Commuters hailing a cab or waiting for public transit in Washington, D.C. this month are likely to get a glimpse of iconic Phoenix imagery before their trip commences.
Visit Phoenix (CVB) is blitzing the D.C. area with a transit-based advertising buy that includes mini-billboards atop taxis and digital posters in transit stations. The ads showcase Visit Phoenix’s “This is Phoenix” ad campaign, which is built around dramatic photography of Greater Phoenix outdoor activity in the Sonoran Desert.
The ad blitz coincides with a sales mission in the Washington D.C. area by Visit Phoenix, the Phoenix Convention Center, and nine of the city’s largest hotels and resorts. The convention sales mission delegation will meet with professional associations and national trade unions, hundreds of which are headquartered in and around the nation’s capital.
Visit Phoenix staff just completed its fiscal year with a 30% increase in Phoenix Convention Center future year bookings and a strong rebound in resort/hotel leads and bookings. Continuing this momentum, the Phoenix convention sales delegation will meet with more than 250 DC convention planners and association executives through sales appointments, reception-trade shows, and a meeting planner forum during its three-day sales mission.
“Washington is a hotbed for meetings and conventions, and our sales team maintains a strategic presence there with in-market offices and annual events,” said Melissa Gogel, vice president of marketing, communications and tourism for Visit Phoenix. “To support those sales efforts, we’re placing our new ‘This is Phoenix’ ads in some high-traffic transit locations. The goal is to increase the exposure of the Visit Phoenix brand in one of our most important markets, and to do it at a time when our sales team is saturating the market with face-to-face calls.”
The delegation of sales professionals from Phoenix will host four events during the next three days, with one event each in Washington, Alexandria, VA and Chevy Chase, MD.
Phoenix was ranked No. 10 in the list of the “Top 50 U.S. Cities for Conventions in 2013,” according to Cvent, a technology company that connects event planners with more than 200,000 venues in destinations across the United States. Phoenix earned its top-10 destination based on its weather, its air-travel accessibility, its spectrum of meeting-friendly hotels and resorts, and its newly expanded convention center.
“The Phoenix Convention Center was expanded with big association groups in mind,” Gogel said. “It has the space and sophistication to host the biggest of them, or to host smaller ones concurrently. Our focus is to keep the convention center, the hotels and resorts, and the destination as a whole at the top of mind for meeting planners in D.C. and beyond.”
