As a boat coasts along the clear waters off the shores of Englewood, hostess Luiza Florence, a broadcast reporter and producer with Hollywood good looks, describes the tropical temperatures and natural allure—in perfect Portuguese. A marketing team headquartered in Sarasota last month followed Florence, along with two other international hosts, around Southwest Florida capturing footage of the area attractions while shooting scripts tailored to particular international audiences. For Florence, videos are made with Brazilian travelers in mind, but videos were cut in the same trip for audiences in Germany (with host Heiko Obermoeller) and for Spanish-speaking tourists from Mexico and Latin America (with hostess Vange Tapia).

The final products are the most recent installments of Brand USA, a national effort to market American travel destinations to visitors from around the world. Miles Media in Sarasota has helped produce in the neighborhood of 650 videos. Brianne Maciejowski, the Miles account director for Brand USA, said the effort is a move beyond travel videos of the past. “For a while, most of the content used to reach international travelers was translated, subtitled videos with music only or a quite American-looking host, and it just felt aimed for domestic and repurposed for international,” Maciejowski said. “The goal was to put out something that used native hosts writing in their own language to their home audience so that people living in Brazil or Germany felt even more connected to the destination.”

The Englewood videos were done in partnership with the Charlotte Harbor Visitors Bureau, which led the hosts and video crews to such locations as Lemon Bay, Don Pedro Island and Stump Pass. The effort cost the visitors bureau $6,000 and resulted in five videos. Jerry Jones, director of film and digital media for the Charlotte Harbor Visitors Bureau, said this type of high-quality video couldn’t be done at that price without the Brand USA backing behind it. “They had four full production days,” he said. “The quality is really exceptional.” He noted that the DiscoverAmerica.com website where videos will be hosted is one of the first places international visitors coming to America come to learn about destinations. Maciejowski said the visitors bureau has full rights to use the video spots in other materials too.

The work will speak to different cultures in specific ways—Brazilians tend to gravitate to shopping and music scenes while Germans seek out outdoor adventures, for example—and have been proven tourism drivers. Brand USA’s 2013 marketing campaign, for example, resulted in an incremental increase of 1.1 million visitors to the states with a total documented economic impact of $7.4 billion to the U.S. economy.