How can celebrities use the inherent PR of their millions of social media followers to bring tourists back to a destination after a terrible hurricane? How can a simple act transform negative buzz around a natural disaster into a positive and inviting discussion? How can we prove something that no one is ready to believe?

In response to these challenges, we created the Los Cabos Celebrity Reselfies campaign: a socially-driven, celebrity-supported PR campaign to bring tourists back to Los Cabos, just 8 weeks after Hurricane Odile struck the region.

The Mexico Tourism Board needed strong online impact to counter the bad news that was flooding the web and discouraging travelers from visiting —right before high season and before it could sap Los Cabos’ tourist-driven economy.

We invited celebrities (Reese Witherspoon, Mario Lopez, Rosario Dawson, and Nick Jonas) to the area to show and prove it had completely recovered only 8 weeks after the devastation. These stars recreated selfies that tourists took in Los Cabos before the hurricane, to show the world that everything they could do before, they could do now — proving the region was better than ever and guaranteeing that travelers’ high standards were going to be met.

With a $0 media buy plan, 50 million online impressions were generated and the online image of Los Cabos was restored: 39% more positive impressions, compared to the negative online stories about the hurricane. As a result, hotel occupancy in Los Cabos was 9.5% higher than the previous year.

Through PR efforts, our goals were to spread the word by showing the online world that the region was restored, undo the negative online perceptions of Los Cabos generated from the hurricane, and ultimately jump-start the region’s economy that was 96% dependent on tourism. After doing research, we knew that with an ever-skeptical online audience, we couldn’t just tell people that the region was restored. We needed to show them, and we needed to do so in a transparent and disarming way.

Output/Awareness:

Celebrity Reselfie campaign spread like wildfire, generating over 50 million online impressions and over 22.4 million content views.

Knowledge/Consideration:

The campaign also achieved a drastic change in consumer awareness and attitude, as there were 39% more positive impressions about the restored region, compared to the negative online stories generated from the hurricane.

Action/Business Impact:

As a result, hotel occupancy in Los Cabos was 9.5% higher than the previous year and generated 443,500 likes on Instagram.

We used some of Los Cabos’ biggest fans, celebrities (Reese Witherspoon, Mario Lopez, Rosario Dawson, and Nick Jonas), to promote the region in a transparent way that tourists connect to: selfies. We achieved this by recreating and posting selfies that tourists took in Los Cabos before the hurricane, to show the world that Los Cabos was indeed restored and as good as new. After all, if it’s good enough for Reese Witherspoon, it’s good enough for everyone. The PR plan was tactically implemented on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, in order to draw from the celebrities’ millions of online followers and the inherent shareability of social media. The three-week campaign ran from November 13 to December 5. It ran according to the original plan.

The campaign was devised for the Mexico Tourism Board. It was a crisis management effort for one of the country’s top vacation destinations, Los Cabos. The objective was to stop the flooding of negative press on social media and turn it into a positive conversation. In order to ensure that the region’s major industry, tourism, wasn’t destroyed, we needed to turn vacationer apprehension into opportunity.

Our learnings revealed that understanding and interacting in social channels was the fastest and most efficient method of changing the online conversation from negative and tragic, to positive and inviting. The use of celebrities, if done wisely, had a powerful impact in instilling confidence in the tourist destination. We also identified that the majority of travelers from the US had a very negative, long-lasting perception of the effects of a hurricane, drawing parallels with Katrina in New Orleans and Andrew in Florida, where the destinations took months—even years—to recover. Obviously, promising a full recovery after 6-8 weeks was not an easy-to-believe message.

The challenge we faced was that this particular destination draws travelers with very high expectations. They were concerned that the destination wouldn’t be ready to provide an experience that was on par. We needed to prove them wrong.