Lee VCB to unveil new venture
To the editor:
Those of you who know the Lee County Visitor & Convention Bureau’s long-standing reputation for innovation will not be surprised by our latest venture. We shortly will unveil a multi-platform strategic partnership that we have negotiated to provide us with a customized destination Visitor Guide, an e-book version of the guide and other digital solutions that will expand our marketing reach exponentially.
This exciting new partnership will allow us to leverage an association with a leading and well-respected tourism mega-brand that will provide us with an unmatched range of global coverage. We still are working on the logistics of the partnership and will be unveiling the complete program at our annual meeting on Oct. 7 at Sanibel Harbour Marriott Resort & Spa.
We hope you will join us for the exciting announcement to learn the details of how this new joint venture will meet our marketing needs while responding to consumer travel trends and ever-changing marketplace conditions. You’ll see how we are changing our approach to the 2011 Visitor Guide from a simple printed fulfillment piece to a product that effectively crosses over into the web world and provides an integrated marketing solution for myriad needs.
If the new venture is as successful as our recent Still Pristine marketing program, we will be thrilled with the results. The latter campaign was designed to mitigate the negative impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on area businesses by helping correct misperceptions and combat negative images of the spill’s affect on Florida’s beaches.
The campaign consisted of nine 30-second national television spots that we filmed, edited and aired everyday from June 21-25 and June 28-July 1 on select network and cable shows, as well as in-state markets. We are the first destination to use this type of aggressive “Fresh TV” national advertising campaign in the face of a crisis. The ground-breaking advertising featured a Chicago visitor named Dan on a nine-day vacation experiencing a different part of Lee County every day. Each of the nine spots chronicled his waking to a fun, new experience on the area’s clean beaches and waterways.
The campaign results are impressive. Our television ads achieved 81.2 million advertising impressions. They aired in Rich Media online ad units that generated more than 95,000 video views. Their posting on our consumer website garnered 59,343 video views and spiked traffic to the site by 20 percent at peak times over pre-launch levels. Longer versions of the ads posted on YouTube have attracted 8,500 views and counting, and hosting the ads on Facebook resulted in 833 new likes and increased the quality of posts scores. Plus, we sent news of the campaign via e-mail to our more than 100,000 opt-in subscribers.
And that’s not to mention the publicity exposure we generated for the campaign, including favorable coverage in The New York Times, Orlando Sentinel and 21 television stations reaching an audience of 646,175. Plus, our day-eight segment featuring NBC-TV personality Willard Scott was fed to all U.S. NBC affiliates, with confirmed airings on at least nine stations. In addition, we generated 201 online story placements with a potential audience of 63 million and an estimated value at $4.4 million.
In fact, the initiative has been so successful that we have launched a “Bring Back Dan” campaign to keep the momentum going. We are heavily promoting the campaign extension on our consumer home page by asking visitors to vote for their favorite Dan commercial and register to win Dan’s trip to the destination. So far, we have received more than 9,000 votes to return Dan to The Beaches of Fort Myers & Sanibel and generated more than 12,000 entries for the vacation trip. Moreover, user sessions to the website jumped 16 percent over July 2009, one-half percent over June 2010, and 34 percent over May 2010.
We also re-edited and repurposed the attention-grabbing ads for airing on television stations in Miami, West Palm Beach, Tampa/St. Petersburg and Orlando in August; and we ran online Rich Media ads with video from mid-July through the end of August. We plan to continue to leverage our popular Dan character via a publicity event this fall in Chicago focused on Dan’s longing to return to our destination, which we will distribute via YouTube, build out on our Facebook page, continue to spotlight on our consumer homepage and support with online advertising in core markets.
We are scheduled to film another round of commercials with Dan in January 2011 in which we will still focus on our pristine, natural environment but hopefully move beyond our oil recovery messaging. That decision will depend upon the results of ongoing research we are conducting to track consumer perceptions and attitudes regarding the spill’s impact on our area. Consumer perceptions can lag behind actual developments, so we will continue to match our messaging to consumer sentiments.
The New York Times praised our Still Pristine campaign as “the most ambitious and humorous effort yet to keep Florida’s tourism empire alive,” and Orlando Sentinel business columnist Beth Kassab said: “And the winner is Fort Myers and Sanibel Island. The southwest Florida tourist sanctuary achieved a pinnacle moment in advertising circles last week when its campaign to show its oil-free beaches generated enough noise to warrant a story extolling its quirky humor in the New York Times.”
I think you’ll agree that our efforts certainly have earned this praise, and we anticipate that we’ll once again generate marketing accolades with our new strategic marketing partnership. I hope to see you at our annual meeting on Oct. 7 when we will unveil those details.
Tamara Pigott
Executive Director
Lee VCB