There are two moments when a destination gets sold. The first is obvious. A person sees a photograph of an empty beach, a mossy square or a mountain trail and thinks: I could be there. The second sale is quieter. It happens in a county meeting, a hotel ledger or a restaurant on a Wednesday night. The visitor arrived. The room was booked. A tax was collected. Somebody got another shift. Paradise Advertising & Marketing has built an agency around connecting those two moments.
That is a more complicated business than making places look pretty. Paradise, founded in 2002 by the late destination-marketing specialist Cedar Hames, works for the organizations charged with turning geography into demand: convention and visitors bureaus, tourist development offices, municipalities, hotels, resorts, museums and attractions. The firm is based in St. Petersburg, Florida, with another office in Naples and a distributed team across the country. Its public client list ranges from Visit Savannah and Florida's Paradise Coast to an Alaska tribal organization and a pink, century-old resort on the St. Petersburg waterfront.
The second sale
The ad agency with a tax receipt
Consider the agency's oldest kind of proof. Paradise has worked with Florida's Paradise Coast - Naples, Marco Island and the Everglades - for more than two decades. The creative proposition, “Only Paradise Will Do,” is a neat piece of positioning: luxury as refusal. But the more interesting copy sits underneath the campaign. The case study reports $44 million in tourist-tax collections, 10 percent year-over-year visitation growth, a 17 percent rise in average daily room rate and a 31 percent increase in group leads.
Those numbers make the agency legible to two audiences at once. Travelers get a promise. Public officials and local partners get an economic argument. Paradise's services follow the same double logic: research and brand identity at the front; creative, media, social, digital and public relations in the middle; attribution and analytics at the back. A campaign is not finished when it has been noticed.
This is where Paradise differs from a generalist agency. It knows the odd economics of a destination. Nobody owns Savannah in the way a company owns a cereal brand. The “product” is jointly made by residents, hoteliers, parks, restaurants, airlines, weather and memory. The buyer may visit once. The budget may be public. Success can mean room revenue, but it can also mean dispersing visitors beyond a crowded season or explaining why tourism benefits the people who already live there.
“Travel and tourism is what we do. Advocacy is who we are.”Paradise's own description of its niche
What failed first was the old frame
Destination marketing rarely begins with a catastrophe. More often, the existing story has become too small. Columbia County, Florida, wanted to become “the most visited outdoor escape in the southeast,” but its identity did not yet carry that ambition. Paradise spent six months researching and talking with partners, residents and the wider community before introducing Florida's Springlands and the line “Happy Happens Here.” The change of mind came before the tagline: the county's springs, color and unvarnished Florida character could be a coherent product rather than a pile of attractions.
The result is useful because it shows the sequence. Listen first. Find the shared tension. Then name it. The reported outcomes included a 51 percent increase in website sessions, a 48 percent increase in new users, more than $54,000 in gross bookings at 5.9 return on ad spend, and $175,000 in direct economic impact from programmatic media.
Hendersonville, North Carolina, had the opposite problem: a story that worked, but only during apple season. Paradise did not throw out the apples. It widened the emotional field to cider, wine, locally grown food, outdoor recreation, arts and the small reward of reaching a mountain view. “Gratitude at Altitude” and its “Mountain Moments” turned a seasonal fact into a year-round invitation. The case study reports nearly $1 million in attributable direct bookings and a 15:1 return on an online travel agency campaign.
The portable lesson is not to copy the rhyme. It is to distinguish an identity problem from a distribution problem. Columbia County needed a sharper identity. Hendersonville needed more occasions for the identity it already had. Buying more media before making that distinction is how a destination pays to repeat the wrong sentence.
A narrow lane gets wider
In August 2025, Mark Jaronski became chief executive. His résumé runs through Disney, Visit Orlando, Select Registry and the Georgia Department of Economic Development. At Georgia, he oversaw tourism's post-pandemic recovery and later led a 70-person marketing and communications organization. The appointment did not signal a retreat from specialization. It looked more like a bet that the niche was large enough to keep deepening.
A month later, Paradise acquired Laurie Rowe Communications, a tourism public-relations specialist founded in 2006. The deal added four PR professionals, 30 destination clients across nine Southeastern states and a Travel Media Press Room that gives journalists round-the-clock access to story ideas and usable material. The price was not published. For clients, the practical change was easier to see: paid media, brand work and earned media could now sit under a larger travel-specialist roof.
The same pattern continued in 2026. Discover Crystal River selected Paradise to build a mobile-first, accessible online hub for an Eco Compliant Partner Program, connecting visitors with businesses that follow rules for responsible manatee interactions and ecosystem protection. The Vinoy Resort & Golf Club selected the agency for public relations spanning media outreach, thought leadership, press visits and storytelling. One brief is civic and ecological; the other is luxury hospitality. Both ask the same question: how do you attract attention without flattening the place that earned it?
Pick a market narrow enough to learn its balance sheet. Use research to identify the constraint before making creative. Put business outcomes in the brief, not in a report written after the campaign. Keep the promise broad enough to grow, but specific enough that locals recognize themselves in it.
The conditions matter
Paradise's method depends on patient access to stakeholders, usable booking or tax data and a destination willing to make choices. It is weakest when the assignment is merely to buy cheap impressions, when every local interest demands equal billing, or when nobody will agree on what success means. Long partnerships help because destinations accumulate context slowly. Paradise's 23-year relationship with Paradise Coast and president Rudy Webb's 17-year tenure are not decorative facts. They are operational memory.
The “Partner for Good” positioning, introduced publicly in 2024, puts a moral frame around that memory: inclusion, sustainability, community life and measurable growth. The phrase risks becoming soft unless the work supplies hard evidence. Paradise appears to understand the bargain. Awards matter - the agency reported nearly 500 of them by 2024 and nine Adrian Awards for 2024 client work - but its persuasive material is still the unglamorous stuff: occupancy, average daily rate, bookings, audience reach and taxes.
That is the small trick inside the big one. Paradise sells an imagined future to the traveler, then returns to the community with a receipt. The beach photograph opens the door. The second sale explains why the door should remain open.