CIDOT Taps Harmelin Media to Lead US Media Planning & Buying Services

Following a competitive multi-stage procurement process the Cayman Islands Department of Tourism (CIDOT) announces the appointment of Harmelin Media (Harmelin) to be its Agency of Record for U.S. media planning and buying services. CIDOT has retained a media planning and buying services agency in the U.S. for over 20 years. In this role Harmelin will be responsible for providing overall strategic guidance, data driven insight and analysis with both business to business and direct to consumer advertising campaigns across a variety of platforms including digital, print, broadcast and streaming.

Philadelphia-based Harmelin is one of the largest independent media service firms in the United States and has a track record of delivering consistent sales growth for major brands including Hyatt’s Inclusive Collection brands, which the agency helped launch, Ford, US Cellular, QVC and Total Wine & More.

“In an ever-changing U.S. media landscape, it is critical that the Cayman Islands Department of Tourism have a U.S. media planning and buying agency that understands not only where our potential visitors are consuming media, but also how to reach them at every step of the decision making process to ensure that the Cayman Islands remains a premier destination for the United States traveller,” said Rosa Harris, Director of Tourism for CIDOT. “Harmelin’s expertise in understanding the U.S. consumer will be crucial as CIDOT looks to refine its advertising mix to effectively target U.S. travellers amongst an increasingly competitive travel marketplace.”

Director Harris further provided background on the evaluation process by stating “Harmelin’s proprietary Harmonee data analysis platform is sophisticated and built to provide market consumer intelligence to transform CIDOT’s future media strategy based on its business objectives. The Harmonee platform set Harmelin media as the top bidder due to the firm’s large investment in technology solutions and impressively offering an in-house team lead by their Chief of Technology and amplified with a Director of Digital Services on the day-to-day team. The Harmelin bid and positioning with a technology and data driven solutions approach to media buying and placement gave Harmelin a significant competitive advantage in the procurement project. These agency capabilities will allow the destination to refine the strategic planning process to deepen the Cayman Islands annual USA media strategy. Ultimately the goal is to deploy an innovative media plan to deliver incremental growth and untap areas of like audiences to continue to increase new visitors to the Cayman Islands.”

Harmelin’s president, Mary Meder, expressed great enthusiasm for the opportunity to work with the Cayman Islands. “Through this search process, Harmelin has fallen in love with the Cayman Islands, and it is our true honor to work together with the CIDOT team to increase visitation to this dynamic destination. The Harmonee tools we’ve built are perfect to address CIDOT’s need to ensure every dollar is expertly invested to maximize the number of visitors to the islands and their length of stay. Specifically, our Helix analytics platform will merge CIDOT’s customs and arrival data with publicly available travel sources to hyper-target the right communities, across the right media channels, with the right frequency. We have a long history of driving visitation growth for tourism destinations, and we’re excited to put that experience to work for CIDOT. We take very seriously the responsibility to grow tourism that CIDOT is entrusting us with, and we look forward to a long and productive partnership.”