Jacksonville, Florida has long been known for its beaches, sunshine, and laid-back coastal feel. The Visit Jacksonville team knew they had the opportunity to grow visitation beyond their typical audience by connecting the destination story to an underutilized asset: its vibrant local surf community.
In 2025, Visit Jacksonville and MediaOne collaborated on a successful brand alliance strategy that brought to life Soul of Surf, a marketing and influencer campaign that told the story of the strong surf community that has existed in Jacksonville for decades. But the Visit Jacksonville team knew the campaign had further to go.
“Given how successfully the first iteration of Soul of Surf resonated with travelers interested in surfing, we knew we had to keep the conversation going,” said Katie Mitura, CMO of Visit Jacksonville. “We needed to evolve the creative strategy in 2026 to keep the target audience engaged and drive more growth."
That set the direction for the work.
When MediaOne’s creative team initially developed the concept for the Soul of Surf strategy, they purpose-built a long-term brand platform that could support authentic storytelling and grow over time. When it came time to evolve the story, that platform easily expanded into recurring campaigns and content series.
Surf culture has its own rules. It values credibility, community, and lived experience, and it is quick to dismiss anything that feels like it was built for marketing purposes alone. That’s why the goal of this new campaign wasn’t to introduce Jacksonville to surf culture, but to reflect the people and stories that already existed there. Based on their deep understanding of the target audience, the MediaOne team developed two fresh creative strategies: SeaGals and Board Stories.
SeaGals highlights the representation of women surfers in the sport, showcasing the approachability of the Jacksonville surf experience - especially for women and girls. A polished video campaign immerses the viewer into the surf experience, with prominent female surfers from the Jacksonville community acting as their guide.
Board Stories takes a different, but complimentary approach: Using surfboards as a medium, this creative strategy provides a springboard for personal and artistic storytelling. The MediaOne team conducted multiple interviews with surfers in Jacksonville, developing multiple UGC-inspired content pieces that further explore the history of surfing in Jacksonville and deepen the viewer’s connection with the Jacksonville surf experience.
All content lives within the Soul of Surf digital ecosystem, bringing together storytelling, and campaign content, giving audiences a clear way to engage while providing Visit Jacksonville with a scalable foundation for future phases.
By choosing to lead with its community, Visit Jacksonville began showing up in surf culture with clarity and confidence. The destination was no longer absent from the conversation, and it wasn’t trying to force its way into it.
The SeaGals and Board Stories marketing strategies successfully extended the original Soul of Surf platform into a sustained storytelling initiative, driving meaningful awareness and engagement across owned, paid, and partnered channels.
During the 2026 campaign flight from January 22 through March 31, media activation delivered significant reach and scale across high-impact channels. The campaign generated more than 6 million total estimated media impressions, powered by immersive video and premium placements across programmatic display, Prime Video CTV, YouTube, and Meta.
The Soul of Surf content platform generated more than 81,000 page views, with over 28,000 sessions exceeding one minute on page and signaling strong audience interest in the creative experience.
The SeaGals video series drove broad visibility, accounting for:
2.79 million programmatic display impressions
244,000 Prime Video CTV impressions
Nearly 160,000 YouTube views
1.57 million Meta impressions
The Board Stories series complemented that reach with:
174,000 Prime Video CTV impressions
112,000 YouTube views
Over 1 million Meta impressions
As part of the integrated campaign strategy, MediaOne led a custom content collaboration with The Inertia, a publication popular among surf and outdoor enthusiasts. Dedicated articles, e-newsletter features, social promotion, and custom content placements across The Intertia generated more than 1.7 million impressions, reaching over 91,000 users and driving more than 4,000 combined clicks and engagements.
Beyond a single campaign, Soul of Surf has given Visit Jacksonville a scalable, ownable platform designed for longevity. It created room to continue telling surf stories, deepening engagement with surf-driven audiences while extending Jacksonville’s presence to new audiences through authentic, community-led storytelling.
As Mitura reflected on the work, the value was clear: “When you let the people who love this place tell its story, it resonates in a way traditional marketing never can.”