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How Do You Make America’s 250th Feel Unmistakably Florida Keys?

America only turns 250 once. For The Florida Keys & Key West, the opportunity was bigger than celebrating a national milestone. It was a strategic chance to tell the story through a place that has always had its own ideas about independence.

Starmark and Visit Florida Keys created an integrated America 250 campaign that connected the nation’s history with the people, places and free-spirited culture of The Keys. From a new commemorative identity, to print, social and out of home applications, every piece celebrated the occasion while keeping The Keys front and center.

A National Milestone With a Keys Point of View

The campaign needed an identity that could commemorate America’s 250th while still feeling distinctly connected to The Florida Keys.

Starmark developed a new brandmark that brought patriotic cues together with elements inspired by The Keys. Five stars represented the five Keys destinations while flag-inspired forms gave the mark a sense of movement.

Just as important, the system was designed to flex across everything from pole banners and event signage to smaller commemorative uses, giving Visit Florida Keys a consistent visual signature throughout the celebration.

Putting Keys History in the Spotlight

America’s story is full of people who tried something that seemed impossible. The Florida Keys has a few of those stories of its own. For a special Smithsonian Magazine placement, Starmark focused on Henry Flagler’s Overseas Railroad and the extraordinary route that eventually became today’s Overseas Highway.

The spread pairs historic construction photography with a modern aerial of the Seven Mile Bridge, connecting an ambitious chapter of the past to an experience travelers can still follow today.

Giving Independence a Little Keys Flavor

For magazine placements like in Food & Wine, Starmark brought America 250 into the established voice of The Florida Keys with distinctly local takes on ad copy.

Bringing it all into the Social Feed

Paid social extended the story with a mix of video and historical content designed for discovery. A launch video introduced the platform:

A companion carousel moved through chapters of Keys history, from wreckers and the Overseas Railroad to maritime history and the Conch Republic, connecting the destination’s independent spirit across generations.

Ready to Make a Big Moment Your Own?

Let’s talk about how Starmark can turn cultural moments into marketing experiences that feel relevant, distinctive and true to your brand.

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Starmark partners Amelia Island and Visit Florida Keys honored at state tourism awards

It was a big night for two of Starmark’s DMO clients at the VISIT FLORIDA 2026 Florida Governor’s Conference on Tourism, with Amelia Island Convention & Visitors Bureau and Visit Florida Keys & Key West bringing home a combined 10 awards, including three Henry Awards—the highest honors in their respective categories.

For Amelia Island, six awards recognized a range of work spanning advertising, public relations, travel trade and integrated marketing. The destination won a coveted Henry Award for Print Advertising for the Find Your Unwind leisure campaign, along with two Silver and three Bronze awards.

Amelia Island’s 2026 Flagler Awards

Henry — Print Advertising: Find Your Unwind Leisure
Silver — Public Relations & Earned Media: New Day Cleveland + Midwest Influencers
Silver — Travel Trade, Meetings & B2B Marketing: Amelia Island Meetings Videos
Bronze — Specialty Marketing: Amelia Island Dining Month Campaign
Bronze — Mobile Marketing: Fall/Winter Rich Media Unit
Bronze — Integrated Marketing Campaign: Find Your Unwind Campaign

Visit Florida Keys also had a standout evening, earning four Flagler Awards, including two Henry Awards. The wins recognized innovative work in sustainable tourism, social media, websites and mobile marketing.

Visit Florida Keys & Key West’s 2026 Flagler Awards

Henry — Sustainable Tourism Marketing: Integrated Ecotourism Program
Henry — Social Media Marketing: Florida Keys Instant Experiences
Silver — Websites: VisitFloridaKeys.com
Silver — Mobile Marketing: Key West Scroller

The Flagler Awards, presented by VISIT FLORIDA, recognize outstanding tourism marketing across the state. With 10 awards between two valued partners, this year’s honors are a celebration not only of exceptional creative work, but of the strategy, collaboration and destination storytelling behind it.

We’re proud to celebrate these wins with Amelia Island and Visit Florida Keys & Key West.

Starmark shares the stage at Amelia Island’s Annual Strategic Marketing Meeting

The Starmark tourism team recently had the honor of presenting the new Amelia Island campaign “Find your unwind ” to the destination’s tourism industry at The Ritz-Carlton, Amelia Island. In addition to the work, the team shared an in-depth look at how the creative, media and strategic planning came together to make the campaign a huge success.

We celebrated the day with our partner, Amelia Island Convention & Visitor’s Bureau (AICVB), by inviting attendees to share their own ways to “unwind” as part of a branded booth activation, along with photo ops, collateral and free swag for everyone who participated.

This also happened — just in time for the meeting, we were notified of the campaign’s Telly Award win. Congrats to the team and our friends at AICVB. We hope to be adding more hardware to the shelf with Amelia Island in the coming months, stay tuned…

See the Campaign

How Do You Turn an Emotional State-of-Mind into Economic Impact?

When Starmark partnered with the Amelia Island Convention & Visitors Bureau (AICVB) to launch “Find Your Unwind,” the goal was ambitious: break through Florida’s “sea of sameness” by trading coordinates on a map for an emotional state-of-being. From our phase one brand research, we knew the promise of a total mental reset would resonate deeply with travelers seeking to disconnect from the everyday.

To turn that vision into reality, Starmark aligned strategy, creative and media around well-established psychological science. By pairing high-end editorial creative for leisure, meetings and weddings, with psychologically targeted media placements, we ensured our message would reach audiences in the exact moments they were most open to it—driving both deeper brand love and significant economic action.

The Science Behind “Mindset Targeting”

To ensure the “Find Your Unwind” message met travelers when they were most open to imagining themselves on Amelia Island, Starmark engineered a media placement strategy grounded in both science and emotion.

Reaching the Receptive Mind: Moving beyond basic demographics like “women 35-54” to target people based on what they are doing and feeling in the moment—reaching them when they are already in a relaxed, joyful headspace.
Mood-Congruent Processing: Leveraging the brain’s natural tendency to seek out information that matches its current mood. When travelers are already feeling good, their brains act as a filter that actively welcomes positive brand messages.
Leveraging Spillover Theory: Carefully curating ad environments—avoiding heavy news or stressful content in favor of lighthearted, uplifting programming where the positive “container” leaks its good mood directly onto the brand.
A “Visual Exhale” Execution: Pairing an elevated, high-end editorial style with hyper-targeted digital and print media across families, couples and luxury seekers alike.

From Visual Exhale to Measurable Momentum

The creative and media direction illustrates how beautiful, science-backed strategy is much more likely to deliver a beautiful bottom line. In just the first six months, the campaign delivered exceptional increases year over year in key metrics across all platforms, exceeding all industry benchmarks:

34%+ Increase in click through rate on Display banners
30% Increase in click through on Meta ads
33% increase in click through on Google paid search ads

Additional tracked exposure to the new creative translated into real-world action and direct booking impact.

One Mindset. One Connected Strategy.

Find Your Unwind brought together:

Research, strategic positioning and brand promise
High-end editorial creative direction
Psychologically targeted, multi-channel media planning
Contextual environment curation

The result is more than a creative concept. It’s a high-performing campaign that meets travelers at the exact right moment to turn total relaxation into real-world business results.

Ready to Turn Your Brand Insight into Real-World Results?

Let’s talk about how Starmark can turn audience insight into strategy, creative solutions and measurable action.

Putting a creative drive market spin on a slower travel season

For The Florida Keys & Key West, late summer to early fall is usually slower than the rest of the year. Leveraging one of The Keys’ most famous assets, the Overseas Highway, we laid the creative foundation for a new seasonal campaign named Keys Season. It gives travelers more reasons to consider, more confidence to book and a more compelling way to see The Keys this time of year.

From Slow Season to Keys Season

The answer was not simply another sale. It was a coordinated product, promotions and messaging strategy built around four ideas:

Stay and save
Experience bundles
Events and happenings
Book with confidence

Together, these four ideas position late summer and early fall as a distinct time to experience The Florida Keys, with fewer crowds, seasonal experiences, added value and, with flexible accommodations cancellation policies, more reasons to book with confidence.

The name Keys Season gives the campaign an identity that we can return to year after year. The line “One Road. Miles of Savings.” connects the value message to the physical experience of traveling the Overseas Highway.

It makes the campaign authentic to The Keys while appealing directly to priority drive markets. The visual system is designed to work across outdoor, digital, email, social and the Visit Florida Keys website.

Bringing Local Partners Along

To be successful, Keys Season relies on strong participation from local businesses.

Because this is the first seasonal program of its kind for The Keys, Starmark created a clear partner recruitment system that makes it easy to:

Understand the campaign
Sign up
Submit an offer
Add an offer to the Visit Florida Keys website

The partner message makes the shared goal clear: “You bring the offer. We’ll help bring the visitors.” This turns partner participation into a coordinated Keys-wide effort built to support local businesses and give travelers more reasons to book.

Building the Campaign System

Out-of-home and display ads support both awareness and booking.

Paid social extends the campaign into priority markets and gives travelers more ways to discover Keys Season.

Rich media units let users swipe through offers, experiences and reasons to visit.

The landing page brings the full campaign together, connecting travelers with deals, packages, events and booking information.

Travelers Started Saying Yes

Keys Season launched May 1. By mid-May, we were already seeing measurable improvement in forward-looking projections. Occupancy levels for June, July and August, which had been projected to decline just two months earlier, recovered to at or above the previous year’s levels. These early results suggest that travelers are responding to the campaign’s value and confidence messaging.

One Road. One Connected Strategy.

Keys Season brought together:

Research and strategy
Campaign naming and identity
Partner recruitment
Creative and media
Digital implementation
Booking-focused content

The result is more than a seasonal ad campaign. It’s a new way to position late summer and early fall in The Florida Keys & Key West.

Need to Turn a Business Challenge Into an Opportunity?

Let’s talk about how Starmark can help turn audience insight into strategy, creative solutions and measurable action. Get in touch.

Possible 2026: Four Takeaways from a Media Perspective

Three days. Dozens of sessions. And four different takeaways from our Starmark team. You’ve already heard from our Chief Digital Officer, Executive Creative Director and Group Creative Director. From our media department, here’s the most resonant theme: the marketing industry is at a genuine inflection point, and the gap between those experimenting with AI and those watching from the sidelines is widening fast. So, here are the four media insights that will shape our advice over the next year and a half.

The funnel isn’t collapsing — it’s getting more complex

We’ve been told the purchase funnel is dead so many times it feels like a foregone conclusion. The reality is more nuanced: the funnel hasn’t disappeared, but AI is actively shortening the distance between intent and purchase.

Research from eMarketer showed that AI search gives answers, not options — when a consumer asks Gemini for the best carry-on bag for a Paris trip, they get four curated recommendations with context, not 28 product reviews requiring 45 minutes of reading. That compression of the consideration phase is real. But what happens next isn’t what the fear-based headlines suggest.

AI-referred shoppers arrive with more intent — and they still browse, still build baskets, and still need to be influenced. And that’s because 69% of AI-assisted shoppers still prefer to complete their purchase on a retailer’s app or website. Only 10% buy through a native AI interface. Retailers control the infrastructure that makes consumers feel comfortable spending money — inventory, pricing, fulfillment — and that doesn’t change because an LLM made a recommendation.

AI may reshape influence earlier in the journey, but commerce still resolves inside retailer ecosystems.
— eMarketer, April 2026

The practical takeaway: higher intent traffic from AI referrals doesn’t mean fewer chances to influence. Track where that traffic enters your site. If you’re seeing more lower-funnel arrivals on product pages, optimize and monetize those spaces accordingly.

AI and search are merging — and both are growing

The fear that AI will kill search is also running ahead of reality. The actual data shows something more interesting: AI users are more likely to use Google daily, not less. As of April 2026, 76% of weekly AI users are daily Google users, compared to 65% of the general internet population.

Total minutes spent with Google have actually gone up as AI usage has grown. We’re in a period of choice expansion, which means you can’t just optimize for search or answer engines. Google still matters most for organic and paid, but you need to monitor and optimize for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity as well.

A new eMarketer AI Visibility Index is tracking how brands show up in LLM recommendations by category. In personal care and beauty, La Roche-Posay leads with a 22% brand mention rate in ChatGPT — meaning it appears in 22% of relevant queries. Even the 10th-ranked brand, Fenty Beauty, only appears in 9% of queries. That’s how early-stage this is, and why starting GEO work now, before competitors do, is a genuine advantage.

Google’s new AI mode is a great example of why watching this trend matters in the real world. Instead of bifurcating search and its Gemini answer engine, Google has chosen to combine them into a single interface. This is a clear indication of how meaningful optimizing for answers and for conventional search needs to be the guiding strategy for marketers.

Social is still the discovery layer

Social media’s dominance in product discovery remains significant and data-backed. In June 2025, 39.2% of US shoppers said social media was where they first encountered new brands or products they went on to buy. The next closest channel is a brand’s own site or app at 27.6%. GenAI tools as a discovery channel came in at just 3.8%.

Influencer trust is also growing, not eroding. Among Gen Z (18–29), the share who have purchased something based on a creator’s recommendation rose from 41% in early 2023 to 56% by January 2025. Among adults 30+, it grew from 19% to 27% over the same period. That’s a durable structural shift, not a trend.

And here’s the new emerging trend to watch: social GEO. Every major platform is building some form of answer engine, and social content is already showing up in LLM replies. Start developing creator-led GEO strategies now, before the platforms formalize how it works and before the competition gets there first.

AI-first doesn’t mean people-last

Multiple sessions pushed back on the narrative that AI is coming for marketing jobs. The more accurate framing from the enterprise speakers: AI handles tasks and workflows, which frees people to focus on decision-making. The shift in 2026 is toward agentic workflows — where tasks are automated end-to-end — with humans staying in the loop for judgment calls.

The research finding that stuck with us: the same percentage of marketers who say governance is a problem today expect it to still be a problem two years from now. There’s no shortcut through the organizational change required to make AI genuinely useful at scale. That’s where agency value lives — helping clients close that gap.

Five actions to take now

Track AI referral traffic as a separate channel
- Identify where ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude are sending users, what pages they land on, and how they behave. This data doesn’t exist in most client dashboards yet — build it in now.
Start GEO monitoring before it becomes urgent
- Track how your brands appear in LLM responses monthly. As an example, in the beauty sector, the top brand only shows up in 22% of relevant ChatGPT queries. Brands not appearing at all won’t be considered.
Optimize lower-funnel product pages for AI-referred traffic
- AI-referred shoppers arrive with higher intent but still browse and build baskets. If you’re seeing more direct-to-product-page traffic, the monetization and content on those pages needs to work harder.
Don’t abandon fundamentals for fear-based reallocation
- Historical precedent matters. Most platform attempts to own the full transaction have failed. Traditional search is flat, not declining. Follow transactions, not just attention or headlines.
Get your team genuinely hands-on with AI tools
- Not just familiar — daily users. The gap between abstract AI enthusiasm and real operational understanding is exactly where strategy goes wrong. The people closest to the tools see the landscape most clearly.

Possible 2026 Roundup: Brand & AI

This year’s Possible Conference in Miami made one thing clear: the novelty of generative AI is waning. In its place is a hard mandate for agentic workflows and radical authenticity. Brands face a definitive crossroads: slide into an “Age of Slop” filled with generic digital content, or step up to a new “Golden Age of Media”.

Commanding Authority in Agentic Search

The consumer journey has fractured into a non-stop digital swirl of AI queries, social validation, and chatbots. Under the hood, consumers are starting to rely on direct, AI-generated answers over traditional web links.

This radically changes discovery. Brands must shift from optimizing strictly for keywords (SEO) to optimizing for large language model (LLM) behavior. Because roughly 75% of model training data relies on conversational, community-driven platforms, the stakes are high. When an AI agent spends tokens to solve a problem, your brand needs to be the authoritative source cited. Marketers must treat AI engines as primary stakeholders, using high-quality proprietary content to win both human and machine attention.

IP Activation: Brands as Entertainment

Consumers are starving for great stories, not thinly veiled commercials. To win in a democratized creator economy, brands must view their heritage as cultural intellectual property rather than advertising assets.

weinermobile — *Credit: iStock.com/Ward DeWitt*

Oscar Mayer turned the Wienermobile into entertainment with the “Wienie 500,” drawing 8 million livestream viewers on Fox.
Kraft leveraged its classic macaroni necklace for a limited-edition Mother’s Day jewelry collaboration.
Heinz celebrated the NFL draft’s 57th pick as “Mr. 57”.

This isn’t advertising; it’s culture—a springboard for audience participation.

Community-First Storytelling

Resonant brands build genuine communities, transforming passive observers into active participants. Content must evolve to address the actual problems real people are trying to solve.

Hoorae CEO, Issa Rae, demonstrated this with her premium TikTok micro-drama series Screen Time, prioritizing audiences through mobile-first storytelling that garnered millions of views. Similarly, Discover Puerto Rico uses hyper-local storytelling with creators, like Bad Bunny, to organically attract high-intent travelers instead of merely tourists.

The Rise of Agentic Commerce

The leap to agentic AI introduces autonomous, multi-step execution across the marketing funnel. This expands our creative canvas into Agentic Commerce.

As model costs drop, personalized AI assistants will deliver hyper-relevant, interactive ad experiences. Consumers will be able to virtually try on apparel or visualize products together in real time, driving frictionless conversions. Starmark is already implementing conversational, adaptive AI display ads for travel and tourism.

The Creative Mandate

Ultimately, brands must stop contributing to digital noise and design intelligent ecosystems that meet customers where they are. Said another way: being able to make more marketing or content more quickly with AI isn’t worth much – unless what you’re making is different, interesting and useful. Human judgment, brand authority, and creative storytelling remain the ultimate differentiators.

Get ready to explore: A dispatch from Possible 2026

Brett wrote about the AI Overload at Possible last week, but there was more to the conversation than LLMs. Here are some of my favorite tidbits from an action-packed conference.

1. Brand creative empirically outperforms pure performance creative

After seven years of tracking and measurement, MMA, in partnership with Ally Financial and Campbell’s, unveiled financial results of their Brand as Performance study. The bottom line: brand affinity creative (advertising designed to make a consumer like the brand) converted customers at a higher rate and led to longer customer lifetime value. Not only that, the study showed that sales lift in groups exposed to brand affinity creative extended for six months beyond the three-month study period, showing the long tail of work that makes prospects like you.

2. Reach is worthless, but engagement pays off

Top performing brands that are winning culture and winning at the register, like Kraft-Heinz, Tubi and JCPenney, are winning through engagement. It’s not about getting in front of the most people the most times. It’s a game of making a deeper impact by delivering things that bring joy and make people want to spend time with you.

3. Use AI to do things you couldn’t before

It’s a failure of imagination to only look to AI for ways to do what you can already do. Instead, take bigger swings at things that simply weren’t possible before. To power their Five-Star Theater holiday effort, Amazon used a customized agent to scrub through tens of thousands of reviews for the most Shakespearean takes on their products, worthy to be read by actors.

4. Everyone’s just experimenting

Even the world’s biggest companies don’t have a playbook for AI and LLMs. The current moment is all about experimentation. Just trying new things is the overriding recommendation from the theorists, marketing leaders and experts.

5. Tentpoles of marketing in the last decade are officially deceased

Before LLMs, social referral traffic to brand and publisher sites was already plummeting. AI answers and summaries are driving search referrals down even further. Video engagement is in decline, too. So stopping customers with video and driving them to your site is officially a dead strategy. It’s time to try new things and reexamine old assumptions about what works.

AI Overload at the Possible Conference in Miami

AI, AI, AI! When every booth is “AI-powered” and every keynote is “AI-driven,” it’s hard to tell who is actually doing something new and who just updated their PowerPoint template. It all started to blur together and all started to sound the same. Sifting through all the white noise, I did find some key learnings and insights that I found valuable. Starmark has long been supporters of the MMA and the Possible conference is top notch for marketing and media technology.

Here are the three biggest shifts I noticed at the conference:

The “Workforce” Shift: From Tool to Teammate

The biggest takeaway from the “Enterprise AI Agents” and Coca-Cola sessions isn’t just “use AI to create content.” It’s the move toward Agentic Workflows. When the world can be flooded with generated content, they are finding that longer form content, and premium content stands out.

Last year was about Generative AI (making things). This year is about Agentic AI (doing things).
If your team is still “prompting” AI one by one, you’re behind. The “Possible” standard is now automated agents. I like the idea of small discreet “Insta-workers” that run autonomously in the background to flag inventory or spend issues before a human even logs in. The idea you can then string them together with handoffs sounds like a more flexible way to get value over generative AI.

The “Strategy” Shift: Vulnerability & Answer Engines

There were many sessions about AEO/GEO, the move from SEO to Answer Engine Optimization (or Generative Engine Optimization – the final term is still up in the air). This is a noticeable threat to website traffic, but also has real opportunities that can be executed now to get ahead.

The fact that “AI can refute your brand marketing spin” is huge. AI prefers substance over spin, and it severely punishes inconsistency. As marketers this may be a tough adjustment, but it’s necessary.
As always, AI models are trained on data, stats, science, and Reddit/LinkedIn are important off site content that is used to train these models. If what your website says doesn’t match what real people are saying on Reddit, the AI (and therefore the consumer) will call you out. Substance is now a survival tactic, not just a brand choice.

The “Process” Shift: Agility over Planning

We have been talking about Agile for over a decade. But it’s always great to hear how others are doing and what benefits they are finding. McCormick discussed their shift to “Agile Pods” and “2-week sprints”, which highlight a massive change in their marketing department’s structure.

If it works for the audience, it will work for the brand. Instead of long plans pushed onto a platform, marketers must adapt their strategies to fit the audience’s existing behavior and needs.
Being agile lets them try new things not in the plan, test, and learn. It opened up a lot of experimentation for them they didn’t have previously.

The Bottom Line: If you had to delete every slide that mentioned “AI” and only keep the ones that changed your business goals, you’re left with:

Community over Reach (Creators/Reddit/LinkedIn).
Agility over Planning (2-week sprints).
Outcomes over Metrics (Effectiveness over Efficiency).

Starmark’s Shift from Waterfall to Agile Drives Growth with IBM Targetprocess

As part of our celebration of 10 years of going Agile, IBM has published an article about our journey with Targetprocess, a tool we are still completely satisfied with 10 years on. Here’s an excerpt:

A critical success factor for Starmark when migrating away from waterfall and to Agile was to find the right software tool to run our business using Agile methodology. It needed to be technically savvy, but also have a great UI for our creative teams too. After piloting multiple tools, we landed on Targetprocess (by IBM). It has the perfect blend of sophistication for our developers, and user friendliness for our managers and creative teams allowing everyone to understand their workloads at a glance.

Read the IBM Case Study on Starmark here.

Starmark Shines: Earns Gold MarCom Award for FPL’s Experiential Installation

We are absolutely thrilled to announce that Starmark has been honored with a prestigious Gold MarCom Award for our outstanding work on the Florida Power & Light Company (FPL) experiential installation at Junior Achievement of South Florida’s JA World.

This coveted award recognizes excellence in marketing and communications, and winning Gold is a testament to the creativity, strategy, and dedication of the entire Starmark team, as well as the visionary partnership with FPL and Junior Achievement of South Florida.

The Award-Winning Experience

The FPL installation, a key component of the JA World “hands-on” learning experience, was designed to be much more than a simple display. It is a fully immersive, experiential environment that captures the vital role FPL plays in the community, providing students with a tangible, interactive understanding of:

Rewarding Pathways: The diverse and exciting career opportunities available within the energy industry.
Energy Generation: How power is created and distributed, including FPL’s commitment to clean, sustainable energy solutions.
Financial Literacy: The importance of budgeting and energy consumption choices.

A Partnership that Powers Learning

Our goal was to create an experience that didn’t just tell students about FPL, but allowed them to feel and interact with the brand’s mission. Receiving the Gold MarCom Award validates our approach in turning complex industry concepts into engaging, memorable lessons for the next generation. We are incredibly proud of the impact this installation is having on the thousands of students who visit JA World each year.
— Jacqui Hartnett, CEO, Starmark

This recognition underscores the successful collaboration between Starmark, FPL, and Junior Achievement of South Florida, demonstrating the power of innovative design to support essential educational programs.

About the MarCom Awards

The MarCom Awards is one of the oldest, largest, and most respected creative competitions in the world. It recognizes the excellence of marketing and communication professionals, with entries judged by the Association of Marketing and Communication Professionals (AMCP). The Gold Award is given to entries that demonstrate an outstanding standard of quality and creative achievement.

Sparking New Possibilities: FPL’s Storefront with Junior Achievement of South Florida

Nurturing a healthy pipeline of future talent is essential to an organization’s long-term success — and the Florida Power and Light (FPL) team made strong strides in fueling theirs by immersing 20,000+ eighth graders in hands-on learning fun at Junior Achievement of South Florida’s JA Career Discovery Park.

Powering Future Generations

FPL is the state’s largest power utility, with 5 million customers and 8,000 employees. When a high-profile sponsorship opportunity arose with JA World, enabling FPL to connect students‘ current educational choices to their future economic success, FPL and Starmark were all in!

Junior Achievement of South Florida prepares young people with the knowledge, ability and confidence to navigate career and financial literacy. JA World Huizenga Center at the Lillian S. Wells Pavilion is the largest JA experiential learning center in the world and has impacted more than 1.2 million students since its inception in 1959. One of the organization’s flagship programs is JA Career Discovery Park, where 20,000 eighth grade students get to explore careers in “storefronts”. Each of these room-size build outs represents a major South Florida employer or industry.

Igniting Their Interest

JA World offered FPL the ideal setting to illuminate a wide range of dynamic career possibilities — from engineering to marketing to mission-critical drone operations. Our goals: compel students to spend quality time at the installation and open their minds to rewarding energy career paths. Since each student visits all the JA World storefronts, we had limited time to make an impact.

Today’s students, as digital natives, are most at home with visual content and gamified education. Yet, the real world is tactile and dimensional too. So Starmark ideated a strategic blend of both that would stand out from all other flat, static storefronts. Leading-edge digital tech was combined with tangible FPL artifacts, like a rover and transformer, to build a unique, multi-faceted learning experience. Once we developed the strategy and installation elements, we created scale models in VR to test our concepts.

JAW105 FPL Stills Select Retouch Composite Seven High Energy Dec02

Amping Up Excitement

Our strategy and execution:

Keep it hands-on: transform mundane career information into interactive fun.
Keep it moving: short interactions and multiple stations to hold attention and interest.
Keep it energetic: gaming challenges and team activities that weren’t dry or dull.

Starting Strong

As soon as students approached our space, “Welcome! It’s going to be a high-energy day.” set their expectations. Upon entering, 360 degrees of immersive engagement surrounded them.

Seven High-Energy Installations

Each experience was interactive, engaging and fun, fulfilling our “high-energy” welcome promise.

FPL Command Center With Drone

Our mini version of a real-life FPL Command Center housed six working monitors. These included a power device status map, power grid data readouts, flight traffic, weather, drone operations, and maintenance/repair activity log:

The introductory video outlined their critical mission: a team of three students would work together to solve an urgent power grid issue.
We suspended a working drone and assigned a role to each student on the 3-person team:
- Flight operations: ensuring it’s safe to fly the drone
- Flight operator: piloting and looking for the grid issue
- Repair specialist: documenting/logging the issue to dispatch a maintenance crew

“Future Self” Augmented Reality

Discovery Park wants each child to picture themselves in future careers. We embraced that goal with an augmented reality (AR) station where visitors literally saw themselves in an energy career:

Students step up to two life-sized monitors.
AR tech dresses the user in one of four outfits matched to a role: Environmental Specialist, Data Scientist, Nuclear Technician and Renewable Energy Engineer.
Outfits are displayed in a video loop while displaying fast facts about each career.

JAW105 FPL Stills Select Retouch Composite FPL Command Center with Drone Dec02

Line Worker Photo Opp

Hard hats and neon vests worn in sky-high workplace settings: the traditional FPL line worker is among the company’s most recognized roles. Our photo opp leveraged this popular image:

We invited students to don the line worker gear and pose inside an FPL bucket truck prop.
The roofline backdrop and visual perspective trick makes it seem as if they are 30 feet up.
This photo opp was a HUGE hit with the kids!

Career Profiles

There’s a role for every student’s talent and interest at FPL and to emphasize that, we wrapped pony walls with the message profiles of actual FPL employees:

The core message: “Power your passion. Fuel your dreams.”
Walls showcased diverse careers, from Marketing Specialist to Arborist to Data Scientist, with short descriptions and salary ranges.
Creative or STEM, in office or outdoors, it’s easy to see a bright future for everyone at FPL.

Home Energy Specialist

Hot water heaters, AC, washers, dryers and entertainment systems are a staple in most homes. This hands-on learning activity transformed our eighth graders into home energy experts:

Students flipped switches in a living area vignette to see which appliances drew the most energy. The power meter steadily tracks their progress.
Once all four appliances are set to their optimal settings, users are rewarded with a success animation on the meter.

FlowOfElectricityDiagram TwoStudents 3B5A0119 web

Follow the Flow of Electricity

We flip a switch and power turns on. But how does it get to our outlets and appliances?

Our “Follow the Flow of Electricity” mural shows students the steps electricity takes: from power plant to service line to the hand hole outside their homes.
They also learn the names and purpose of all the equipment they’ve likely seen every day, without ever realizing what it was for.

“House Of Savings” Energy Usage Simulator

Now students will know why moms and dads nag us to close that fridge door or turn off that light! You’re never too young to learn about saving energy:

We updated the content and visuals of FPL’s “House of Savings” online tool to appeal to eighth-grade audiences.
They see how to optimize energy usage and lower the cost; bonus win for mom and dad!

JAW105 FPL Stills Select Retouch Composite Follow the Flow of Energy Dec02

Powering Workforce Development

Initiatives like JA Career Discovery Park are smart long-term strategies: they seed future pipeline development at early stages, sparking awareness at a formative time when children are just starting to explore their interests and talents. As our young audience matures in the next decade, they will start firming up their career path and even becoming FPL customers.

Kids who are educated, prepared to lead, inspired to learn, develop, think innovatively…that is what will power Florida’s future. Partnering with Starmark this year empowered us to deepen our support for the valuable contribution JA World makes and elevate our own impact to a whole new level.
— Juliet Murphy Roulhac, Esq., FPL’s External Director, Senior Affairs & Corporate Philanthropy

FPL’s JA Career Discovery Park Storefront was a big success and met all goals set, establishing FPL as a rewarding employer and community partner; introducing the brand to 20,000+ students; and sending each one back home with a new perspective on the rewarding possibilities ahead.

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