• by Erik Sass  @eriksass1, August 11, 2014

The Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Board has appointed MBuy to handle international media buying for the board’s various campaigns and promotional efforts, the organization announced this week.

In this new arrangement, MBuy will work with HEILBrice, L.A. Tourism’s creative and strategic agency of record, to create coordinated cross-platform campaigns.

MBuy is the media planning and buying technology and services provider created by Mediaocean, which supplies software, data analysis and workflow management technology to advertising and media agencies. Its capabilities cover both traditional and digital media buying, and include campaign planning, audience targeting, and optimization, drawing on a combination of third- and first-party data, as well as post-buy analytics and reporting. It also supports real-time bidding across major digital ad exchanges.

The first collaborations between L.A. Tourism, MBuy and HEILBrice will target travelers in international markets including Australia, Canada and China, which have been the source of a growing number of tourists visiting Los Angeles in recent years.

In 2013 42.2 million people visited Los Angeles, a record number for the city, spending an estimated $18.4 billion during their visits, according to L.A. Tourism.

As China’s burgeoning middle class expands its horizons (and opens its pocketbook), that country is set to become the second-biggest country of origin for tourists visiting the U.S., second only to Britain. According to the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Travel & Tourism Office, 1.8 million Chinese visited the U.S. in 2013, and the government expects that number to increase to 2.1 million in 2014.

Earlier this year, the Obama administration ordered the Department of Homeland Security to streamline the tourist visa application process for visitors from around the world.