IAAPA is the global home for attractions and excitement, representing everyone from theme park giants and water park operators to zoos, aquariums, museums, science centers, cruise ships, and more. It serves as the global nexus for those shaping the experiences that captivate, enthrall, and inspire audiences around the world. Every year, IAAPA brings that community together through immersive Expos held across four regions of the world.

With Expo 2025 in Orlando on the horizon, IAAPA saw an opportunity to do more than promote a single event. The organization wanted one voice that could carry across all four Expos, so that whether someone encountered the brand in Orlando, Shanghai, Dubai, or Barcelona, it felt consistent, inviting, and unmistakably IAAPA. To bring that vision to life, we built on the existing campaign platform and refined the creative, helping “Find Possible” resonate with greater clarity, consistency, and impact.

IAAPA’s audience is not making “quick consumer choices.” They’re juggling a lot every time they make a decision. Reaching a theme park owner in Florida is a different conversation than engaging a museum director in Toronto or a water park operator in Colombia. And registration decisions rarely happen on impulse. They involve internal buy-in, budget approvals, calendar juggling, and at least one colleague who is routinely double-booked.

To meet that reality, &Barr partnered with IAAPA to build an integrated campaign across Google Search and Performance Max, Meta, LinkedIn, YouTube, email, direct mail, print, and trade partnerships. The result was a media plan that performed like a relay race: paid social and video built awareness across North America and Latin America during the long runway to registration, LinkedIn carried targeted campaigns into the US, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico to reach the owners, GMs, and directors who actually hold the pen, and search and CRM stepped in when intent was already running high.

Then came one of the campaign’s most memorable touches: personalized Funko Pop! figures designed to look like each CEO receiving them. Mailed to industry leaders at exactly the right moment in the registration window, they gave recipients something unexpected, highly personal, and hard to ignore. More than a collectible, they gave decision-makers a chance to quite literally see themselves in the world of IAAPA. Oh, and on top of all, IAAPA had a scavenger hunt where they hid 3D printed bumper cars throughout events leading up to the Expo to help drive excitement for the event.

The secret to IAAPA Expo 2025 was reach and genuine connection. When you connect, whether through a personalized mailer or a well-timed reminder through digital media, people show up. All 43,840 of them.

That audience number surpassed the year’s goal and was nearly 6% ahead of 2024’s numbers. Campaign performance improved across every metric year over year: impressions up 6%, clicks up 10%, click-through rate up 3%.

Direct mail was the standout. Conversion rates exceeded 16%, and when pass-along registrations are factored in, the estimated impact climbs past 45%, generating roughly $250,000 in revenue. Trade partnerships across North America, Europe, and Asia added nearly $150,000 in negotiated media value on top of that. Put it all together and the campaign returned close to $400,000 on a $166,000 investment. A strong showing for a five-month campaign that knew when to go broad and when to make it personal.