Top Flight Media’s Darren Smith at Friday’s press conference in city hall. At right, a rendering of a campaign poster at a city bus stop.
The Dauphin County regional tourism bureau has budgeted close to $100,000 for Harrisburg’s “Summer in the City” promotional campaign, an all-out effort to market the city’s summer cultural offerings on billboards, buses and the Web, city officials announced Friday.
The campaign, which will launch on June 23, will highlight such events as the “Harrisburg Independence Weekend Walkaround,” a three-day program of festivities scheduled for the July 4 weekend. The full program, which can be viewed at Stayandplayhbg.com, includes free concerts in city parks, “family fun” festivals, a martial arts tournament and a reading of the Declaration of Independence.
Mary Smith, president of the Hershey Harrisburg Regional Visitors Bureau, joined Harrisburg Mayor Eric Papenfuse at a press conference Friday morning in city hall to announce the campaign, which will be promoted on area billboards as well as on each bus in Capital Area Transit’s 80-bus fleet.
Bob Philbin, a spokesman for CAT and the city’s former chief of operations under Mayor Linda Thompson, said CAT buses were estimated to produce 3.5 million impressions over the course of the campaign. If the campaign runs through Labor Day, Sept. 1, that figure would amount to 50,000 impressions per day.
The visitors bureau hired Top Flight Media, an advertising agency headquartered on Lindle Road, to design the campaign. Darren Smith, Top Flight’s senior vice president, said Friday that this is Top Flight’s fourth year working with the bureau, and that his company sought to “over-deliver” on the city’s marketing needs.
Funding for the marketing campaign comes from the county’s hotel tax, a levy on overnight lodging that was raised from 3 percent to 5 percent in 2008. According to county ordinance, a portion of hotel tax revenues—about 13 percent—is to be spent on “appropriate and reasonable marketing and promotional expenses” for tourism in Harrisburg, though there’s some complexity in who gets to do the spending.
Of the 13 percent of hotel taxes earmarked for marketing Harrisburg, most of it—around 8 percent—is paid directly to the Harrisburg treasurer. The other 5 percent is distributed to the Hershey Harrisburg Regional Visitors Bureau, which is Dauphin County’s designated tourism promotion agency. The bureau also gets 20 percent of total hotel tax revenue for county-wide tourism promotion.
Since 2011, total hotel tax revenues have come in between $9 and $10 million, according to figures provided by the county treasurer. Based on the allocation formula, the amount sent to the visitors bureau explicitly for spending on city tourism should have been just below half-a-million dollars each year—$445,000 in 2011, $450,000 in 2012, and $485,000 in 2013.
Rick Dunlap, the bureau’s public relations director, said it was hard to say what the bureau actually spent to market the city in those years. City and regional tourism often overlap, as when someone books a night at the Hilton downtown and then visits Hersheypark the next day, Dunlap said. But between media tours, sales missions and other promotions, he felt confident that the bureau had spent an amount “up to and exceeding” the revenues slated for city promotion.
Dunlap also said, however, that the absence of any formal marketing campaign made it difficult to provide a solid figure on spending. Prior to the administration of Harrisburg’s former mayor, Linda Thompson, marketing campaigns were typically brainstormed by a subcommittee of city and bureau representatives. In fact, the county ordinance provides for approval of such a spending plan by the regional visitors bureau in relation to city marketing dollars.
But a meeting between bureau representatives and Mayor Thompson, which took place early in her term, had indicated that her administration either had little time or little interest in a regional tourism plan, Dunlap said. “The past administration had quite a focus on keeping water out of their boat,” he said, referring to the city’s fiscal crisis. “There was less engagement from a tourism aspect.”
Attempts to reach Thompson for comment Friday were unsuccessful.
