Making Places that Win

What exactly is Placewyn?

Placewyn is not an ad agency or a traditional vendor. We operate like a destination marketing organization, just like you. Our work focuses on cataloging the human layer of your place including the stories, sentiments, personality traits and niche interests that define what it feels like to belong there.

Rather than focusing on traditional place-based branding, we map the anthropological sentiment of your community by identifying the traits and interests that naturally align with your destination's brand personality. This allows potential visitors to recognize themselves in your place and feel that it reflects the ideal version of who they aspire to be.

By doing this, we help AI models, search engines, and social platforms understand and recommend your destination to the people most likely to feel a deep connection when they arrive.

How Placewyn is different from traditional destination marketing services

Placewyn is different from traditional destination marketing services because we don’t focus on deliverables that require further action or implementation, like asset inventories, go‑to‑market strategies or branding guidelines.

In the age of artificial intelligence, these resources can be generated and tailored to your destination in minutes whenever you need them. For small DMOs, investing heavily in such documentation often diverts funds from what truly matters.

It is far more important for small DMOs to be raising awareness and building positive sentiment so your place is seen, understood, and recommended to the right people.

Why Context Cloud matters

For small, rural, and emerging tourism destinations, building a strong context cloud is essential. There are tens of thousands of places to discover in the United States, and people tend to value those where they perceive a shared experience or a sense of place that reflects the version of themselves they want to be seen in (sometimes called a vibe.)

If the details that shape that perception aren't available in a way that can be indexed by the platforms people use to discover new places (like ChatGPT, Google, Gemini, TikTok, Instagram and others), those platforms have no way of knowing whether your destination matches what they already understand about the user. Without that match, your place won't be recommended, no matter how special it is.

Destinations and organizations that benefit most from Placewyn

Small towns, rural areas, and emerging destinations benefit the most from Placewyn’s context cloud architecture because they often have very little emotionally relevant content available on the public internet.

Large language models and discovery platforms naturally recommend established destinations because there's already a vast pool of content associated with them, covering a wide range of visitor types and interests.

While well‑known destinations can still gain by targeting under‑recognized visitor personas, emerging destinations see the greatest impact because without a context cloud, they start with zero or very few recommendations for anyone.

We also recognize that many of the places that stand to benefit most may not have a fully fledged Convention & Visitors Bureau (CVB) where tourism is the sole focus. We also work with chambers of commerce, economic development agencies, municipal governments, main street associations and historical societies.

Core deliverables and outcomes

Placewyn's core deliverable is a structured set of video transcripts that have been carefully categorized and contextualized. We annotate transcripts to include themes, traits, and emotional signals that reflect what makes your destination feel human and unique.

The goal is to train AI models to better understand the personality of your place and recognize which types of visitors are most likely to see themselves there. This helps recommendation engines match your destination to the right people based on alignment with identity, not just attractions or amenities.

Why traditional branding and SEO tactics are less effective in an era of AI-driven discovery

A brand alone can't capture the full range of people who might feel seen in a destination or feel that its personality aligns with the version of themselves they aspire to be.

Old SEO strategies (like cramming keywords onto a page to match search queries) no longer work the way they used to. AI can semantically understand meaning, so what matters now is having content that aligns with user intent and emotional relevance, not just word matching.

How AI models decide which places to recommend

When a user asks something like “recommend some weekend getaways for someone like me,” AI models semantically match everything they know about that user (from past questions and known preferences) to everything they've indexed about destinations.

The places that get recommended are the ones with the most diverse and specific examples of content that align with the user's context cloud. If your destination doesn't have that kind of content available for the model to index, it simply won't show up in the response.

What happens when destinations don't have emotionally relevant online content

When a destination lacks a strong online presence with a meaningful library of content showing what kinds of people feel seen there, AI models struggle to build an accurate context cloud. The models can't infer what a real visitor might sense from your website just based on look and feel, if one even exists.

Influencer support doesn't guarantee discoverability, because AI may not know they mentioned your destination at all. Even if it does, the typical influencer stance of “I’m here because I'm famous” adds little value because it lacks the personal context of why they feel aligned with the place, which is what AI actually needs to make relevant recommendations.

How Placewyn ensures the right people discover your destinaion

We make sure there's authentic content from real people about why they feel seen in your destination and how it aligns with their values.

Instead of inventing hypothetical personas, we work with genuine voices sharing their own perspectives. At scale, this content shapes how AI models understand your local sense of place and allows them to recognize the specific types of people who would feel most at home in your destination.

How we build a destination's Context Cloud

We work with your local community stakeholders to collect real stories from as many individuals as possible. This includes front line hospitality workers including hotel and restaurant staff, small business owners, municipal employees, attraction operators and more.

Each destination has a unique cast of supporting actors that bring the personality of the place to life. We build a custom stakeholder engagement strategy for each destination to capture the widest variety of sentiment.

The onboarding to implementation process

DMOs should expect the entire process to take approximately 3 to 4 months from intial discovery to deliverable handover.

1. We start by defining the target market personas most relevent to your destination, which is typically around 20 for small towns and rural areas. (1 week)
2. Next, we identify headcounts of local stakeholders to determine approximately how many individual stories we can expect to gather. (1 week)
3. If the expected number of individuals is too low (fewer than 2,000) we may recommend partnering with some nearby areas to define a regional tourism area with similar target market personas, in order to expand the sample size of the content base. (1-2 weeks)
4. We make introductions with key stakeholders and provide information about the project, including the kind of information we are looking to capture and how they should communicate and incentivize their employees to participate. (3-4 weeks)
5. We process submitted videos to include transcriptions and annotations. (4-6 weeks)
6. We provide the DMO with text and video content to reuse on their websites and social channels. (1 week)

How we gather local voices and stories

We ask local tourism stakeholders and their employees to record a short 1-2 minute video answering two simple questions:

1. How does the destination make you feel seen as the unique individual you are?
2. How does the destination represent the version of you that you wish you could be?

These questions are intended to be as open-ended as possible while still targeting very specific emotional context about the types of personalities that are most aligned with your destination.

The goal isn't to push a purely positive narrative. With few exceptions, we generally recommend publishing all stories as they are told with the primary goal being to train AI models on the types of visitors that will and won't appreciate your destination.

How we measure results and success

During the initial discovery process we identify target market personas that are most likely to be represented by the content sample. This helps inform us of which types of prompts might be asked by potential visitors looking for trip inspiration.

By comparing the initial list of expected personas along with additional personas revealed through content acquisition, we craft a list of prompts representing the full range of questions potential visitors may reasonably ask.

We then test these prompts over time against popular AI models including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Google AI Search and Perplexity. Results are interpreted as a percentage of responses that included the destination.

Effective time period of AI model training

To have effective influence on AI model output, we recommend having at least 100 unique individuals to establish a strong connection between the personality of your destination and the personality represented by the content. Once there are at least 100 unique stories published establishing this personality connection we can begin reliably begin testing content performance.

Indexing and training of AI models can take months to years depending on material and data sources used by each of the AI providers. However, all AI providers are now including live web search as part of the response generation process. By utilizing traditional SEO strategies, we can aim to start seeing results within 4 weeks of content publication.