We’re celebrating around here! We won Noble’s first Telly Awards: a Gold for our work with Travel Nevada and a Silver for our work with Visit Lake Tahoe.
Both projects started the same way, with a partner willing to back an idea that didn’t look like the usual destination marketing. That willingness made the work possible, and a great group of collaborators helped us make it real.
What a Telly Means
A Telly is among the most respected marks of quality in video and television, awarded for 47 years, to outstanding work across every kind of screen. Entries are judged by a council of more than 250 leaders from major networks, production companies, global agencies and streaming platforms, the people who set the bar for the industry. This year they reviewed nearly 14,000 entries from 55 countries, the most in the awards’ history. Bringing home a Gold and a Silver on our first time out means so much.
Gold: Get a Little Out There with Alex Honnold (Travel Nevada)
Our Gold came from “Get a Little Out There with Alex Honnold,” a five-episode series for Travel Nevada that trades the neon for the open road, following Honnold past the obvious stops and into Nevada’s wide-open backcountry, ghost towns, desert lore and world-class climbing. The draw is Honnold himself.
As the climber behind the Oscar-winning “Free Solo” and the first-ever free solo of Taipei 101, he is a genuine celebrity and the real outdoor article at once, and that authenticity is what makes the series land. Travel Nevada was game to build around him, and audiences showed up: more than 30 million views and counting. Credit goes to our partners, too, who were instrumental to the project’s success: Nevada Division of Tourism (Travel Nevada), Fahlgren Mortine, Outside, J.J. Kelley, RXR, Alex Honnold and many more. You can stream all episodes now on Outside, no subscription required.
Silver: Beyond Awestruck: The Scientific Search for Connection (Visit Lake Tahoe)
Our Silver went to “Beyond Awestruck: The Scientific Search for Connection,” a three-part docuseries for Visit Lake Tahoe with an unusual lead: the research itself. Most destination work shows you the view. This one measures what the view does to you. Almost no destination grounds its marketing in real science, and this series does exactly that, following Dr. Paul Piff and his team at UC Irvine as they study awe at Lake Tahoe.
Working in the field with roughly 1,000 participants, the team measured what awe at Lake Tahoe actually does to people. The study is ongoing, but even the early findings stand out. Two minutes of mindful appreciation was enough to raise happiness by 33 percent and the sense of awe by 70 percent, among the strongest effects researchers have seen outside a lab. None of it happens without Dr. Piff and his UC Irvine research team and Curtis Birch, whose creative partnership helped bring the story to life in our docuseries. We’re thankful for them, and for Outside, where the series aired.
Why Work Like This Wins
Travel and tourism marketing is tough. All too often, the videos look alike: sweeping golden hour aerials, a couple clinking glasses at a scenic overlook, a soundtrack that swells in all the same places, and a voiceover promising you’ll make memories that last a lifetime.
When every place sells itself the same way, none of it sticks. The trick is making people actually feel something.
These two projects pursued that feeling in different ways: one through a host who is the real thing, and the other through scientific research into what a place actually does to the people who visit it.
What they share is a client willing to push past the usual playbook, and a team that knew how to pull it off. That kind of marketing is the work we are proudest to do, and a Telly from judges who do this for a living tells us we are doing it right.
If you have a place worth getting people to feel something about, let’s talk.
