Consumer growth · Scalable market strategy · Integrated storytelling
Making one experience relevant in twelve different markets.
A location-based business needs local demand. A national brand needs a national story. The problem was building one system that produced both, all year.
At a glance
- Challenge
- iFLY operates indoor skydiving tunnels as local venues, each dependent on demand from its own metro. The task was one system that produced both local demand and a national story.
- My role
- Senior Account Executive at Edelman in 2017. I won the account in a new-business pitch and owned the program foundation, media strategy and target lists, outreach, briefing materials, and reporting.
- Approach
- An audience relevance map, a national story platform, a seasonal calendar, and a national-to-local media structure.
- Key decision
- Connect one national story to local media in each market, so every venue gains coverage tied to its own audience.
- Result
- Earned-media outputs as reported in 2017. Potential reach is an opportunity-to-see estimate. It is not customer acquisition or revenue, which I do not have data for.
- Role
- Senior Account Executive, Edelman
- Context
- iFLY operates indoor skydiving tunnels as individual local venues, each dependent on demand from its own metro area.
- Business question
- How do you build a repeatable national storytelling platform that also drives growth in specific local markets?
- What I owned
- The new-business win and program foundation
- Media strategy and target lists
- Outreach and interview coordination
- Briefing materials and reporting
- Client communication
- Methods
- Audience relevance mapping
- Story-platform development
- Seasonal calendar planning
- National and local media architecture
- Results measurement
A location business with a national brand has two audiences and one budget.
Twelve tunnels, each needing bookings from people within driving distance. One brand, needing enough national presence that the concept is familiar before anyone sees a local listing. Run those as separate programs and you get expensive duplication. Run only the national program and no tunnel sells a ticket.
The second constraint was novelty. Indoor skydiving is inherently visual and inherently one-note: it is fun, and then the story is over. A program that relies on the experience being novel produces one wave of coverage and then silence.
Both problems have the same answer. Stop pitching the tunnel. Build a small number of story platforms: durable reasons the experience is relevant to a defined audience, and run each one nationally and locally, on a schedule.
Stop selling the experience. Build the reasons it matters, then repeat them on a calendar.
Four platforms, each tied to an audience with a recurring need and a predictable news moment, which is what turns a one-off activation into a year-round engine that any market can run.
Four durable stories, not one campaign.
| Platform | Audience | Why it recurs | Where it runs |
|---|---|---|---|
| STEM & back-to-school | Parents, educators, education reporters | A wind tunnel is a physics laboratory. The relevance is permanent and the news moment returns every August. | National + local |
| All Abilities | Disability community, families, local news | Flight without ground contact is accessible in ways almost no sport is. The story is human, local, and photographable. | Local-led |
| Holiday gifting | Gift-guide editors, lifestyle media | Experience gifting is a fixed annual editorial slot with predictable deadlines. | National-led |
| The sport of indoor skydiving | Sports and fitness media, enthusiasts | Competitive flying reframes the venue from attraction to athletic discipline. | National + local |
Why platforms instead of campaigns
A campaign is spent once. A platform can be re-pitched every year with a new local proof point, a new spokesperson, or a new market, and it accumulates relationships with the reporters who cover that beat.
What that made possible operationally
Any of the twelve markets could run any platform with a local face and a local detail, using the same underlying angle, briefing material, and proof points.
Local execution stopped requiring central strategy every time.
Coverage every month of the program, not one spike.
The test of a platform system is whether it produces a drumbeat. Across the 2017 program, placements landed in every month from April to December, with local clusters where a market activation ran and national peaks aligned to the back-to-school and gifting moments.
Fig. 02: Placement cadence by month, counted from the program's own 2017 coverage index.
National reach and local conversion, deliberately paired.
High-reach national placements made the concept familiar. Market-level stories tied to priority tunnels turned that familiarity into a booking within driving distance. Neither works alone.
| HuffPost | 43.3M / 22.9M UMV |
| Bustle | 23.9M UMV |
| The Wall Street Journal | 23M UMV |
| BuzzFeed | 17.6M UMV |
| Thought Catalog | 7.8M UMV |
| Men's Fitness | 3.9M UMV |
| Chicago Tribune | 18.7M UMV |
| Tampa: WTVT, WTSP, 10 News, ABC | Broadcast cluster |
| Daily Herald, Chicago | 1.6M UMV |
| WPIX-TV, Westchester | 2.5M UMV |
| Baltimore: WBFF, WMAR | 534K–567K UMV |
| San Diego: KFMB, NBC7, Reader | Market cluster |
The Tampa, Chicago, Baltimore, and San Diego clusters are the tell: each represents a single local activation converted into multiple placements across a market's broadcast and print outlets, rather than one story pitched once.
What the program delivered.
What the evidence supports
Thirty-five placements across nine months, twelve markets, and eleven initiatives, with the top coverage drivers being exactly the four platforms the strategy was built on: STEM and back-to-school, holiday, All Abilities, and the sport of indoor skydiving.
The program also reported $3.67M+ in advertising value equivalency, a metric the industry has since largely abandoned, and which I would not present as a result today.
What I would measure instead now
- Market-level demand lift: bookings or search volume in a market in the four weeks after a local placement, against unsupported markets as a control
- Platform yield: placements and quality per platform, to decide which of the four to fund next year and which to retire
- Message penetration: what share of coverage carried the intended relevance angle rather than describing the venue
All three are answerable with data a client already has, and all three turn an earned-media program into a growth program.