• by Tanya Gazdik , July 15, 2013

A campaign from the North Lake Tahoe Marketing Cooperative targets San Francisco residents, offering them warmer weather than they can get at home.

The effort includes TV, radio, print, outdoor, online and transit advertising to promote the resort area -- which is better known for its alpine, winter attractions -- as a summer escape.

The intent is to increase North Lake Tahoe hotel stays during the in-between, shoulder season; high summer is nearly fully booked. The work is by San Francisco advertising agency School of Thought.

The campaign almost skips what Lake Tahoe has to offer, and focuses instead on what San Francisco, its primary market, does not have -- i.e., summer. Daytime summer temperatures in the mountains average 20 degrees higher than by the notoriously cold and foggy Bay.

TV, in both 15-second and 30-second versions, shows a San Francisco backyard birthday party, with cake and favors and burgers on the grill. All good, then a chilling fog rolls in and the fun is over. Lake Tahoe appears only in the commercial’s final few seconds, and only in quick -- and sunny -- cuts. The spot closes with the area’s new tag, “Real summer. Real close.”

Print, outdoor and digital banners don’t get around to showing Lake Tahoe at all. Instead we see parka’d kids at the beach (headline: “Winter, spring, winter, fall”), a foggy golf course (“The good news is, it’ll burn off. In October”) and an iconic, fogbound Golden Gate (“Don’t call it Frisco. Or summer.”)

The media buy is all in the San Francisco DMA. TV runs on Discovery, ESPN, Food, A&E, USA and National Geographic channels. Print full pages are in local weeklies. Outdoor billboards and wallscapes and transit posters are in high-foot traffic areas including the Ferry Building. Online banners are geotargeted on Trip Advisor and radio reads on Pandora.

“Our summer campaign budget is more limited than winter’s, so we target the market with the highest concentration of our audience, which is the San Francisco Bay Area, and especially San Francisco itself,” said Bill Hoffman, executive director, Incline Village Crystal Bay Visitors Bureau, which is a partner, with the North Lake Tahoe Resort Association, in the North Lake Tahoe Marketing Coop.

This campaign is similar to the group’s winter effort, "Get Your Balance Back," which was about why you need to get away, Hoffman tells Marketing Daily.

 

“In that case, the reason was to regain balance in your life,” he says. “Now the reason is to get out of the cold and fog. Either way, an escape to North Lake Tahoe is the cure. Put differently, the heavy lift for our advertising is to get San Franciscans to take a vacation. Once we get that message through, getting them to North Lake Tahoe is easy.”

Advertising works when it tells a truth that people can relate to, Hoffman says.

 

“We at North Lake Tahoe love San Francisco,” he said. “It is a world-class city. Yet, it's widely acknowledged—by Mark Twain over a hundred years ago, and by San Franciscans daily—that its summers are chilly. With a limited budget, it was important that our campaign get people talking. We wanted to acknowledge that chilly truth in a good-natured way.”