Sector(s)

Visit the site

Visit the site

Organizations Involved

Brand USA, the USA's official travel and tourism organization, redesigned its primary website VisitTheUSA.com in 2016 with Mediacurrent as a contributing agency. The Drupal 8-based platform encompasses 15 websites in 8 languages that are geo-targeted around the world. 

Brand USA’s mission to promote the economic and social benefits of U.S travel didn't end after launch. They teamed up with Mediacurrent for full-service digital support to continue evolving the platform.

About the project

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Project Goals

Brand USA faced the challenge of staying up-to-speed on Drupal technology trends, new features, and security issues. They also needed to sustain the success of the website as a marketing vehicle. For example, Brand USA uses a massive number of beautiful images to capture stories of travel adventures. This makes it especially important for the site to be optimized for speed and performance. At the same time, they anticipated the need for new digital campaigns to continue reaching international audiences, across multiple languages.

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Mediacurrent's Approach

With Mediacurrent’s support, Brand USA optimized its Drupal platform to be fast, flexible, and far-reaching to engage global audiences.

Global Scale

  • Multilingual maintenance keeps the website open to the world.

Engaging UX

  • Travel adventures await! Interactive campaigns invite exploration.

Function & Flexibility


  • Primary site content is pulled into a subsite for COVID-cautious travel planners.

Performance


  • CloudFlare enhancements save on cost and improve page load time.

Media Handling

  • For this photo-rich site, optimized images offer a better user experience.
  • Custom Solr search configuration to display search results instantly.

Captivating a Global Audience

Brand USA offers content in multiple languages to connect with new audiences on a global scale. 

The Great Firewall of China: An automated deployment process ensures the Chinese-language subsite is not only accessible from China but also maintainable for the US-based team.

Multilingual Translation: Drupal integrates with SDL for translation management. Editorial enhancements give site editors the tools to select region-specific images and tailor content to multiple locales per language (e.g. Spanish in Spain and Spanish in Mexico).

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Drupal Performance 

Reducing page load times

A performance solution was built for Brand USA’s unique scale and complexity. CloudFlare page caching was enabled to speed up the site. Reducing page load calls helped to shrink the budget for dynamic interactive maps (Google Maps Platform) that display U.S. travel spots.

28%reduced Google Maps spend

Live Search

When the appetite for adventure strikes, site visitors can expect travel options at their fingertips. Now, search results across the site appear instantly with a custom-configured Solr search. Drupal Search API and Acquia Search modules combine with custom endpoints the site can then access through JavaScript.

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Uncovering Local Experiences 

Brand USA has digital marketing campaigns aimed to inspire travelers to discover the people and places of the USA. Even as the pandemic continues to change travel across the world, this vision has endured. Mediacurrent’s integrated support team — including design, development, and digital strategy — helped bring these campaigns to light. 

United Stories

International travelers crave local experiences. The United Stories campaign achieves just that with a welcoming space to explore local destinations. 

Mediacurrent’s developers repurposed the main site’s Drupal theme and paragraphs to create a fresh look for the campaign’s landing page. A clean minimalist design with full-screen travel photos sparks a sense of adventure. Users are invited to discover unique travel spots coast to coast through an interactive map. For Brand USA’s site builders, we created a highly usable component-based system tailored to their editorial workflow.


Let’s Go There!

When it’s time for you, we’ll be ready. 

That’s the message behind the Let’s Go There campaign, encouraging Americans to plan ahead for travel experiences when it’s safe to do so amid COVID-19. The U.S. Travel Association, which lobbies on behalf of Brand USA, initiated the campaign. Mediacurrent developed a subsite to share content from Visittheusa.com with the U.S. Travel Association’s distinct brand image.

Mediacurrent ‘walks the walk’ as a digital agency partner by delivering results on time and on budget. They bring a broad range of development expertise and creative resources to help us build the future of U.S. tourism.
Mark Lapidus, Sr. Director, Digital & Content Development, Brand USA 

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Why Drupal was chosen

  • Multilingual translation management 
  • Powerful editorial features
  • Customization

Technical Specifications

Drupal version:

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen

Over the course of the project, MediaValet developed a Drupal 8 module, which augments image fields and the WYSIWYG editor with a pop-up box that frames a MediaValet dashboard. Within this dashboard, the user can log in to MediaValet using their MediaValet credentials, and then select an image to insert a MediaValet image where one would normally insert an image from the Drupal media library (the latter is still possible).