Alphabet® is a strategic brand consultancy based in Ottawa, operating for over 25 years. Comprised of subject matter experts, they have extensive tourism and place branding knowledge, and a relentless focus on business objectives.

Their experience in place marketing and destination development offers unique insights to your challenges and opportunities, including:

- Experience in local, regional, national and international markets

- Understanding of destination and place organizations, their structure, their stakeholders, and their partners

- Experience in place marketing strategic development for clients including destinations, attractions, associations, accommodations, and transportation operators

- Experience in communication strategies, developing messaging frameworks, creating action-driven marketing programs, and website/digital planning and development

digital / design / marketing / social media

Brandkit® is a leading brand management platform built for Destination Marketing, Place Branding Organisations, and Economic Development Agencies.

Our platform combines digital asset management, media centre, CMS, customisable Brand Portal, File Transfer, Content Distribution, and Stakeholder Collaboration tools that enable brands and their marketing teams to find, manage, curate, share and deploy images, video, brand assets, brand guidelines, infographics, pdfs, design files, press releases, blog posts, story ideas, links to earned media, and more, at scale, all in one unified content library.

Brandkit® is headquartered in New Zealand and works with a number of DMO’s, Place Brands, Economic Development Agencies, and other businesses globally. Including Tourism New Zealand, VisitScotland, Brand Estonia, and Brand Tasmania.

CivicBrand is a consultancy that helps cities, downtowns, counties, and destination organizations shape their identity through strategic branding, public engagement, placemaking, and design. Guided by a triple bottom line approach—benefiting people, driving economic opportunity, and enhancing the built and natural environment—CivicBrand focuses on creating lovable, resilient places rooted in community vision. With a “locals-first” philosophy, they emphasize storytelling, equitable engagement, and authentic representation. Since 2008, their team of strategists, creatives, and place-makers has helped communities foster civic pride, strengthen local economies, and guide growth through cohesive branding and meaningful public involvement.

CrowdRiff is a visual marketing platform purpose-built for the travel and tourism industry. The platform combines content discovery, digital asset management and content delivery tools that enable marketers to source and share top performing visuals with their respective audiences, at scale. 

CrowdRiff currently works with over 900 leading travel and tourism brands globally, including Destination BC and the European Travel Commission.

Development Counsellors International (DCI) is a global research, marketing and public relations firm that specializes exclusively in tourism, economic development and talent attraction marketing. Since we were founded in 1960, we have worked with more than 500 cities, regions and countries to attract visitors, businesses and talent. Ranked a Top 20 Global PR Firm by PR Week and one of Outside Magazine’s “Best Places to Work,” DCI is a certified women-owned firm with a leadership team of five partners. DCI employs more than 80 of the best and brightest professionals in place marketing. Our agency is headquartered in New York City, with a presence throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe.

research / strategy / design / storytelling

Epsilon is a digital media company that leverages data to drive destination demand. Our digital media solutions allow destination marketers to utilize real-time, person level data to have proactive conversations with the right travelers. We provide DMOs with the ability to use transactional spending data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to build and manage campaigns that speak directly to real people like midweek travelers, past visitors to your destination, bourbon purchasers, golfers, etc. Our measurement solution, Net Economic Impact, measures the direct influence your campaign had on true visitation and visitor spend, yielding an unmodeled measure of economic impact. This reporting will help you prove the value of tourism marketing to your stakeholders by demonstrating how much money visitors spend at hotels, restaurants, retail shops, and more.

Mr. Hunden and his Chicago-based firm offer extensive experience in the economics of placemaking, primarily via transformative real estate projects. He has provided economic development, market and financial feasibility, impact, developer selection and planning expertise for more than 800 projects and studies over the past 25+ years, totaling more than $6 billion in developed real estate. The firm completes approximately 60 assignments per year with its 12-person professional staff. Hunden’s background in economic, real estate and tourism development combine to make him a unique resource for communities looking to develop their destinations and projects in a viable, transformative and sustainable way. Some compelling projects include the Chicago Riverwalk and Navy Pier, Distrito T-Mobile in San Juan, a mega mixed-use destination in the Middle East (in pre-development), and Lansdowne Park in Ottawa, ON.

LMNL Studio is a design firm that brings place-based narratives to life. Our multidisciplinary approach pairs strategists  and storytellers with architects and technologists to shape physical places as well as the digital and virtual layers of a connected ecosystem. We call this approach omnispatial design.

Whether you seek to activate a specific space or create a more magnetic destination, our approach to purposeful placemaking aims to inspire, educate, and build community. Our innovative design process integrates spatial technologies as a material layer of place so environments come alive with art, real time data, digital wayfinding, and moments of pure delight.

Watch this video to learn more about LMNL Studio, an omnispatial design practice specializing in purposeful placemaking.

Miles Partnership is a strategic marketing consultancy focused exclusively on travel and tourism. Our mission is to enrich lives through travel by positively impacting communities and travelers with audience-focused, results-driven solutions. Our team is skilled in every aspect of travel and tourism, from marketing and communications to destination management and sustainability.

Today we work with more than 150 destinations, hospitality businesses and other travel industry clients worldwide to develop marketing and management strategies that amplify local experiences, boost visitation, improve community relations and increase overall economic impact.

MMGY Global is the world’s leading integrated marketing firm specializing in the travel, tourism and hospitality industry. With operating brands across the world, the award-winning organization maintains a global communications practice in all marketing channels, serving many of the world’s premier travel and tourism brands. MMGY Global strives to create a connected, inclusive and peaceful world by promoting travel as a cultural bridge of understanding. For more information, visit mmgyglobal.com.

Propulso is a location intelligence platform that helps organizations make smarter, faster decisions by turning anonymized mobility data into business actionable insights. Our GeoIndicators provide on-demand, fully customizable market analyses in minutes—at a fraction of the cost and complexity of traditional methods. Our GeoMarketing solution enables precise audience targeting and campaign optimization based on real-world movement, while tracking success through physical conversions. With unmatched data precision, privacy-first practices, and advanced reporting tools, Propulso equips organizations across industries with powerful, decision-ready insights to drive high-impact strategies and measurable gains—at local, national, and global scales.

Resonance partners with visionary places that seek bolder ideas and better futures to create transformative strategies, brands and campaigns that attract talent, investment, residents and visitors.

Our diverse, multidisciplinary team of designers, planners, strategists, creatives, storytellers, and account leaders has completed more than 100 visioning, strategy, marketing and branding projects for communities, cities, destinations and countries around the world.

Across every project, we strive to foster community, preserve cultural heritage, create vibrancy and generate economic benefits by making places more livable, lovable and prosperous for all.

Our Best Cities reports are covered by thousands of media outlets around the world and used by companies and government agencies to help design, develop and promote places large and small globally. Our proprietary Place Power™ Score benchmarks the performance of cities – from data we collect on 500 urban regions around the world – and gives us unique insights on their performance, and how they can best leverage their strengths to attract residents, visitors, talent and investment.

RoleCall is an economic development and talent attraction consulting and strategy agency. We work with city and state governments, Chambers of commerce, economic development organizations, and destination marketing organizations to build effective, trackable, and sustainable talent attraction solutions. Our unique digital platform provides real-time data insights to prove the efficacy of marketing and attraction efforts, making sure that investments are providing an impactful return. From consulting and strategy to marketing and lead nurturing, RoleCall’s expertise provides high-level outcomes for its clients.

Simpleview, a Granicus company, is a worldwide leading provider of CRM, CMS, website design, digital marketing services, and data insights for convention bureaus, venues, tourism boards, destination marketing organizations (DMOs), and attractions. The company employs staff across the globe, serving clients of all sizes, including small towns, world capitals, top meeting destinations, and countries across multiple continents. For more information, please visit https://www.simpleviewinc.com/.

TopRight is the premier, story-led brand consultancy and activation firm. We believe in the transformative power of brand living. Our unique approach naturally activates customers, delivering a unique competitive advantage for our clients. We develop and activate brands to drive business success. Working with complex organizations operating in complex ecosystems, we're well-positioned to drive transformative growth for your organization. Our leadership team embodies decades of expertise, having worked in place branding (such as Middlesex County, Fulton County, City of Detroit, City of Calgary, the Toledo Region, Cathedral City, VA Horse Industry) and with global powerhouses in technology, entertainment, and beyond.

Joe Veneto, Chief Experience Officer, Veneto Collaboratory, is a placemaking and experience design expert partnering with Destination Management Organizations, Economic Development Agencies, Travel Attractions and Corporations. Through the Experience Design Studio process, he creates innovative places as well as new customer experiences that transform tourism landscapes, drive visitation, and converts customers into destination brand ambassadors.

The Experience Design Studio process has been implemented in multiple destinations throughout North America.

Joe is also a highly regarding thought leader and professional speaker on tourism trends, destination placemaking and customer experience. His content-rich programs provide innovative ideas and insights that make him one of the industry’s most requested experts on Experiential Tourism and Destination Development.