why everything looks the same

From 2015 to 2019, I worked across a portfolio of state, county, and city tourism and population-attraction brands at Miles Partnership — St. Pete/Clearwater, Palm Beach County, the State of Delaware, Sarasota, Grand Junction, Veterans Florida, and a complete rebrand and integrated campaign rollout for Discover the Palm Beaches. What I learned in those years has shaped how I think about brand work in every category I've operated in since. One campaign in particular taught me the lesson that the rest of my career has been built on.

The Real Problem

Every destination has the same raw material. Beaches, mountains, food scenes, charming downtowns, regional pride. The visitor sees a thousand variations of the same drone shot, the same family-on-the-pier moment. Genre wins. Place loses.

That's the symptom. The cause is structural.

Tourism boards and state marketing organizations are political, consensus-driven, multi-stakeholder operations. Every regional partner wants their slice. Every elected official wants their priority reflected. The agency creative who has the cleanest brief is the one who has talked the destination into a position everyone in the room can agree on — which usually means the safest, broadest, least specific positioning available.

That's how every campaign in the category ends up starting with the same word. Discover the Palm Beaches. Discover Florida. Discover Delaware. It's not creative laziness. It's incentive laziness. The brief trains the work toward sameness — because consensus doesn't reward specificity, and most agencies don't have the cycles to fight for it.

I learned this the hard way on the first campaign I ever truly led.

The Campaign That Taught Me

In my second year at the agency, I got handed Veterans Florida — a state-funded initiative tasked with attracting separating and retiring servicemembers to build their post-military lives in Florida. The reason I got it isn't a story I tell often. I was the only veteran on staff. The agency needed someone who could speak to the audience credibly in pitches and in client meetings, and I was the default choice. The campaign happened to be the first one I ever truly led.

The brief was conventional. The category was not.

Veteran-targeted marketing has its own template, and it's a punishing one. Fatigues. American flags. Salutes at sunset. "You served — now let us serve you." Two decades of post-9/11 veteran-focused campaigns had ground these tropes into a kind of national wallpaper. You could swap one organization's campaign for another's, and nobody would notice. The audience — actual veterans — had stopped seeing it years earlier.

If we'd run with that template, the Veterans Florida campaign would have landed exactly where every veteran-focused campaign before it had landed: in the dust bin of forgettable, well-meaning, completely interchangeable work. So I pushed for something different. Not different for the sake of being different — different because the audience deserved it, and because the actual story Florida had to tell was richer than the template allowed.

The cornerstone: Real Veterans. Real Success.

The idea was simple. Show actual veterans who had built lives in Florida — not actors, not stock imagery, not abstract appeals to service. Real people. Real businesses that they had founded. Real degrees they had earned. Real communities they had joined.

Four pillars supported it:

• Entrepreneurship. Florida had the infrastructure and business climate to support veteran-founded companies.

• Education. Florida's higher-ed system, paired with veteran benefits, made post-military credentialing accessible.

• Opportunity. Florida's economy — aviation, defense, healthcare, agriculture, tech — needed the talent veterans were trained in.

• Community. Florida had one of the largest veteran populations in the country. The network already existed.

These weren't marketing claims. They were the actual reasons Florida was a good fit for veterans, said clearly enough that veterans could verify them.

The campaign was built around real stories of veterans living those four pillars. Real success looked like veterans who had founded businesses across the state, earned degrees through Florida universities, taken jobs in Florida's aerospace, defense, and agriculture sectors, and become neighbors in Florida communities. The campaign showed Florida as the place where the next chapter actually happened — not where veterans were thanked for the last one. It was the first time I'd seen, in my own work, what happens when you refuse to default. The campaign cut through. The organization grew on the foundation it laid. A decade on, Veterans Florida is still operating from a pillar-based framework that traces back to the strategic foundation that campaign established.

Across the Portfolio

Veterans Florida wasn't the only place I did this work. It was the place I learned what was possible.

The same discipline carried into every other client during those years. Discover the Palm Beaches: anchored on the specific texture of Palm Beach County — culture, history, food, the actual experience of being there — rather than the generic "Florida vacation" signal every coastal destination was already buying. St. Pete/Clearwater, the State of Delaware, Sarasota: same approach, different categories. Find what was actually distinctive. Build the system that let the place speak for itself. Resist the reflex to default to the easy shot.

Led teams of up to 6 across design, copy, content, and production. Maintained visual and editorial cohesion across campaigns that lived simultaneously in glossy print magazines, regional brochures, broadcast video, web, paid digital, and partner co-op materials. Worked directly with marketing leadership inside tourism boards and state organizations to defend positioning when consensus pressure would have pulled the work back toward the template.

Outcomes

The hardest outcome to claim in destination and population-attraction marketing is a clean revenue line. KPIs in these categories aggregate across thousands of variables and rarely attribute cleanly back to specific creative work. But the outcomes the industry itself measures are real ones — and the work delivered them. Multi-year client relationships in a category where agency rotation is constant. Differentiated positioning systems that survived stakeholder consensus pressure. Visual and editorial cohesion maintained across distributed production environments. Internal buy-in across organizations complex enough to qualify as small governments. And in the case of Veterans Florida, a strategic foundation durable enough to still anchor the organization a decade later.

The work held together. The clients kept the work. That's the destination marketing version of compounding.

What It Taught Me

Veterans Florida was the discipline forge. Not because it was the most strategically complex campaign of my career, but because it was the first one where I had to choose — out loud, in front of clients, against the easy default — to do the harder work.

That choice taught me everything that came after.

How to defend a positioning through stakeholder politics without giving up the position. How to find the genuinely distinctive thing in a category built on shared assets and tired tropes. How to build a creative system that holds together across multiple media types and production environments. How to push back on a brief when the audience deserves more than the brief allows.

That discipline shows up in everything I've done since. The Tamarack work — defending a brand position through regulatory scrutiny without losing coherence — is the same discipline applied to aviation. The Van Compass work — refusing to default to "we need more demand generation" when the easy growth disappeared — is the same discipline applied to PE-backed consumer. Different categories. Same underlying work. The destination years didn't teach me how to be different. They taught me how to be consistent under pressure to drift. That turns out to be most of the work, in any category that matters.

What It Means

Don't try to be original. Try to be true.

The brands that win in saturated categories aren't the ones with the most clever positioning or the most novel campaigns. They're the ones with the conviction to find what's actually distinctive about themselves and say it, clearly, for long enough that people remember it. For Veterans Florida, that meant showing real veterans in real Florida communities, building real lives, telling real stories. The category default would have shown the salute at sunset. We showed the entrepreneur, the student, the neighbor.