Visit Burbank rolled out a new brand platform this month called “Go Off Script,” built around the idea that the best moments in Burbank are the ones travelers don’t plan. The rebrand is more than a creative refresh: it kicks off a new ten-year operating term for the bureau and lines the destination up against an unusually dense pipeline of mega-events headed for the Los Angeles region.

The campaign was developed with Strausberg Group and tourism agency Verdin Marketing, and centers on the premise that visitors should step into the role of “main character” the moment they arrive. The creative is intentionally loose — studio tours, neighborhood discovery, street art, unscripted detours — positioning Burbank as the antidote to the over-itinerized version of L.A. that dominates the inbound travel narrative.

The timing is the news. Within an 18-month window, Burbank is hosting the Los Angeles World Cup 26 Fan Zone in Downtown Burbank on July 18 and 19, opening a new Hollywood Burbank Airport terminal in October, then sitting inside the host region for Super Bowl LXI in 2027 and the 2028 Summer Olympics. That is a four-event compounding effect in a destination that ten years ago was best known to travelers as “the airport you fly into to avoid LAX.”

What this means for non-host DMOs

The most important detail in this story is not the campaign tagline. It is that Burbank chose to rebrand before the World Cup, not after. Most non-host destinations in the LA region will spend the next 18 months trying to attach their existing brand to a global event. Visit Burbank is doing the opposite: rewriting its brand so that the global event reinforces a positioning the destination wants to own for the next decade.

This is the practical playbook for any DMO sitting near a 2026, 2027, or 2028 mega-event:

Use the moment to reframe, not to ride coattails. A FIFA Fan Zone or an Olympic spillover audience is the most valuable testing environment a brand will ever get. Spending it on the same campaign you ran last year is a missed opportunity.
Secure a multi-year operating runway first. Burbank’s new ten-year term gave the bureau the political license to invest in a long-horizon brand instead of a one-cycle campaign. Without that, the rebrand would have been a marketing exercise.
Tie the brand to the on-the-ground product. “Go Off Script” is not just creative messaging — it implicitly bets that Burbank’s neighborhood retail, restaurants, and studio access can deliver the unscripted experience the campaign promises. That alignment between brand and product is what separates a credible rebrand from a slogan.

Burbank is also a useful case study because the destination is not “discovered” in the way Anaheim, Santa Monica, or Hollywood are. Most non-host DMOs have the same problem: they live next to a marquee destination and either get ignored or get treated as overflow. The “Go Off Script” framing positions Burbank as the alternative to the marquee instead of an extension of it — a positioning that any non-host DMO sitting next to a host city should be evaluating right now.

The bigger structural point: with Brand USA recently launching its “America the Beautiful” global push and the FIFA World Cup pulling international demand into U.S. metros for the first time at this scale, every non-host DMO in or near a host region has roughly 12 months to decide whether their existing brand can carry the weight of a global event audience. If the answer is no, Burbank just laid out the timeline for what to do about it.

Photo by Moses Malik Roldan on Unsplash