Sunshine Matters

The Share a Little Sunshine campaign continues to gain momentum through ongoing partnerships that highlight the uniqueness and diversity of what Florida has to offer its visitors as well as residents.  One example would be the recent partnership with the Florida Film Commission to promote Digital Graffiti at Alys Beach, located along Northwest Florida’s Gulf Coast in the Beaches of South Walton. 

Digital Graffiti is a really cool and hip art festival that transcends traditional art festivals by projecting original video and interactive artworks onto the iconic white walls of Alys Beach.  The festival boasts being the world’s first projection art festival where artists use the latest technologies that literally bring art to life and makes it fun for festival goers to interact.

The timing of the Share a Little Sunshine Digital Graffiti promotion couldn’t have been better, with the recent opening of the Northwest Florida Beaches International Airport.  The Share a Little Sunshine campaign leveraged the airport opening as an opportunity to extend the marketing reach of the Digital Graffiti festival.  In building the marketing strategy for the festival, we aimed to do the following: a.) create a custom card invitation to promote the festival on www.ShareaLittleSunshine.org; b.) develop a Facebook promotion that would inform, engage and reward; c.) execute a media strategy that would target travel bloggers, film, art and techy journalists; d.) provide a sender incentive and a recipient incentive; and e.) provide overall exposure for the festival.

The Digital Graffiti custom card invitation was sent 1,189 times from April 29-June 7.  This means that senders of the card were entered to win a Mazda Miata and recipients of the card received offers of 25% off the purchase of Digital Graffiti tickets and $25 off a Southwest Airlines flight to Florida.

The Share a Little Sunshine Digital Graffiti Facebook promotion included tidbit posts and ticket giveaways to custom card senders.  In addition to winning tickets, winners also received Share a Little Sunshine t-shirts.  The promotion received 1 million impressions (raw number of times a story was seen on our wall and in the news feed of our fans), 65 comments and 554 likes (number of fans that “liked” the posts about Digital Graffiti).

Our public relations media outreach included a media release targeting more than 950 journalists, including travel, film and art bloggers, as well as tech journalists.  The release was a first in a new traditional/social media hybrid release format that links to, but doesn’t attach, embeddable images, videos, news facts, shortened URLs and tweets about the Digital Graffiti festival, as well as buttons to quickly share the content of the release with others through top social media networks.

As you can see, the Share a Little Sunshine Digital Graffiti promotion was a fully integrated promotion and totally customized for the festival.  We want to continue partnerships such as this, so if you have an event or festival in your destination that exemplifies the uniqueness and diversity of Florida, let us know and we’ll develop a Share a Little Sunshine promotional marketing strategy that works for you.

I look forward to brainstorming with you.  I can be reached at (850) 205-3855 or tmccaskill@VISITFLORIDA.org.