Photo by David Ellis
Partner/Executive Creative Director, Clarity Coverdale Fury
By Paul Nolan
Like Hollywood, the advertising business is rife with copycats. If one print or TV campaign is successful, a half-dozen more like it will follow.
Oftentimes, it’s the client who’s to blame. When a company sees a competitor get tremendous response with a retro promotion or by signing on a sports star as a spokesperson, it’s hard not to follow.
The executives at Explore Minnesota Tourism (EMT) knew when they decided last year to create a promotional campaign to increase tourism to the state that they wanted something different, something forceful, maybe even edgy—something decidedly less, well, touristy than existing campaigns.
They found what they were looking for with the help of Jac Coverdale and a team of creative minds at Clarity Coverdale Fury, a Minneapolis advertising agency. The integrated campaign, “My Favorite Minnesota,” takes advantage of the user-generated online phenomenon sparked by YouTube to create a collection of “Webisodes” in which real Minnesotans share what they love about their state. The result is some one dozen neatly packaged and wildly entertaining short films on everything from biking, golfing and winter sports in Minnesota, to the happy travails of an antique hunter and the footloose antics of a “festival junkie” who engages in mashed potato wrestling.
“The message of the campaign was, ‘Go see where Minnesotans like to go.’ The whole concept was based on providing insider information,” Coverdale says.
Research had shown that most tourists go online to find out more about where to go and what to see, so Coverdale knew that the Explore Minnesota Tourism Web site (www.exploreminnesota.com) would be a vital part of the campaign. Ultimately, Clarity Coverdale Fury redesigned EMT’s entire site and drove traffic to it via 15-second TV commercials and strategically placed print advertisements.
Coverdale and his creative team came up with the concept in a matter of weeks last summer when Explore Minnesota Tourism was shopping for a new agency. “We were trying to be different from other states,” he says in explaining how they put the pitch together. “We had a war room of beautiful, four-color magazine ads with beautiful photos of beaches or mountains and clever headlines. It just seemed that you could put your hand over the logo in each and it could have been anywhere. We felt there had to be a new way to look at this.”
The EMT folks shared the same objective. “EMT was definitely a great client,” Coverdale says. “They want other states to look at what they’re doing and go, ‘Wow! Let’s do that!’ They were definitely intrigued by going about it in a new way.”
The “My Favorite Minnesota” concept sprung out of a Saturday morning brainstorming session in the agency’s downtown office, a brightly lit space on the 13th floor of the One Financial Plaza tower that feels like the set of a TV show about advertising agencies with its wood floors, open design, glassed-in conference rooms and walls full of posters from previous campaigns.
“We were kicking around lots of ideas that we liked, and somebody said wouldn’t it be cool to have some guys tour their favorite bowling alleys around Minnesota, from these grand, multiple-lane complexes to the one-lane alleys that you find in the back of a VFW hall in Grand Marais,” Coverdale says. “Then we thought, ‘You could do that for camping and festivals and biking.’ So that’s how the idea was hatched.”
They jotted down a list of activities that broadly represents what Minnesota has to offer and came up with the idea of having visitors to the Web site submit their own lists of favorites in those categories. Real people; real passion.
EMT loved the integrated and interactive approach and signed a contract with Clarity Coverdale Fury early last summer. That left Coverdale and his team with a limited amount of time to shoot the Webisodes that required warm weather.
The first challenge was finding the “real Minnesotans” to feature in the short films. “Some of it was research, but a lot of it was just word-of-mouth,” Coverdale says. “We were just looking for people who were passionate about the topics.”
Somebody knew somebody who knew somebody who loved fishing or biking or antiquing and that was that. The agency hired Fischer Edit, a downtown film production company, and they spent the month of August 2006 following their subjects around the state and capturing everything on film.
“The main thing we tried to do is let each Webisode reflect the passion and personality of the person doing it,” Coverdale says. “We wanted to let them shine while making it entertaining and fun.”
The end result is a wonderful mix of video blogs ranging from the serenity of professional golf course photographer Peter Wong capturing sunrise images of his favorite Minnesota courses, to the quirky Conan-like antics of Stephen Gurewitz, who lets viewers tag along as he traipses around the state to his favorite antiquing spots.
Coverdale went on several of the field assignments himself, including a tour of the state’s scenic byways with a group of Harley-riding legal professionals that goes by the name “Street Legal.” A bike enthusiast himself who has been building choppers since he was 17, the 54-year-old Coverdale says that was one assignment he couldn’t pass up.
Any ad campaign, no matter how entertaining, must ultimately be measured on how successful it was. The “My Favorite Minnesota” campaign only launched last spring, so it’s too early to tell just how successful it will be. Early results, however, are positive.
Michele Peters, senior manager of communications for Explore Minnesota Tourism, reports that traffic to their Web site increased nearly 25 percent in July over July 2006. And the site’s advertisers—hotels, restaurants and other tourist-related businesses—are receiving significantly more hits on their ads compared to last year.
Coverdale’s team initially faced some resistance when it proposed highlighting individual attractions and private businesses around the state through the participants’ lists of favorites. Eventually, they worked around this potentially sticky situation by creating a link to a comprehensive list of businesses in the related category on every Web page.
“State tourism tends to talk in great generalities. We felt that when we hit on the ‘My Favorite Minnesota’ concept, it was a great way to talk about specifics,” Coverdale says. “If you’re into mountain biking, we’ve got some great ideas.”
And if imitation is any measure of success (remember our point about advertising being a copycat industry?), other states are already mimicking the “What do the locals like to do?” approach. (You know who you are … Pennsylvania.)
Part of the beauty of the campaign is it’s organic nature. It’s designed so that it can continue to grow. Several “favorites” lists have been added since the site launched and Coverdale’s team was working on another 10 Webisodes this summer, focusing on nightlife, sports and other topics they felt were not covered enough in the initial batch.
On a personal level, Coverdale says the campaign has reinforced his enthusiasm for the state. He grew up in Iowa and moved here after graduating from Iowa State University. “I got really excited when we started to put this whole thing together and we had these people’s lists of all of these great places that we couldn’t wait to go to also. I knew if it really makes me want to go there, then it’s going to make other people want to go there, too.”
