If you thought Boston was all Dunkin’, the Red Sox, and the Freedom Trail, the city’s tourism arm would like you to kindly reconsider.

In recent years, the Greater Boston Convention & Visitors Bureau (GBCVB) has worked to show under-marketed sides of the city on social media, hoping to increase awareness of the city’s multiculturalism, help businesses in historically marginalized communities, and boost tourism.

Big picture: Dave O’Donnell, GBCVB’s VP of strategic communications, told Marketing Brew that part of the bureau’s mission is to tell a “bigger, better, broader Boston story” than what’s out there. “Boston, historically, has an issue with a stereotype of not being a welcoming destination, especially to Black and brown visitors,” he said.

• Last year, GBCVB worked with former Boston Mayor and US Labor Secretary Marty Walsh’s office to create a tourism marketing campaign called “All Inclusive Boston,” marking the first time that City Hall invested funds into a tourism push.
• It was re-launched earlier this month under Mayor Michelle Wu, the first woman and person of color to lead the city.
• In collaboration with organizations like Black Girl Digital, an influencer marketing agency founded by LaToya Shambo, the campaign draws a diverse set of social media influencers from Boston and around the country to share their experience and help expand traditional ideas of the city.

Having a wicked time

Shambo said while tourism has been tricky with Covid, GBCVB has shown commitment to investing in this campaign beyond a one-and-done stint. “They’re standing behind it,” she told us.

Zoom in: In the first iteration of “All Inclusive Boston,” the GBCVB team identified neighborhoods that were underrepresented in Boston’s marketing campaigns, like Dorchester and Jamaica Plain, both of which are majority-minority. They then worked with Shambo’s team to find 14 local Boston influencers to film reels, stories, and vlogs in those neighborhoods.

All in all, O’Donnell said they generated almost 2 million impressions, half of which were from paid social media. This year, they’re working with Shambo and Black Girl Digital to bring influencers to Boston from cities around the country, like @atasteofkoko, @adamwontlose, and @marissa.daily.

Read more about the strategy behind the campaign, as well as how it’s performed so far, here.—KH

You’ll know a network ID when you see it on TV. Whether you’re watching Nickelodeon, MTV, SyFy, Adult Swim, or Food Network, occasional 10- or 15-second clips dance around the screen and end with the network’s logo, often with a recognizable jingle, providing bite-sized branding opportunities that are a mainstay of traditional network and cable television.

And while Hulu isn’t exactly a traditional television network, the streaming service is making them for its viewers, too.

• This month, the Disney-owned streamer, which offers certain subscribers live-TV viewing in addition to on-demand programming, rolled out Hulu IDs. The IDs—also referred to as idents—are the results of a months-long creative effort with dozens of artists around the world to cement Hulu’s brand as being “as synonymous with TV as Hershey’s is to chocolate,” said Reid Thompson, VP and head of creative at Hulu’s creative studio Greenhouse.
• “They’re such odes to classic TV idents, but [we’re] really bringing them into the streaming era,” Thompson told Marketing Brew.
• Hulu said the idents are being shared on social media for now, with plans to roll out the videos on its platform being finalized.

We talked to the Greenhouse team about how the IDs were created. Read the story here.—KS

As Roku pushes into original content to attract advertiser dollars during this year’s upfronts, it’s also debuting a technical offering to attract investment: a clean room.

The streaming platform’s clean room, which rolled out this week, offers advertisers and agencies the ability to compare their own aggregated data with the audience and linear-TV data that Roku collects across its devices and platforms, the company said Tuesday.

Matched data sets can then be used to determine things like potential campaign reach, current audience delivery, and advertising effectiveness to drive results like product sales and sign-ups. Several agencies are already on board: Omnicom Media Group, Dentsu, Horizon Media, Icon Media Direct, and Camelot are all using the clean room on live campaigns beginning this week.

Scrub-a-dub: Clean rooms are having a moment, as we’ve previously reported. They claim to work as a neutral intermediary where platforms and advertisers can dump their datasets to leverage each other’s data and audience insights without giving up their own first-party info, which they usually can’t—or don’t want to—share.

They’re particularly attractive as more privacy regulations and limitations crop up around the country, and as the third-party cookie continues its phaseout. But they also come with their own challenges, especially since clean rooms belonging to individual publishers can’t be compared across other platforms without using additional tools.

Get in line: Roku’s not the only entertainment company with a clean room, and it almost certainly won’t be the last. Late last year, Disney took the wraps off its own clean room, with Omnicom and Drivetime as beta launch partners.—KS

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Hash it out: Instagram is trying to make hashtags more useful.

Plan it: If you’re a social media manager, these 13 tips will help you schedule your day.

Tread carefully: Research on what Gen Z wants from brands in the metaverse.

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Stat: Omnicom’s organic revenue grew nearly 12% in the first quarter of 2022 despite challenges like rising inflation, the war in Ukraine, and the pandemic, per the Wall Street Journal.

Quote: “Accelerating transformation through connectivity.” Some good, old-fashioned corporate speak from a pitch deck belonging to Jared Kushner’s investment fund, Affinity Partners.

Read: Google reportedly served ads on sites after they were placed on the US sanctions list, per Business Insider.

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• Sports inventory is selling out faster than ever
• Brands are speaking out on social issues, but it could take years before consumers believe their efforts are sincere
• Spotify’s acquisition of podcast analytics firms has some in the industry concerned