Pinellas County rehires an Orlando agency that came up with the "Florida's Beach" campaign four years ago.
By MARK ALBRIGHT
Published September 9, 2004
CLEARWATER - Pinellas County tourist marketers on Wednesday decided to rehire an Orlando agency that lost their $4.4-million advertising account three years ago.
Yesawich, Pepperdine, Brown & Russell will take over the St. Petersburg/Clearwater Area Convention and Visitors Bureau account after the County Commission grants its expected ratification Oct. 5.
The Orlando ad agency lost an eight-year hold on the account to FKQ Advertising of Clearwater in 2001. Last month, FKQ decided not to bid to keep the job, but never disclosed a reason.
YPB&R is the agency that cooked up the idea of branding Pinellas as "Florida's Beach" four years ago. The agency said the county's message needs to be tweaked to match a changed consumer attitude toward travel. The emphasis will shift more to traveling with friends and family. The agency also proposed custom-tailored ad messages for some minority markets and publications.
YPB&R also proposed spending more of the budget on television (15 percent) than the other agencies bidding and nothing on newspapers except in co-op ads. The reason: 53 percent of Pinellas visitors get most of their travel information from the Internet. Most of the TV money would be spread among less expensive cable networks. YPB&R estimated more than half of all Pinellas visitor prospects tuned in the Weather Channel, Discovery Channel or A&E at some time during the day.
YPB&R narrowly prevailed over Cramer-Kresselt, a Chicago agency that creates ads for Winn-Dixie and Corona beer; and Smith Advertising, a Fayetteville, N.C., agency that recently resigned after 15 years as Sarasota's tourist ad agency.
One of Cramer-Kresselt's TV ad mockups was strikingly similar to a Corona beer campaign that features a couple relaxing on a remote beach with little more than the sound of surf in the background. Smith proposed inserting a picture of a furry white bunny in ad headlines to emphasize the powderly softness of Pinellas beach sand, but much of the sand on Pinellas' renourished beaches is coarse shell.
"The bunny would be an icon similar to the AFLAC duck," said Gary Smith, chief executive of the agency. Plush bunnies were passed out to selection committee members, who also heard a suggestion that selling them as souvenirs could be a revenue source.
County officials agreed to pay YPB&R a 13.5 percent agency fee, or about $600,000 a year. They also decided it was not worth paying extra for the agency to staff a branch office in Pinellas. They also waived their conflict of interest rule that its agency could not represent another Florida destination. YPB&R is the agency for Panama City Beach, which it says it has sold to a different market.
