The airing of Pulaski County’s tourism commercial on Sunday night is starting to have an impact. The Community Development Commission got an update from Executive Director Nathan Origer on Tuesday.
“We went from 26 hits to the tourism website on Sunday to 106 on Monday,” he said. “We’re hoping, obviously, as we get into the season and we saturate the market more, that will continue to increase, but we were pretty psyched to see a quadrupling of the traffic that we hit in the first two days there. And today, I checked just before I left the office, and it was at about 70 today.”
The commercial ran twice on WBBM-TV Chicago during the Academy of Country Music Awards and will air several more times. The advertising package cost the county $25,000.
On top of that, Origer said digital advertising will soon be going online. “They’ve been working with me finishing up the imagery and videos that we’ll be using online,” he told CDC members. “We’ll start with WTTW public television out of Chicago in June. We hit news print magazine in Fort Wayne this month, and we’re still working with Comcast to see if they’re able to do a better job giving us something that they haven’t in the past. We were not generating a lot of traffic working with them. We’ve explained the situation. We’ll see if it’s something we’re going to do or not, but they are working on a proposal for us, as well.”
Origer said the CDC is being a little more aggressive with tourism advertising this year. On Monday, the county council agreed to make another $16,000 available for that purpose, by transferring $10,000 from the CDC’s Economic Development line item and $6,000 from Land Acquisition.
