Little Rock's new advertising campaign aims to appeal to a broad, new audience, but the marketing pitch will also be familiar to longtime residents.
The city is reviving the "Big on Little Rock" slogan, which it launched in the 1990s, to market the city to out-of-town visitors and convention planners. It plans a fresh video and set of images for television and social media.
At an event Thursday unveiling the new campaign, Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau President and CEO Gretchen Hall said the campaign helps the city highlight its wide range of assets. If someone is big on outdoor adventure, history, the arts, local flavor and craft beer, then he'll be big on Little Rock, the campaign's one-minute video and images propose.
"This new advertising campaign will showcase our civic pride and also allow us to illustrate the diversity of our great city in a way that we feel will resonate with the public, and it's also something we can truly deliver on," Hall said.
The new ads will begin showing up in target markets in and outside of Arkansas today. The Convention and Visitors Bureau will target the areas of Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, Houston, Memphis and Nashville, Tenn., Shreveport, La., Kansas City, Mo., and Chicago. Of those out-of-state targets, Houston and Nashville are new this year, the bureau's communications manager Libby Lloyd said.
The bureau is also aiming to reach audiences in Pulaski County and the state's other most-populous counties, including Benton, Washington, Sebastian, Crawford, Pope, Faulkner, White, Craighead, Garland, Saline, Lonoke, Jefferson and Union.
"We want to spark interest in couples and families coming for a weekend getaway, increase the number of meetings booked within the destination, inspire our local pride," Hall said.
She said the online portion of the campaign will focus on videos and streaming, and less on standard banner ads seen on websites.
The Convention and Visitors Bureau contracted with Paradise Advertising and Marketing, a firm based in St. Petersburg, Fla., to lead out-of-state media placement, research and creative campaign development. The service was competitively bid in 2018. Paradise partnered with Little Rock's Mangan Holcomb Partners to lead in-state placement.
Research and creative development for the new campaign cost $55,000. The bureau's total contract with Paradise for 2020 is $550,500, which includes all media placement and research.
The bureau plans to spend more than $1 million on marketing and communications overall in 2020. The agency has a budget this year of $20.6 million and is primarily funded by a 2% hotel, motel and restaurant sales tax.
The city has used slogans based around the phrase "with a Southern accent" in its marketing material since it launched its most recent ad campaign in 2013.
NW News on 03/01/2020