• by Karl Greenberg , February 2, 2012

The City of Philadelphia is hoping to boost winter tourism with a new chapter of the "With Love, Philadelphia XOXO" campaign via the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation (GPTMC).

The GPTMC, which launched the "With Love" platform in 2009 as a $2.5 million summer push, is targeting couples with the newest iteration of the campaign, which runs through March. The GPTMC says data from its hotel visitor survey suggest winter brings the most couples to the city as tourists.

The $825,000 campaign features a new look, ads and a sweepstakes at GPTMC's Facebook page, facebook.com/visitphilly, which has about 107,000 "friends." The promotion, called "29 Nights of Dates," gives one winner for each day of the month of February one of 29 Philly excursions and associated prizes. Among them are a Mural Arts Program Tour along with lunch at Table 31 and a one-night stay at the Crowne Plaza Philadelphia Downtown; a class at Cook and drinks at Twenty Manning Grill; Ritz theater tickets and dinner at Positano Coast.

The 29th winner also gets a red two-seat Vespa and a couple of With Love-branded helmets.

The campaign is GPTMC's sixth installment of the love letters campaign, per the organization. The  media buy is mostly in the Philadelphia DMA because -- the group explains -- people tend to travel closer to home in the winter. Ads are on billboards, in train stations, online and in newspapers and magazines.

The tourism group is also running the ads, with romantic lines "Dear Budding Romance, Love blooms in the winter," "Dear Hot Night Out Together, I look good in the morning," on JDate, eHarmony, Open Table, Live Nation, Yelp and others.

Web banners include 15-second video teasers this time, a move GPTMC says it hasn't done in the past. The videos offer vignettes of Philadelphia's dining and nightlife scenes. Longer versions are on GPTMC’s websites and social media properties.

The campaign also has newspaper stickers touting a sleepover message on the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer and Bucks County Courier Times, and coffee sleeves.

A broader media buy for the campaign, involving participation of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, Adventure Aquarium, the Philadelphia Orchestra and Chester County Conference and Visitors Bureau will run in Philadelphia, northern New Jersey and New York markets.

Philadelphia got a boost in January from the NHL Winter Classic hockey game, which was held in the city. Caroline Bean, GPTMC's director of social media, said the game helped awareness. "The kind of attention it put on the city is important," she says, adding that the NHL ran lots of video and photography of the city around the promotion and broadcast of the game.

Bean tells Marketing Daily that the organization will do another summer campaign aimed at families and in March will launch its first-ever coordinated visual arts marketing campaign. Called "With Art Philadelphia," the $2 million, two-year campaign aims to position Philadelphia as one of the world’s great art destinations.

The campaign  a partnership with numerous organizations, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Convention & Visitors Bureau, Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance and Parkway Council Foundation.