Taos Summer of Love 2009

Challenge – As the nation faced its worst recession since the Great Depression, The Town of Taos, NM, a town that depends on tourism revenue, needed to come up with creative ways to bring tourists to the Town.  Nationally, tourism in 2008–2009 was down by 20 percent.

Objectives – Create a compelling tourism message to drive tourists to Taos, NM.  Generate at least 10 pieces in “A” list media. The campaign we created was the Summer of Love, which in 2009 commemorated the 40^th anniversary of the release of the movie Easy Rider, which was largely shot and edited in Taos.

Strategy/Tactics

• Create an aggressive coordinated public relations campaign
• Place print and online advertising in targeted travel publications
• Create and send a monthly e-newsletter to travel prospects
• Facilitate communication and partnership among the various tourism entities in Taos, NM
• Kick off News Conference with Dennis Hopper
• Trade Shows
• Summer of Love Microsite
• Sweepstakes
• Events
• We coordinated Familiarization Tours (FAM tours) with travel writers and tour group operators.
• All ads received unique URLs and a corresponding 800# in order to track results.
• We wrote, designed and sent a monthly broadcast email to a database of 1.3 million subscribers who either requested information specifically on Taos, the Southwest, or travel.
• We co-oped ads with the other Tourism stakeholders in Taos, NM.
• We created vehicle wraps for two of the town’s vans.

Results – Lodgers Tax increased by 7.6 percent. We received well over a billion impressions in 2008 and placed over 100 articles in “A” venues including:

• The Today Show
• The New York Times Travel Show
• Sky Magazine
• Cooking Light
• About.com
• Yahoo.com
• LA Times
• Wall Street Journal
• USA Today
• Conde Nast
• Trip Advisor

We took the $350,000 total marketing budget and more than doubled it with pro-bono donations from the tourism partners, free ads from the media and value added from our other partners.