Beach CVB wins 2 awards

PANAMA CITY BEACH - The Beach Convention & Visitors Bureau has received two prestigious awards for work on its Summer White Sale campaign launched earlier this year.
   
The two 2008 Bronze Adrian Awards from the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International were received for public relations marketing and Web integrated marketing.
   
Susan Estler, CVB vice president of marketing, said the awards were an important recognition because they were based on performance.
   
"These aren't beauty awards," she said. "The concept has to be followed through with performance" that must be detailed in the application process.
   
The Summer White Sale joined together more than 50 local business "partners" that offered potential visitors' discounts on hotel rooms, restaurants and activities in a campaign featuring a Web page linked to www.visitpanamacitybeach.com.
   
Visitors downloaded almost 24,000 discount coupons from the Summer White Sale Web page, and bed tax collections rose 1.8 percent over the life of the campaign despite a national downturn in summer travel, officials said.
   
The site not only allowed potential visitors to download the discount coupons from various businesses, but routed the user to an individual business's own Web site, raising its profile.
   
The Summer White Sale was launched in May at a cost of about $450,000. An extension through October represented an investment of an additional $80,000.
   
The Summer White Sale's public relations campaign generated free publicity worth more than $500,000 from such national media outlets such as the Washington Post, The New York Times and "Good Morning America," tourism officials said.
   
Estler said the Beach CVB planned to build on the success of the Summer White sale in an effort to move away from magazine advertising into "a more pro-active multi-media campaign" to promote the Beach as a premier tourist attraction.
   
The HSMAI Adrian Awards are among the most prestigious advertising and public relations competitions in the world for travel industry work, officials said. More than 1,300 entries from more than 30 countries were submitted to this year's competition.