Arlington Convention & Visitors Bureau launched 'Arli & The World of Wonderful' in May 2019, a 90-second CGI-animated film by Peter Mayer that reframes the
Arli & The World of Wonderful Puts Arlington on the Animated Map
Arlington Convention & Visitors Bureau launched 'Arli & The World of Wonderful' in May 2019, a 90-second CGI-animated film created by Peter Mayer and strategic creative group ATK PLN that follows an ordinary family rediscovering excitement through a spontaneous visit to Arlington, Texas, positioning the city under the platform 'Welcome to Arlington, a World of Wonderful.'
The campaign debuted on May 7, 2019, according to Mediaroom Arlington, with a public preview held three days later on May 10 at the inaugural Arlington Tourism WOW Award event at Texas Live! The choice of venue was deliberate: Texas Live! itself was one of the landmark developments that defined Arlington's new identity, and previewing the film there placed the campaign squarely inside the city's momentum rather than merely describing it from outside.
At the center of the narrative sits the Wonderfuls, a fictional family whose settled, uneventful life transforms after discovering Arlington. The animated format allowed the campaign to compress a wide range of the city's real assets — AT&T Stadium, Globe Life Park, Six Flags Over Texas, Globe Life Field, Esports Stadium Arlington, and Texas Live! — into a single 90-second cinematic arc without the footage limitations that constrain live-action destination advertising. In the United States, where destination marketing often defaults to sweeping aerial shots and stock-adjacent imagery, the animated short-film approach represented a meaningful structural departure. The campaign carries a Clapboard Score of 61 out of 100, reflecting a creative concept with genuine differentiation but execution that stops short of category-redefining impact. Ron Price, President and CEO of the Arlington Convention & Visitors Bureau, stated publicly, as reported by travmedia.com, that the campaign was designed to take the existing 'World of Wonderful' platform to the next level and to differentiate Arlington from typical destination spots by embodying the city's energy and dynamism.
The Arlington Convention & Visitors Bureau built this campaign on a precise competitive insight: that conventional destination advertising in the United States relies on visual familiarity rather than emotional transformation.
Arlington sits in a dense competitive landscape. Its immediate rivals for leisure travel spend and short-break consideration include the Dallas and Fort Worth markets. Visit Fort Worth, for instance, has publicly documented a market approach spanning domestic drive markets — Dallas, Austin, Houston, West Texas, and Oklahoma City — as well as international markets including Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada, according to fortworth.com. Competing inside that geography required Arlington CVB to find a register that neither larger city brands nor regional theme-park-adjacent destinations had yet occupied. The animated narrative format provided that register.
The strategic rationale was also grounded in Arlington's own recent growth trajectory. According to an industry report cited by Assets Simpleviewinc, Arlington recorded a significant year-over-year increase in both booked events and hotel room nights in 2018, signalling that the city had tangible supply-side momentum to match against a bolder demand-generation creative position. Infrastructure developments — the Live! by Loews hotel, the planned conversion of Arlington Convention Center into an esports venue, and the opening of Texas Live! — gave the campaign concrete assets to showcase rather than aspirational imagery alone.
Desmond LaVelle, Vice President and Executive Creative Director at Peter Mayer, framed the campaign's philosophical anchor in a statement reported by travmedia.com: 'Fun isn't frivolity, it's a human need.' That premise elevated the Wonderfuls' story above simple tourism promotion, reframing leisure and recreation as emotionally necessary rather than optional. In the United States travel and leisure sector, where campaigns often compete on price or convenience, an argument from human necessity is an inherently stickier strategic position. The 2019 campaign also marked a clear evolution from Arlington CVB's previous work: the 'Pursue Happy' campaign of 2016, which framed the city as the 'American Dream City,' according to clapboard.com, had introduced emotional benefits as a platform. 'Arli & The World of Wonderful' extended that logic into character-driven narrative storytelling.
Peter Mayer constructed the creative execution of 'Arli & The World of Wonderful' as a short-film entertainment property first and a tourism advertisement second.
The decision to use full CGI animation as the production method was not merely aesthetic. As Ron Price noted in comments reported by travmedia.com, CGI allowed the campaign to illustrate Arlington's full range of city assets and attractions within a 90-second runtime in a way that live-action production would have struggled to achieve with the same narrative cohesion. Shooting AT&T Stadium, Six Flags Over Texas, Globe Life Park, Esports Stadium Arlington, and Texas Live! as live locations within a single short film would have required either an episodic structure or significant compression that sacrificed story. Animation dissolved that constraint entirely.
Desmond LaVelle, Executive Creative Director at Peter Mayer, guided the creative direction of the campaign, with his public statements — reported by travmedia.com — making clear that the intention was to express Arlington's character rather than simply catalogue its attractions. The Wonderfuls family functions as a surrogate for the target audience: people whose daily lives have become routine and who underestimate what proximity to a city like Arlington makes possible. The animation style was designed to carry warmth and energy simultaneously, signalling accessibility rather than spectacle while still communicating scale. Peter Mayer collaborated with strategic creative group ATK PLN on the campaign, according to adsoftheworld.com and mediaroom.arlington.org, combining New Orleans-based creative leadership with additional strategic input. The film premiered not in a conventional advertising context but at Arlington's inaugural Tourism WOW Award event at Texas Live!, a placement that turned the campaign launch itself into a cultural moment for the city. In the United States travel and leisure production landscape of 2019, the animated destination film format remained uncommon enough that the execution carried inherent novelty value alongside its narrative ambitions.
No comprehensive third-party verified performance metrics for 'Arli & The World of Wonderful' are publicly available beyond the campaign's launch documentation.
What the public record does confirm, according to mediaroom.arlington.org, is that the campaign launched on May 7, 2019 and received its first public screening at the inaugural Arlington Tourism WOW Award event on May 10, 2019 — a launch strategy that generated earned media attention within the Texas events and hospitality press at the time of release, as reported by travmedia.com. The contextual indicators surrounding the campaign are structurally significant. Arlington had already recorded strong hospitality growth heading into 2019, per data cited by assets.simpleviewinc.com, giving the campaign a favourable tailwind rather than a remedial brief. The animation format, the character-driven narrative, and the platform of 'Welcome to Arlington, a World of Wonderful' represented a coherent long-term brand architecture rather than a single tactical execution, which suggests the campaign was designed for cumulative brand-building impact across the United States market rather than immediate conversion measurement. The Clapboard Score of 61 out of 100 reflects that structural ambition without overstating the campaign's documented real-world footprint. The creative concept is differentiated within the destination marketing category and the production approach is purposeful, but the absence of measurable public outcome data limits a full assessment of effectiveness. What 'Arli & The World of Wonderful' demonstrates is that Arlington CVB and Peter Mayer understood in 2019 that the competition for leisure travel attention in the United States had moved decisively toward storytelling — and that a city's personality, rendered with craft and narrative intention, is a more durable asset than any individual promotional offer.
'Arli & The World of Wonderful' is a 90-second CGI-animated film launched by Arlington Convention & Visitors Bureau in May 2019. Created by Peter Mayer and ATK PLN, it follows the fictional Wonderfuls family discovering Arlington, Texas, under the platform 'Welcome to Arlington, a World of Wonderful,' positioning the city as a leisure travel destination through narrative animation.
Peter Mayer, an advertising agency based in New Orleans, created the campaign in collaboration with strategic creative group ATK PLN, according to adsoftheworld.com and mediaroom.arlington.org. Desmond LaVelle, Vice President and Executive Creative Director at Peter Mayer, led the creative direction and framed the campaign's philosophy around the idea that fun is a human need.
Arlington Convention & Visitors Bureau officially launched the campaign on May 7, 2019, according to mediaroom.arlington.org. Its first public screening took place on May 10, 2019, at Arlington's inaugural Tourism WOW Award event held at Texas Live!, one of the city's newly developed entertainment venues featured in the film itself.
CGI animation allowed the campaign to showcase multiple Arlington attractions — including AT&T Stadium, Six Flags Over Texas, and Esports Stadium Arlington — within a single 90-second narrative arc, according to statements by Arlington CVB President Ron Price reported by travmedia.com. Live-action production could not have achieved the same storytelling cohesion across that many locations within that runtime.
The film features AT&T Stadium, Globe Life Park, Globe Life Field, Six Flags Over Texas, Esports Stadium Arlington, and Texas Live!, according to mediaroom.arlington.org. These venues collectively represent Arlington's identity as an entertainment and sports destination in the United States, and their inclusion in the animated narrative was central to the campaign's city-positioning strategy.
Arlington CVB's previous major campaign, 'Pursue Happy,' launched in June 2016 and framed the city as the 'American Dream City,' according to clapboard.com. The 2019 Arli campaign evolved that emotional positioning into character-driven CGI narrative, introducing a mascot figure and a short-film entertainment format that no prior Arlington CVB campaign had used.
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