For Helsinki, one of the biggest challenges in attracting foreign talent has been rather low awareness of the city globally. To showcase the best of their city and to attract the talent they need, they launched a new values-driven campaign: 'Helsinki Freedom.'

Last week, Sheffield announced the launch of a new campaign – Sheffield Your University City - created in collaboration between Sheffield Council’s marketing body and the city’s two universities. We caught up with the masterminds behind the innovative collaboration to understand more about the journey and what they learned along the way.

We know how busy the life of a place brand and marketing leader is. Which is why we reached out to our partners for the 2022 Americas conference to get their top line coverage of the discussion – ensuring you’re up to date on all the latest topics in an easily digestible format.

So with no further ado, here we go…

Airports have always been key selling points in tourist and economic attractiveness strategies. Which country, city or region has never boasted itself of having air access? Yet, the global crises and their persistent effects on air travelling have called into question the role of these major infrastructures. As we rebuild, can airports become essential assets in the attractiveness and branding of destinations?

We’re delighted to have Liina Maria Lepik, Director of the Estonian Tourist Board, as one of our judges for the City Nation Place Awards. Ahead of the judging, we caught up with her to understand how Estonia’s place brand connects different stakeholders under a single brand vision, and how they’re talking about their sustainable values.

Over the years, we've been privileged to see some of the best and brightest of place branding and place marketing campaigns from around the world. As we gear up for the 2022 City Nation Place Awards, we wanted to revisit this list to share some of our personal favourites from the City Nation Place Awards archive and to update it with the campaigns from last year that we just can’t stop thinking about!

People didn't have a perception of Norwich at all, and that needed to change in order for the city to compete with other UK honeypot destinations. Enter Norwich's place brand strategy to be the City of Stories.

It’s always a challenge to summarise a day and a half’s worth of content into a single article (the wine at the after party almost certainly didn’t help!), but here are our key takeaways from the conference.

Emojis have revolutionized communications in a similar way that the text message did. Not forgetting that the text message was a Finnish invention – so why wouldn’t Finland be the first country to launch its own official emojis as well?

How can we build attractive communities where people want to live, work, visit and invest? And what does it take to engage your community in creating a vibrant place?

After everything that’s happened over the last few years, we began to ask ourselves – what is actually driving people to choose a city or region to visit or live in? Have the motivators for travel and relocation changed at all? Ipsos have been researching which factors matter most to Americans and Canadians in 2022 when selecting one location from another.

With so many stakeholders involved – and with most DMOs not owning any of their assets – is true destination management just a pipe dream? And how do you evolve a destination management mindset to one of destination stewardship?