Wear shorts, stay for a long time

Sarasota tourism officials responded to a pair of thumping setbacks suffered over the past year with a new, and aggressive, attack plan.

The strategy centers on a $500,000 advertising campaign and partnership between Visit Sarasota County and JetBlue Airways. The slogan is Sarasota in Shorts. It's a play on the idea that when the weather is cold up north, people can do anything, from Christmas shopping to sitting on the beach, in shorts while in Sarasota. JetBlue flies three direct flights into Sarasota Bradenton International Airport, two from New York and one from Boston.

“We're really excited about this,” Visit Sarasota County Communications Director Erin Duggan tells Coffee Talk. “We hope it will be really cold up there in November and December.”

The campaign is the first time Visit Sarasota County has partnered with a major national airline. It's also the first time the office, the former Sarasota Convention & Visitors Bureau, has spent a chunk of its annual ad budget, usually in the low-seven figures, on one campaign.

The most recent setback Visit Sarasota County addresses with the Sarasota in Shorts campaign is the loss of AirTran Airways. A subsidiary of Southwest, AirTran terminated service from Sarasota Bradenton International Airport Aug. 11. The airline represented about 33% of the airport's annual passenger traffic.

But an even more painful gut-punch hit Visit Sarasota County in October. That's when John Deere announced it planned to move its dealer conference from Sarasota-Bradenton to suburban Orlando. The firm's conference was a three-week procession of product displays, seminars and live demonstrations that brought at least 3,000 people to town.

The Sarasota in Shorts campaign, says Duggan, was launched out of conversations Visit Sarasota County officials held with local business owners worried about the impact of the John Deere defection. Says Duggan: “We knew we had to do something big to replace that business.”

JetBlue will match whatever Visit Sarasota County spends on the campaign, says Duggan, which will likely be between $200,000 and $300,000. The campaign will include TV, radio, print and Web ads, plus a component in New York City-area buses and subways. JetBlue also plans to promote the campaign on its in-flight TVs.