About the show

The Most Honest Conversation in Destination Marketing.

Destination Discourse is a weekly show about the arguments the destination marketing industry is quietly having — staged out loud, on the record, by people who actually run things.

Why the show exists

The industry is in the middle of a transformation. Most of it is pretending it isn't.

Destination marketing is roughly a decade behind the most sophisticated marketing disciplines. The playbook most DMOs still run — funnels, paid, clicks, vanity metrics — was built for a world that's already gone. AI is changing how travelers decide. Funding models are fraying. Governments are rethinking the entire basis on which DMOs are financed. Residents are asking harder questions than they used to. And the trade press mostly keeps nodding along.

Stuart Butler runs Visit Myrtle Beach as its president. Adam Stoker runs Brand Revolt, an agency that serves destinations. We started this show because we could each feel the gap between what we were saying in private meetings and what was getting said on conference stages — and the private version was almost always more useful.

So we made a show where the private version is the product. Every week, one of us picks a question the industry has been avoiding. We invite someone who knows something about it — a sitting DMO president, a vendor principal, an industry veteran — and we disagree in public until something honest comes out.

How the show works

The format, in one minute.

Each episode runs about 50 minutes. Every episode opens with a question — always phrased as a question, always real, always something one of us is actually unsure about. We have a news segment called Stu's News (yes, it has a jingle, yes, the jingle is deliberately imperfect, please don't write in). And then we argue.

Some episodes are just the two of us. Those are the ones where we openly disagree with each other — we've titled episodes "Is Stuart Right About the Future of DMOs?" and "Is Adam Wrong About Paid Media?" for a reason.

Most episodes include a guest. Our guest list is built around one rule: people who actually run things. Sitting DMO presidents, CEOs, CMOs. Agency principals. Vendor founders. Nobody is here because their PR team pitched us. Nobody gets softballs.

Once a year, we take the show on the road — live at ESTO, live at SC GovCon, live wherever the industry is gathered — because the argument works better with an audience in the room.

The hosts

Two people who don't work for each other.

Founder, Brand Revolt

Adam Stoker

Host of The Destination Marketing Podcast

Adam runs Brand Revolt, an agency that serves destination marketing organizations. Before Brand Revolt, he ran Relic Agency and launched Tourism IQ, a learning platform for the destination marketing industry. He also hosts The Destination Marketing Podcast, now 400+ episodes deep, which makes him one of the most-recorded voices in the industry.

Adam shows up to this show with cross-client pattern recognition — he sees what's working and what's not across dozens of destinations at once — and with a consistent bias toward owned media, earned relationships, and the long game. He is rarely the one softening a position.

President, Visit Myrtle Beach

Stuart Butler

2025 Content Marketer of the Year — Content Marketing Institute

Stuart runs the full operator side of a destination marketing organization that's consistently ahead of its peers. He was named 2025 Content Marketer of the Year by the Content Marketing Institute — the award recognized his work on Traveling the Spectrum, Charlie's Place, and this show among other projects.

Before Visit Myrtle Beach, Stuart was in hotels and online retail. He describes his move from retail to hotels as stepping back five years, and his move from hotels to the DMO world as stepping back another five. He sees the gap between destination marketing and the more sophisticated parts of the marketing discipline, and he's made closing it his job.

Stuart shows up to this show with real data, real stakes, and a willingness to be wrong on the record. His Visit Myrtle Beach org is the live case study under every argument he makes.

Ownership

Who owns this show (and why it matters).

Destination Discourse is owned personally and jointly by Adam Stoker and Stuart Butler. It is not a Brand Revolt marketing channel. It is not a Visit Myrtle Beach content initiative. It is not sponsored by either host's employer.

That's deliberate. The show only works if neither host has a corporate reason to soften a stance, flatter a guest, or back down from a disagreement. The editorial independence is the product.

We run ads sparingly. When we do run a sponsor, we say so. Sponsors never influence the topic, the guest, or the argument.

Who the show is for

If you're in the industry, it's for you.

DMO and CVB staff at any level. From marketing coordinators to sitting presidents and CEOs. If you've ever sat in a strategy meeting and thought "nobody in this room is asking the right question," this is your show.
Vendors and service providers to the industry. Agencies, tech platforms, data providers, media partners, consultants. If you want to know how DMO-side leaders actually think — not how they talk in RFPs — this is the most useful 50 minutes of your week.

If you're looking for travel inspiration, booking a vacation, or trying to decide where to go next summer: this is not that show. There are many good shows that are. This is not one of them.

The Desties

One more thing — we call you Desties.

If you stick around, you become a Destie. That's what we call our audience, and we mean it: Desties are the destination marketers, vendors, and industry veterans who've collectively decided this industry shouldn't sleepwalk into irrelevance. You'll see us talk to you and about you by that name — in episodes, on stage, in the newsletter, in merch we haven't made yet but probably will.

Becoming a Destie is free. It just takes a subscribe.

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