Tuesday, March 28, 2023
In a bid to boost tourism in the city, Meet Minneapolis introduced a new advertising campaign on Monday. The campaign is titled “See What All the Fuss Is About,” and Meet Minneapolis claims it is a response to all of the negative “fussing about Minneapolis” on social media.
They’re attempting to counter a popular social media narrative in which some people believe Minneapolis is a dangerous “ghost town” with nothing left to offer.
Meet Minneapolis leaders say their objective with the campaign is to turn that criticism on its head and urge people to evaluate the positive aspects of the city.
“We know people have had a lot of conversations around Minneapolis and we want to showcase some of this commentary and have them think about it in a different way,” Courtney Reese, Senior Vice President of Destination Branding and Strategy, Meet Minneapolis, said.
She and her team created this campaign to counteract some of the negative messages and statements about Minneapolis that have been circulated.
“We know that Minneapolis has had its share of challenges over the last three years. We are not ignoring the murdering of George Floyd, or the social unrest, or the lingering impacts of COVID, but we can both work as a community to make things better and celebrate the things that we have here,” Reese explains.
The $850,000 campaign will include billboards, TV ads, and different online and social media promotions.
Reese claims that their advertising is becoming more edgy in order to capture people’s attention and combat the negative narrative that is being disseminated on social media.
“So much of advertising is you see it and say ‘oh, that’s nice’ and then you forget about it. We really wanted to take that record scratch moment and have someone look at it and say ‘huh, I see what you did there,’” Reese explains.
One of the campaign’s billboards, for example, depicts a close-up image of desserts with the words “Desserted, but not like you think.”
Another hoarding depicts empty cocktail glasses with the phrase “Empty, but not like Twitter says.”
“We’d rather have someone say they love it or hate it than have them say it’s nice and forget about it,” Reese says.
Unless they travel outside of the city, Twin Cities residents are unlikely to notice the billboards and commercials.
According to Reese, the ad is aimed at areas between 15 and 300 miles distant, such as Fargo, Duluth, Rochester, Wisconsin, and Greater Minnesota.
“This is the largest campaign that we have had to attract leisure consumers in at least the last ten years.
For this campaign, we actually dipped into our reserve funding. Our board authorized this opportunity for us to be able to have this larger push so we can get some folks to come into town,” Reese says.
Tags: Meet Minneapolis, Tourism
