Wrightsville Beach’s marketing advisory committee is considering combining part of the town’s advertising budget with that of Carolina Beach, Kure Beach and Wilmington to market the area as a whole, but March 8 the committee members decided the benefits of joining forces were outweighed by too many concerns for them to approve the concept — yet.
“I feel like this decision is above my pay grade,” committee member Pres Davenport said, explaining that although the marketing committee’s role is to advise the board of aldermen, he wanted to bring the town’s leaders into the discussion of such a significant budget reallocation.
The committee agreed to schedule a joint meeting with the aldermen as well as a joint meeting with Kure and Carolina Beach’s marketing committees. The beach towns must proceed together with the campaign or the initiative won’t work.
“We’re a three-legged stool,” committee member John Andrews said. “Take one leg out and we all fall, so I’d love to hear what they have to say.”
The benefits of a joint campaign would be a larger budget, helping the campaign reach a greater audience, and the unique selling point of the three distinctive beach towns plus the city.
The $500,000 budget for the joint campaign would allow for more full-page print ads, more video, full-season billboard placement and an expanded market placement, Clean Design brand strategist Travis Conte told the committee.
“It will give you highly visible, more competitive ads,” he explained.
But the joint campaign would require a shift in the beach towns’ mentality from rivals to teammates, at least until the consumer’s focus was narrowed down to New Hanover County. The real competition, Conte said, are destinations like the Outer Banks and the Crystal Coast, which have large marketing budgets due to joint campaigns similar to the one proposed for New Hanover County’s beaches.
In addition to creating a more competitive budget, the joint campaign would allow local beaches to stand apart from the Crystal Coast and Outer Banks by highlighting the beaches’ proximity to Wilmington.
The $500,000 budget would be split in the fairest way possible, Clean Design director of media strategy Tom Hickey said.
Wilmington would contribute 100 percent of its budget. A joint campaign would not be a significant departure for the city because it already brands itself as “Wilmington and Beaches.” The beach towns would each contribute 33 percent of their budgets.
Hickey and Conte envisioned the campaign being a series of ads mentioning all three beaches and the city while highlighting one in particular with a large photo and accompanying headline. The split of ads highlighting each beach would correspond to the dollar amount each beach contributed to the total budget.
The joint campaign would target consumers in the initial phases of trip planning, which Conte called the “dreaming phase.” Each beach town would use the remaining 66 percent of its budget to draw in consumers when they get to what Conte called the “planning phase” — choosing a specific location and booking lodging.
While the committee members realized the benefits of the joint campaign, they were concerned with giving a third of their budget to a campaign that didn’t specifically market Wrightsville Beach. Carolina and Kure Beaches’ marketing committees feel the same, Conte and Hickey said.
The agency representatives agreed that with the committees’ evident skepticism and joint meetings to schedule, the campaign would not be implemented this fiscal year, even if it were eventually approved. Instead, Wrightsville Beach will, for now, put its entire marketing budget into its own campaign, while the beach towns’ marketing committees continue to explore the potential for a joint campaign in the 2017-18 fiscal year.
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