Travel technology platform Steller’s campaign with Visit Anaheim, the destination marketing organization for Anaheim and Garden Grove, California, has won the U.S. Travel Association’s 2026 ESTO Digital Brilliance Award for a campaign that linked creator content directly to trip planning and booking data.

The winning campaign, run with agency of record Miles Partnership, paired five travel creators with experiences across Anaheim in late 2025, covering the destination’s attractions, restaurants and entertainment, according to a press release. The campaign used Steller Connect to route the creators’ content into interactive trip planning, automated marketing and booking tools, with Steller Connect Players embedded on VisitAnaheim.org to extend that content beyond the social feed. Visit Anaheim, which ran 39 influencer campaigns in 2024, said the setup let it connect influencer engagement to booking activity and quantify economic impact for the first time. The campaign generated hundreds of planned trips to Anaheim within 90 days, representing $791,800 in potential economic impact, according to the companies.

Jade Broadus, Steller’s VP of Business Development and Sue O’Shea, Visit Anaheim’s Vice President of Marketing.

“Creator marketing has evolved far beyond likes, views, and engagement,” said Wesley Kirkpatrick, social media director at Visit Anaheim. “Through our partnership with Steller, we’ve been able to show that creators aren’t just inspiring people to visit Anaheim, they’re influencing real travel decisions and generating measurable economic impact.”

Steller CEO Pete Bryant framed the award as validation of a broader shift in how the channel needs to prove itself. “For years, destination marketers have invested heavily in influencer marketing because we know authentic creator content inspires travel and builds trust, but proving what happens after someone sees that content has been incredibly difficult,” Bryant said. “Together, we connected creator content to the rest of the traveler journey.”

That difficulty is one Steller has quantified in its own research. A survey of 200 DMO and CVB professionals the company published earlier this year found that 76% of destination marketers rank tracking attribution and impact as their single greatest challenge, ahead of finding and vetting creators. Ninety-two percent of respondents said they were maintaining or increasing influencer budgets in 2026 regardless, with 65% of internal stakeholders prioritizing economic impact data over engagement numbers when evaluating campaigns.

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