Do you ever feel like your property’s Instagram looks like it was designed by a committee with opposing agendas? Marketing multiple hospitality experiences under one roof without giving your audience whiplash is one of the industry’s greatest challenges—yet it’s essential for success in today’s competitive landscape.
In this episode of Social Pulse: Hospitality Edition with Agorapulse’s Chief Storyteller Mike Allton, our guest today has mastered this balancing act. Adir Tal, the marketing mind behind La Hotspots Calamigos Guest Ranch and the Victorian transition from world-traveling DJ to Hospitality Innovator. He’s now an expert at telling cohesive brand stories while juggling exclusive membership programs, luxury accommodations, and high-profile events, all without breaking a sweat. In this article, he shares his strategic storytelling secrets with us.
[Listen to the full episode below, or read along for the transcript of the Social Pulse: Hospitality Edition, powered by Agorapulse. Try it for free today.]
How did your experience as a DJ and a nightclub operator shape your approach to hospitality marketing today?
Adir Tal: I’ll tell you, the whole music industry was a very unique experience for me. I started very young, DJing when I was 11 years old, and I started even younger playing instruments. I did that for a long time.
In a nutshell, I got to experience hospitality from the other side. I got to experience it being hosted by some of the biggest, most amazing properties and restaurateurs and nightclub owners. And I saw what worked and what didn’t work. And when I had the opportunity to expand with my current business partners, the Gerson family, they’ve owned and operated this actual ranch for almost a hundred years. Family-owned business—just an incredible family that’s allowed me to grow and become successful in a different venture. I took the leap of faith, and I pivoted. I also got married and had a child and realized that married men and fathers don’t mesh with nightlife.
So I wanted to change my life, and I found an opportunity to open a nightclub, which then grew into a restaurant in a different location, then grew into getting involved here at this incredible, extraordinary property here in Malibu. And I did a lot more than just marketing. I dove into hospitality at first and wanted to learn everything.
It does help a lot with marketing when you understand the operational side of it. And it’s just been a whirlwind of emotion and success, and I’ve been honored, and it’s a very humbling experience, too, in the hospitality industry.
But the marketing side is a really fun, creative journey that if you’re passionate about it and you enjoy it, and of course [with] creativity, the possibilities are endless. And I’ve been fortunate to have that here at Calamigos, as well as the Victorian.
Mike Allton: I know you’ve mentioned that at Calamigos Ranch, you manage three distinct pillars of the business: the membership, the guest ranch, and events.
Can you walk us through how these different elements coexist under one brand?
Adir Tal: It’s a very tricky marketing navigational aspect when you have three completely different industries that you’re overseeing as far as the branding, the visuals, the assets, all that.
The events department here on this property is actually the first big business on the property. The ranch started as an actual ranch with Grant Geron, Garner’s grandfather, Garner, and Garrett’s grandfather. It transformed into this incredible event space, and it’s one of the largest, if not the largest event spaces, in Southern California.
The way that you have to cater to that clientele is very different from the guest ranch, which is the boutique resort side of it, and especially the membership side. Finding a balance is actually surprisingly easier than you would expect here on this property because of all of it. There’s a lot of continuity between all the brands. The events help feed the resort. The resort helps feed the membership and vice versa.
So, at the end of the day, as long as the creative vision and the brand guide are correct, which we’ve spent a lot of time curating and working through. It’s finding a way to find that balance that coexists between them. The beauty of what we do here is we’re very family-driven.
And with that said, all those three pillars of the business feed into that; whether it’s a wedding, it’s still a family affair, a corporate event may be the only thing that strays away from it. And we do huge corporate events for really big people, really big companies here.
And so with that said, it’s just finding the common factor, which is we’re in nature, we’re in Malibu, we’re in Southern California, which, other than today, it’s a little cloudy, but usually it’s a beautiful day and beautiful weather. Finding what makes it fun for our guests, our people that are hosting events here, and for our members to just immerse themselves in the beauty and the nature of this family-driven property.
[Do] you only have one social profile for the properties on the major platforms, or how are you structuring your social media presence?
Adir Tal: No, so because the businesses, as much as they coexist with each other, they are very particular. So we do have multiple channels for multiple businesses that I’ve overseen for quite some time. I have a great team here. We do a lot more in-house than I think the majority of companies of our scale do. It goes back to the way that Gersons have taught us all, which is we’re about homegrown talent within this community that we’ve built here, whether you started as a busser, now you’re a manager.
But the same thing with our social media team. The same thing with our video team. Our video team got married here and had a video team that shot it. We got to know them, and it grew, and we built a beautiful relationship with each other. And now they do all of our high-end videos, the high-budget style separate from that. We have an amazing in-house marketing department here that we’ve built from the ground up.
It’s almost a joke that Garner and I have made because we’re basically our ad agency without having to go out to a third party. But we have more than three ’cause we have other properties of this property. But here on the property, there is the wedding and events center. We have the membership, and then we have the guest ranch, and then we also have a beach club, which is down the Canaan from us. We used to have a separate social media platform for that, but we viewed that as another addition to both the membership and the guest ranch.
So now it’s just those three main focuses.
They’ve done well for us. The engagement’s through the roof. I will say, it’s a lot easier marketing something that’s just organically beautiful. And people want to view it [and] want to see it. Some of the people on your show that I’ve listened to that just sound extraordinary have to work harder at marketing than I do.
I could come up with a great idea, but the place itself, I’m in one of our resort rooms. It’s pretty beautiful. So, from a social media standpoint, you get inspired by seeing the wood on the roof, and you decide to pull something all together, whether it’s a treatment of video or booking an influencer to stay. But it’s a little easier for us here because we work hard on the product, and we produce the correct product. So the rest falls into place a little bit easier for us. Of course, I’m not saying it’s an easy job, it’s hard to balance.
It is a balancing act between the three pillars of our business. The guest ranch and the membership are one. At the end of the day, the members get to utilize the guest ranch. I’m sure you’ve heard in other podcasts the concept of the third space before we even understood what that was; we’d already done it, which is the ability to come.
We’re not just a coffee shop, we’re not just a pool. We’re not just a ranch. We’re not just a restaurant. We’re not just a gym or a spa. Your third space is this home away from home in Malibu that has and emulates all of it.
And then, of course, with the ethos of this family ties, where everything is catered towards our kids, everything’s catered towards a luxurious, elegant, upper echelon clientele.
But we do it in a very non-pretentious, non-waspy way. And I tell a lot of our members when I do their interviews, I say, “Listen, we’re not for everyone. We are a rustic ranch. We’re deemed the surfing cowboys of Malibu.” We all grew up out here. We all surf, and I’m wearing cowboy boots today. We’re here on a ranch, and it’s cold. But we’re all local to the area, and we are unique, and a lot of people love it. They love to feel it’s like a place not to sound too cheesy, but it’s the place where everybody knows your name, and that does again cater back.
Then, of course, there are hardships when it comes to membership, right? Because it is a very private community with some very extraordinary members. And we’re very careful: The social media that we do for that, we don’t show any faces.
The only face that you will see on it is my daughter and my wife. They’re my models. But our members, you don’t see their faces unless some members enjoy it and ask for it then. Whereas the Guest Ranch [is the] same thing. It’s a very private place. Going back to what you asked, I guess the biggest hardship is exposing the beauty of an event, a membership event, or a resort stay while keeping privacy.
Because even if it’s an event, it’s a beautiful monumental event in your life. You’re getting married here. You don’t want people to see it, nor do we show it. We do a lot if people tag us and stuff, we’ll share, we’ll ask for permission. But there is a fine dance that you have to find where you can show enough to engage with people and to show them what we are and how well we do it.
But on the flip of it, abiding by their privacy, abiding by their wants and needs, and making sure that we don’t overshow those monumental core memories that we’re building.
Related episode: We did an entire episode with Gideon from a country club called Addison Reserve, all about that challenge of having just the most gorgeous events and incredible people.
With so many different facets to your marketing, how do you prevent one from cannibalizing attention from another?
Adir Tal: The best way I could say it—and something that I’ve always done—is you take one hat off or you put the other one on. You have to treat each business and each pillar with just as much attention to detail, respect, and focus on it.
Being in the music industry, I used to write a lot of music for a lot of different artists, and sometimes it was a pop song, an EDM song, or some other kind of subgenre. I always reminded myself to take one hat off and put the other on—not just from an energy standpoint or a time standpoint but also from an actual creative standpoint.
I need to start my day, let’s say, with an L10 meeting about events, right? The next one has to be an F and B meeting. Now, when I’m looking at it from an operational standpoint, I also have to look at it from a creative standpoint. I need to make sure. That one hand washes the other, but it doesn’t reflect poorly on it.
So it’s difficult, and I wish I could give your viewers almost like that, the smoking gun if you will, of “this is how you do it”.
Listen, in my world, I’ve done a lot of trial and error. I’ve been fortunate to have an incredible support system here between the Gerson family that allows me to dream, they allow me to try, they allow me to push the boundaries, and do it together.
I think it’s probably a unique situation where I have the ability because we’re not this huge, massive corporate company. Of course, we’re a very large company, but I go straight to Garrett and if I need to talk about an event, I can pitch ’em on an idea. The beauty of it is between Garrett Gerson, Garner Gerson, and their parents.
We have somebody that we just brought in named Jason Felts, who was at Virgin for a long time. He is a branding marketing genius. It’s cool to go in there with an idea and then hear all these opinions from these different perspectives. And usually, the idea will not cannibalize. It will benefit the whole property. So, if we’re launching a new menu, then maybe the chef gets inspired to redo the events menu or vice versa. From a marketing standpoint, again, if you just define the brand of the property as a whole, it does make it pretty simple to successfully market without cannibalizing it.
Nor with the space that we’re in. At the end of the day, it’s fun, right? We throw parties for a living. We’re hosting people for a living. We’re creating memories that will be on your bookshelf for the rest of your life. It all still sits within this hospitality world that if you just know hospitality and you live it and you believe in it, it just reflects amongst the marketing, and it does create this unanimous feeling across the three businesses.
Now, of course, the Victorian in Santa Monica is a restaurant and nightclub bar, and we cater to the younger, kind of the 21-year-olds. That’s a very different hat. I have to take this hat off as an adult and go into this younger, trendy guy that I’m not young and trendy anymore. But I work hard at it, I’m doing my best to stay in tune with it. I guess what I could say for everybody out there who has to oversee hundreds of thousands of viewers and different fields of the business is take one hat off and leave it at the door and put the next hat on and get creative—however, you get to your creativity [and] however you find that inspiration just gives each one of them just as much attention.
And if you can’t, and if you get to the point at the end of the day and it’s time to discuss a different topic, then I guess the best advice I would give is to say, “Hey, I’m a little bit burnt out from the last three conversations.”
Then pick it up the first thing the next morning and make sure that it gets a hundred percent of your creative brain.
How do you honor a venue like the Victorian or Calamigos Ranch that is history/legacy while still trying to position it for contemporary audiences?
Adir Tal: It’s interesting.
A lot of that has to do with the fact that the family and the legacies are here with us today. Grant Gerson, who started the Calamigos Ranch, is just an incredible human being. And Glen, his son, who’s Garner Garrett’s father, is just the salt to the earth. He is the daughter’s grandfather, she loves him. It’s a lot more enjoyable to work in a setting where they’re so involved. They’re so here with us, they care so much, and are paying homage to them. Everybody that works here has that same feeling. It’s the best way I could explain it.
You come here to work, or you come here to stay, and you feel something special. There’s something here that’s not like anywhere else. There’s a feeling when you step on this property. Some people call it wellness, some people call it community. There’s something that’s just here that the Gerson family has done a really good job and our work culture of people that are here. We’re all part of it. And we live it.
From a marketing standpoint, again, being a rustic ranch that’s elegant and beautiful, it’s paying homage to them. We have a location on the property called the House Bar. You walk in there, and there are all these incredible photos on the wall, and it looks almost like you wouldn’t understand what they are, and it’s the family from the history here on the property. And just small things like walking by that on your way to a meeting and seeing it, reminding [you] what this was and what it looks like. It does help pull inspiration for different ideas moving forward.
Whether it’s an aesthetically pleasing idea that you want to change or maybe get inspired, come up with a new campaign that pays homage to the past.
Could you share a specific instance where you thought that operational knowledge improved a marketing campaign?
Adir Tal: For me, it’s unique because I didn’t grow up or go to school for marketing. I fell into it here, and I was able to be successful in it.
I’ll give you an example of one that was very successful. I want to do a wine-tasting campaign. Now, operationally, there’s a lot that goes behind a wine-tasting campaign, right? You have to find somebody who can actually be knowledgeable about the wine. You have to do a setup for it. There is a setup breakdown. There’s a labor side to it. Ideas are incredible, and marketing is a very difficult thing to prove ROI, as most of the listeners know if you’re doing marketing. But with that said, you decide you want to do this. It’s very labor intensive. It’s time-consuming, and all of a sudden, you decide to stack 10 of them, right? But it’s a two-hour window, ten two-hour windows, one guy doing the tasting, maybe two.
It’s not possible. So you take your operational brain, you think of an idea for it to be the most successful where the company wins, not just the third-party marketing agency or social media manager. If you take the idea and you actually go the full circle—and maybe you don’t have operational knowledge and that’s okay—but if you think of it from a logistical standpoint, the time it takes to accomplish it, the cost that accrues to it, right? A lot of people in business, in general, don’t fully do the math. I want to be a millionaire. Let’s say you sell a bottle of water. How many bottles of water at what cost do you have to sell to be a millionaire?
And then, of course, that’s a gross versus a net. So if you take that same mentality and you put it into marketing. It will allow you to make campaigns that not only reach an audience but are successful in operationally producing them so that they continue to grow. And then a lot of what we do is very, we call it gorilla marketing, but it’s organic marketing.
It’s creating a great ad of something that we could produce for our resort guests or for an event. And if you understand the operations behind it, which, listen, operations is a very complicated thing, but there’s a ton of books about it. You could read and understand what poor cost is, and what labor cost is.
In the marketing world, we use the word ROI a lot but a return on investment. If the investment is all diluted by the cost of doing the business, then there’s no return. You’re just spending the money that could have been profitable. So if you find the balance of an incredible idea that you want to execute and you believe you can, and then you think about it from a standpoint of.
Will it affect the business negatively from an economic standpoint? Now, of course, in marketing, some things are just investments that you need to do—whether it’s a big ad that you’re running or a new branding deck, or maybe you decide that you want to change the branding of a space.
Of course, those are marketing costs and you usually have a marketing bank. But at the end of the day, if you can come up with an idea and think about it full circle, right? Ideas first, how do you execute it? What’s the team that’s involved in it? What’s the cost associated with it? And you bring it all together.
You’ll have a way more successful opportunity, not only with the campaign but with the company that you’re working with ’cause it’ll appreciate the fact that you’ve taken the opportunity to think about it and make sure that does actually benefit the company.
Read up on insights from hospitality brand experts in every episode of Social Pulse: Hospitality Edition.
How are you thinking about ROI particularly when it comes to social media marketing?
Adir Tal: Yeah. It’s such marketing that is one of the most fun things that you could do.
It’s almost the hardest thing to prove how successful you are at it, right? Most companies don’t want to invest in marketing until it’s too late. And it’s really difficult. There’s a balance to that. There’s a balancing act. Now, in the different pillars of our business, there’s definitely a substantial barometer to success inclusive of using a CRM, right?
For the events side, it’s very easy to run a campaign, and then when you apply to go on a tour. If we can fit you in, right? We’ll play with those schedules for you. But when you apply to join the tour, it asks how you’ve heard about it, right? So if you run an ad, the majority of people say, I saw the Instagram ad, or I saw it on Instagram, or I’ve been tagged on Instagram, whatever it is, that’s an easy way to prove the ROI. Now, of course, the fruition that takes it from a tour to closing the deal is different, but your job is to get them here, is to get them on the property, to get ’em excited. Now, with the resort, it’s difficult ’cause we are a very elegant upper echelon boutique resort, and we call it the guest ranch, obviously, but with that said, we don’t bother our clientele and ask ’em how they heard about us.
So it’s a very difficult one. Now, we’ve done those campaigns, like I said, the winemaker one where you do see significantly and the only place we pushed it was Instagram, but it’s difficult to monitor even when you do an e-blast, right? You can see the backend analytics of how people click on the site, but you don’t know.
You could see the number clicked and the number booked, but you don’t know if that’s really based on the e-blasts or the social media, or maybe there’s a convention in town that happened to be when you ran an ad. So it’s difficult to prove that. I think the only proof of ROI, at the end of the day, is the only proof for success is success, right?
At the end of the day, call it a pie, right? Everything that goes into it, everything that you do, whether it’s operationally, whether it’s marketing, whether it’s bespoke things on the property that make you want to come back. At the end of the day, the only barometer of success is success, and you can see it and live it and feel it.
Now, if you’re at a property that is struggling, I would say try harder on marketing, right? I would say try harder at being better operationally, I would say. Find new creative strategies, and use different platforms. Maybe the people you’re marketing for are older. Is TikTok the right way to do it? Probably not. Maybe you want to focus more on Facebook ads ’cause the older demographic is more prone to using that or even going back old school to actual mail, but I would say each pillar is a success from an ROI standpoint. When it comes to marketing, it’s very unique to itself.
With membership, it’s very unique because we’re very careful about who joins this community of membership. So it’s a bit of a slow roll. And again very lucky, very fortunate. It’s not like we went and raised money and we had to just flood membership with members to get a Q1 being somewhat even or successful.
We chose to be slow with it. We chose to let it breathe. And again, it’s difficult. I’m sure a lot of people who will hear this will say, “Man, you’re just the luckiest guy in the world.” You get to be creative, and honestly, I am pretty lucky. I’m not going to lie.
I work hard. I worked hard to get here, but I do have some luck that came into play. Call it luck, call it relationships. But it is unique. And, when it comes to the three different pillars, I think the best way I could explain to somebody too, to report some form of ROI would be at least the starting to prove yourself that you’ve been capable of succeeding on the economic side is based on campaign, not based on the whole thing.
You decide to run a campaign. Let’s say take the slowest night of the week for a bar and run a campaign to fill it on a Monday night. You got your ROI, right? If the bar does 5,000, all of a sudden, it does 20,000 on a Monday. I think it’s pretty evident how it got there. But I think to prove your ROI as a person doing marketing in a big enough company where there are so many elements and so many things, feeding the company my advice and I’ve done it, take the worst day of the week, make it the most successful.
There’s no debating that it was the marketing campaign that did it.
Are there any resources or thought leaders that you’ve turned to in the hospitality space or marketing space that have helped you navigate challenges?
Adir Tal: I’ll tell you all of us are very fortunate at the amount of knowledge that’s at our fingertips every day. There are extraordinary books.
- Danny Meyer’s Setting the Table is a great one for anybody who wants to get involved in hospitality.
- Tillman Fertita, I think it’s called Shut Up and Listen! It is an incredible book.
- The best way, I would say, is to find a podcast that you enjoy, like this one. Find a book that you enjoy. I referenced a couple that are knowledgeable. They’ll explain to you a lot about hospitality.
Social media learning, I don’t know. It’s hard to tell nowadays what’s real and what’s not. It’s everything out there that is a little bit difficult to understand. I know the younger demographic uses TikTok as their Google search nowadays. There’s so much knowledge out there from some extraordinary people.
- Those two books, as an example, are great. I like to find books that are not in my industry, learn from them, and incorporate them into my industry that are.
Jason Felts just came out with a book called Hollywood Virgin, and it has nothing to do with working on marketing and hospitality, but because he was such a big brand strategy guy for Virgin, if you just take the insights in it and listen to the book, you learn extraordinary lessons—but based off people’s actual what they’ve done for themselves, what they’ve accomplished, their experience.
I would say start with podcasts, start with books, and then meet people.
Everybody [in the] industry is pretty excited to pay it forward. I’ve been very lucky to have guys like Jason, Garner, or Garrett, who have been in the industry longer than me and are so willing to divulge information and ask around.
I’m not big on LinkedIn personally, but I know a lot of people use it.
Find somebody in your local area, grab a coffee, and just chat with each other and see if there’s something that’s stimulating, and you’ll both teach each other something.
Thank all of you for reading the highlights of this episode with Adir Tal. Don’t forget to find the Social Pulse Podcast: Hospitality Edition on Apple, and drop us a review. We’d love to know what you think. Don’t miss other editions of the Social Pulse Podcast like the Retail Edition, Agency Edition, and B2B Edition.
