The beautiful woman shimmers in a shiny copper gown, enjoying a night out downtown while dipping her legs in a Fort Lauderdale rooftop pool. Flanked by two men whose chests are in full view through unbuttoned shirts, she turns to her left to pull one man closer, staring at his lips. She then looks to her right to caress the other man’s face, readying to perhaps kiss him, too.
Next the woman looks straight into the camera — and you realize you’ve just watched the sexiest 15-second ad that Broward County’s tourism arm has ever produced. The commercial’s final message tells tourists: “Welcome Thrill-Seekers,” and “Visit Lauderdale.”
The sexy ad is part of a series of commercials presented by the Greater Fort Lauderdale Convention & Visitors Bureau. It has dropped $800,000 on the ads, running them nationwide since the summer. The goal is to lure a new type of tourist: sexy, exciting, and either rich or “wealth adjacent.”
“Even soft drink companies use sex to sell,” said Stacy Ritter, president and CEO of Visit Lauderdale, Broward County’s tourism promotion arm.
This sultry ad was deliberately meant to be sexy, but it’s not intended to literally promote threesomes or Broward swingers’ clubs, she said. “Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. You can interpret it in any way you wish, we did not provide an interpretation to that,” she said.
The new videos of beauties sailing and sunning have titles such as “Welcome nonconformists.” In another ad, “Welcome captains” is discreetly displayed to help cover up a topless woman as she flips over while tanning on a boat.
Taking a new approach
Images of folks biking and eating in previous advertising campaigns to attract tourists to Broward needed a makeover, Ritter said.
So her agency ditched their previous “Hello Sunny” slogan, which was “very vanilla and very bland” and replaced it with the tagline “Everyone under the sun.”
The $800,000 spent by the agency comes out of its $8 million marketing budget for social media and magazine advertising — bring a reinvention with new images and videos.
“It’s sexy, cosmopolitan, progressive, diverse, we absolutely changed our marketing perspective,” Ritter said.
The tourism arm might be on to something, advertising experts say.
So much of the country already equates Fort Lauderdale with spring break and the sex-crazed co-eds in the 1960s movie “Where the Boys Are,” said Anthony Del Gigante, the chief creative officer of MDG Advertising in Boca Raton.
“Cutting through the clutter [of media] as a strategy makes sense,” he said. It’s a balance between “representing the place and enticing people to come here.”
Still, he said the “new tactic was enticement but presenting a very limited view what Fort Lauderdale is. This appeals to one very specific audience [and shows the] breadth of Fort Lauderdale’s nightlife, the sexier side of Fort Lauderdale. It’s intrinsic to what a lot of people think of it.”
Peter Ricci, director of the hospitality and tourism management program at Florida Atlantic University, said it might have been time for a change. He found the messaging to scream “luxury, upscale, racy, ‘I’m independent,’ and ‘We’re more of a real city with nightlife and clubs.'”
Historically, the tourism ads have focused on attracting families, he said. “Our ads have been too family,” he said. “Fort Lauderdale needs to go on beyond ‘we have a beach.'”
Still, “I just found it very forward and different,” he said. “I wouldn’t have expected that to come out of Fort Lauderdale.”
He said it’s money well spent to get the area “on the map,” which could mean more money flowing in.
Gauging results
The ads appeared in social media and digital campaigns, like Afar, and traditional advertising such as the NY Times Sunday magazine, Modern Luxury, Robb Report and Departures magazine. The ads also rotate on the county’s Facebook and Instagram accounts, disappear automatically, and get replaced by new ones.
How do they know if this even worked?
“It’s difficult to do an ROI,” Ritter acknowledged, referring to the financial return on their investment. So they compare “heads in beds,” which are booked rooms at hotels throughout the county a week after the ad ran versus a year before. (Granted, it’s not a scientific approach.)
Because 2020 was a mess as a result of COVID-19, the agency is comparing the campaign to 2019. From the campaign’s inception in July through October, she said although occupancy is slightly down, hotel revenue is up.
The campaign began this summer and although Ritter doesn’t know how long these new ads will run, she’s pleased it’s getting attention: Mission accomplished.
“We’re thrilled it created a buzz.”
Lisa J. Huriash can be reached at lhuriash@sunsentinel.com or 954-572-2008 or Twitter @LisaHuriash
