A major industry benchmark study released this year has put hard numbers on what many DMO leaders have felt intuitively: the era of awareness-first marketing is over. Sojern’s 2026 State of Destination Marketing report, built on responses from more than 350 destination marketers worldwide, shows that economic impact measurement has become the top strategic priority for 72 percent of DMOs — a dramatic repositioning of where the industry puts its attention and budget.

The numbers on awareness campaigns are stark. The share of DMOs running awareness-focused campaigns dropped from 59 percent in 2025 to 25 percent in 2026 — a 34-point swing in a single year. That is not a gradual evolution. That is a structural reorientation, and it has real implications for how DMOs write briefs, select media partners, and report to their boards.

On the technology side, adoption of AI tools has accelerated, with 66 percent of respondents now using AI for content creation and 51 percent for data analysis. But the maturity gap is wide. Despite those headline adoption numbers, three-quarters of destination professionals do not view AI as a strategic priority within their organizations, and 72 percent say they feel ill-equipped to actually deploy AI tools and platforms effectively. Only 9 percent of DMOs describe their advertising personalization as advanced — a figure that highlights the gap between tool availability and operational capability.

What This Means for DMOs

The shift toward economic impact measurement is overdue, and the report validates what practitioners who’ve been pushing for stronger attribution have long argued: awareness metrics alone cannot sustain DMO funding in an environment where boards and government partners demand ROI accountability. Visitor spend, hotel tax contribution, and attribution-modeled conversion are now the expected language of DMO performance.

The AI adoption gap is a separate but related challenge. Organizations that are using AI only for content generation — the most common use case — are capturing the least strategic value from the technology. The real competitive advantage comes from applying AI to visitor intelligence: segmentation, behavioral prediction, and real-time campaign optimization. That requires infrastructure investment and organizational commitment that most DMOs haven’t made yet.

The industry is at a transition point where the metrics have changed but the capabilities to execute against them are still catching up. For DMO leaders, the question is how fast they close that gap — because the organizations that figure out attribution modeling and AI-assisted visitor intelligence first will be very difficult to compete with for board confidence and budget allocation.