Lee County VCB to launch new consumer advertising campaign

The Lee County Visitor & Convention Bureau (VCB) has launched the first elements of a new consumer advertising campaign, including three new print executions; two new television ads, each with a 60-second and 30-second version; two innovative online advertising executions; and a four-minute destination brand video for sales purposes.

The campaign, which will appear in out-of-state markets in the winter and spring and instate in the summer and fall, is part of the VCB’s nearly $9 million annual advertising budget.

“Today’s consumers face unprecedented choices when it comes to vacation travel, and we want to continue to attract our share of visitors with stand-out creative campaigns that are true to our brand,” said VCB Executive Director Tamara Pigott. “To stay in the forefront of consumers’ minds, we must refresh our advertising campaign on a regular basis.”

The three new print advertisements extend the destination’s current campaign, which features compelling images of the destination imbedded in ordinary objects to position the area as Florida’s unspoiled island sanctuary – where visitors can reconnect with themselves and loved ones. The campaign already has won numerous creative awards, and Pigott said the VCB hopes to garner additional awards with the latest three ads.

In one, the headline reads “Welcome to island time” and features an image imbedded within an hour glass of a couple relaxing on a beach. A second ad leads with the headline, “Nature has a way of refreshing the soul” and spotlights a scene within a water bottle of a couple riding bikes on a boardwalk beneath cypress trees. The third ad features a photo imbedded within a piggybank of two children running toward a beach with the headline, “Memories become more valuable as time goes by.”

Similar in nature to the print ads, the new brand promotional video showcases a wide variety of compelling destination scenes. The emotion-evoking scenes were captured in December as part of a video shoot of the destination for a variety of publicity and promotional purposes.

The VCB’s new television ads were filmed at roughly the same time as the video shoot and will begin airing this month in select feeder markets that include Cincinnati, Columbus, St. Louis, Orlando and Fort Lauderdale. The ads engender a sense of family and connection with a highly emotional appeal captured through intimate moments of connection between people interacting in the destination’s natural setting.

The soon-to-be-completed online ads extend the destination brand into digital media with a break-through creative execution of a wave washing over a viewer’s computer screen to reveal a destination message. The highly realistic imagery is expected to garner the desired click-through rates to the destination’s consumer Web site. The ads are scheduled to appear on the front pages of the travel, weather, sports and life channels of www.USAToday.com and include a mix of high-impact, high-visibility rich media ads, as well as a sustaining standard banner program to help build the campaign’s reach to more than 5.4 million impressions.

While the travel and weather channels are an obvious fit for the destination brand, the life channel skews more heavily female; and research indicates that women typically drive the travel planning process. Exposure on the sports channel is timed to coincide with the NCAA basketball tournaments and March Madness. The standard banner program will run across the entire Web site and be geo-targeted to the primary markets of Chicago, Boston, New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Minneapolis, St. Louis and Milwaukee.

The newly released print ads and brand promotional video are available for viewing on the VCB’s industry partner Web site at http://www.leevcb.com/content/latest-creative.

“There is a numbing sea of sameness in communications messages,” said Pigott. “It’s particularly hard to stand out from the crowd in Florida, but we think our new consumer campaign does a great job of bringing our destination to life to pique consumer interest in visiting us.”

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