Destinations Council Destiny Awards > Short-Term Marketing Campaign

Summer of Love

About This Entry:

2019 marked the 50th anniversary of the iconic Virginia is for Lovers slogan. To celebrate, Virginia Tourism Corporation launched a ’50 Years of Love’ marketing grant program to encourage its local destination partners to celebrate the love.

In brainstorming for the program, Visit Loudoun took a trip back in time to 1969. Inspired by the first Woodstock Festival, flower power, the flared jeans and tie-dye trends and other cultural touchstones, we created a Summer of Love Tour.

The campaign centered on a branded vintage Volkswagen Bus, which traveled to 19 official tour stops throughout the summer. The stops spanned across all of Loudoun County and incorporated two key elements of Visit Loudoun’s strategic plan - to embrace Loudoun’s diverse tourism product and engage with our local community.

This was the first time a campaign united both our urban eastern corridor with the farms and bucolic landscape of the west. Historically Visit Loudoun’s marketing efforts focused on the rural half of Loudoun, but under our new strategic plan we wanted to increase our engagement and promotion of the county’s eastern communities. Further, in alignment with our strategic plan, we saw this as an opportunity to raise the profile of the power of tourism among residents and other local stakeholders as well as draw in outside visitors.

The campaign was built on three main objectives. Not only did we want to commemorate the nationally recognized brand: Virginia is for Lovers, but we wanted to partner and engage with businesses in all sections of our county as well as reach not just visitors, but also our local community through our marketing efforts.

The campaign was a grassroots campaign, developed solely by the CVB, unbudgeted beyond the VTC grant for funding. Hop in the vintage van and practice holding up your peace signs, things are about to get groovy.

Campaign Strategy:

The centerpiece of our Summer of Love Tour was a branded 1970 Volkswagen Bus, which served as a mobile visitor center and key promotional tool for brand awareness, distributing tour maps, event information and merchandise to promote the 50 Years of Love campaign. Lindsay Volkswagen of Dulles sponsored the vehicle and branded wrapping. With its bright colors and groovy waves, the bus became Loudoun’s newest Instagram hot spot to further interact and engage with visitors.

The tour featured 19 tour stops in just 11 weeks, covering all nine Towns and Villages in Loudoun County. Visit Loudoun team members donated a collective 342 evening and weekend hours to the campaign. We leveraged pre-planned partner events in each of these locations to amplify partner messaging and increase our impact. Highlights included a Strawberry Fields Forever event at a local u-pick farm, a Lilly Pulitzer themed Polo in the Park night at a historic estate and a Community Camp Out at a local park. The campaign culminated in The Lindsay VW Summer of Love Music Festival presented by iHeart, which featured a line-up of local musicians and headlined by the nationally recognized band Uprooted.

Another activation in the campaign was the creation of branded wine and beer produced in partnership with Tarara Winery and BChord Brewery. These were sold at tour stops when appropriate and throughout the summer at both establishments.

We promoted our Summer of Love tour across all our social channels and invested in digital, print and radio ads. We targeted potential visitors within a four-hour drive (PA, MD, WV, and DC) as well as our local community. We measured the success of this campaign through not just website traffic and social media engagement, but also the positive impact we were able to bring to our partners including website referrals and ultimately attendance at each tour stop.

Results:

This campaign was a huge success for us. Our VW bus became our home for the summer as we drove (and then later were towed) nearly 1,000 miles around the county. We involved 35 industry partners and nine Towns and Villages across our 19 tour stops . At these events, we interacted with 39,879 residents and visitors in total, sharing visitor information about Loudoun and distributing 50 Years of Love branded merchandise. From a community and industry engagement perspective, we surpassed our expectations. In fact, as the summer progressed, more partners wanted to participate and we added nine more stops bringing our total number to 28.

A key highlight of our success was the earned media coverage. Throughout the summer, 29 stories mentioned our Summer of Love tour, which had an audience of 55.5 million. The press release for the campaign was picked up by 181 news outlets from across the country, reaching an estimated 80 million readers. We were featured in USA Today, Thrillist, MSN Travel and Northern Virginia Magazine as well as in local newspapers and on the television stations serving the greater D.C. market.

Our total campaign budget of $157,000 included the VW bus, design, music festival event production, printed materials and branded merchandise. Through digital ads, we were able to generate 6.6 million impressions with a CTR of 2.55%. Our radio and print ads reached an additional 884,000 people. On our social media channels, we generated 564,000 impressions and more than 20,000 engagements.

Visit Loudoun’s website traffic was up 26% year over year, with 47,000 pageviews on our Summer of Love microsite. In meeting our objective to reach both visitors and residents, Loudoun residents accounted for a healthy 24.7% of our pageviews. And in delivering value to our partners, we generated nearly 3,000 referrals to our partners’ websites. By the end of the campaign, an estimated 144 million people saw “Loudoun County,” “Virginia is for Lovers,” and #LoveLoudoun in print, broadcast as well as across digital and social channels, making this one of the most successful campaigns in Visit Loudoun’s 25-year history.

Why This Is A Finalist: 

An impressive campaign using physical and digital channels, made all the more impressive coming from the county and not an agency. The strategy is smart: nostalgia tends to make people downplay obstacles associated with a purchasing decision. Leaning into the audience experience, Loudoun uses earned social media in a fun way.

This was an ambitious effort full of details that added a more complete coverage of the county.

The use of the iconic VW bus, and tie with the Virginia is for Lovers slogan was clever. Good use of partnerships and pre-planned events.

Underlying the creative tactics is a smart repositioning strategy. Loudon County is known for wine tasting, sprawling suburbs, and polo matches. This campaign punches back with a bit of counter culture, building upon the lovable brand equity of a VW bus.