“Part of the fun was digging into each location and finding the nuances that made it distinct,” David Coomer, agency CEO, told Adweek. “We started with the posters—so it was an art-forward approach—which served as a jumping-off point for the whole campaign.”
The collectible retro-look posters come from creative director-designer Ana Maldonado-Coomer, serving as a customized asset to each of the 15 separate groups in the Central Kentucky-based tourism co-op, which received a $1 million post-Covid federal grant to jumpstart the hospitality industry.
Having multiple clients, under the banner of the Kentucky Tourism, Arts and Heritage Cabinet, wasn’t as challenging as it may sound, Coomer said. The agency already has a track record in the coalition space from its recent “Kentucky After Dark” campaign that linked spooky sites at disparate state locations under one advertising tagline.
Even so, a new campaign brought new partners, and like “Kentucky After Dark,” some towns and attractions involved in “Joy Ride” traditionally had scant marketing money of their own or experience in communicating to mass audiences. This effort will mark their first national exposure and, as it turns out, may signal a new trend in tourism outreach.
In the pre-pandemic era, competition rather than cooperation was the order of the day in much of the travel advertising space. But in the past few years, more destinations are banding together to try to lure in visitors, per a report in Skift that cited Bermuda-Fort Lauderdale, Ottawa-Montreal-Toronto and a handful of Vancouver-area groups vying for Washington State tourists as examples of recent alliances.