Come Out and Play

New Orleans tourism officials recently unveiled a new advertisement campaign promoting the city as fun ... again. The campaign is titled "Come Out and Play" and arrives on the heels of information released that tourism doubled in 2007 (7.1 million visitors) from 2006 (3.7 million) writes nola.com.



The campaign cost a whopping $5.6 million and begs the question in a city desperate for development if this is in fact money well spent. In the age of competitive cities it is staggering the amount of money spent on promotional material and advertisements to boost tourism and lure new residents. Short of declaring the mourning is over - lets just move on, the advert spots present imagery in search of a different kind of post-disaster relief.


[image: via the New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corp (NOTMC)]

The New Orleans Tourism Marketing Corp (NOTMC), author of the campaign, writes:

The print ads celebrate the music, food, history, and architecture of New Orleans. Beautiful post-Katrina photography will appear in national magazines with broad distribution including top travel and lifestyle magazines such as Travel+Leisure, Food & Wine, Southern Living, and Southern Accents. Newspaper ads to promote special events have been created, as well as special advertorial sections in The New Yorker and Texas Monthly to reach the upscale cultural visitor.

Target markets for the promotion are "regional markets" that have historically visited N.O. such as Atlanta, Memphis, and New York.