In the post-war boom of the 1950s, Americans developed a serious case of wanderlust, coinciding with a newly ignited love affair with the automobile.
Those two forces combined to birth the 20th-century road trip, where families piled into station wagons, navigated with paper maps and sparked a decades-long trend that coined the pesty catchphrase, “Are we there yet?”
The phenomenon has waned in recent years—per the advent of mass air travel and discount airlines—but a nostalgic campaign out of Kentucky aims to revive it.
“Joy Ride,” with its vintage-style travel posters, says that simply hitting the blacktop is every bit as compelling as wherever you land. Provided it’s at the heart of the picturesque Bluegrass State, that is.
Calling it “the anti-destination destination campaign,” independent agency Coomer created “Joy Ride” for a co-operative of more than a dozen small towns, counties and points of interest throughout the state.
“We’re all so intent on going from point A to point B, but the idea here is to enjoy the open road and be where you are without necessarily thinking about where you’ll end up,” Greta Pittard Wright, COO and head of strategic planning at Coomer, told Adweek. “It harkens back to a time when Americans got out and just explored.”
As the centerpiece, Coomer made a short film starring American Pickers host Mike Wolfe and his partner Leticia Cline, a preservationist and Kentucky native. The two-minute video shows the couple, driving a cherry-red 1955 Chevy Nomad, tooling around on two-lane back roads, stopping at some requisite horse farms and bourbon distilleries along with out-of-the-way town squares, nature preserves and historic homes.
Art-forward approach
The campaign features more widely known cities like Lexington, Georgetown and state capital Frankfort, but also draws in off-the-beaten-path places like Winchester—home of Ale-8-One soda and the Beer Cheese Trail—and Harrodsburg, a landmark former Shaker community.
“Part of the fun was digging into each location and finding the nuances that made it distinct,” David Coomer, agency CEO, told Adweek. “We started with the posters—so it was an art-forward approach—which served as a jumping-off point for the whole campaign.”
The collectible retro-look posters come from creative director-designer Ana Maldonado-Coomer, serving as a customized asset to each of the 15 separate groups in the Central Kentucky-based tourism co-op, which received a $1 million post-Covid federal grant to jumpstart the hospitality industry.
Having multiple clients, under the banner of the Kentucky Tourism, Arts and Heritage Cabinet, wasn’t as challenging as it may sound, Coomer said. The agency already has a track record in the coalition space from its recent “Kentucky After Dark” campaign that linked spooky sites at disparate state locations under one advertising tagline.
Even so, a new campaign brought new partners, and like “Kentucky After Dark,” some towns and attractions involved in “Joy Ride” traditionally had scant marketing money of their own or experience in communicating to mass audiences. This effort will mark their first national exposure and, as it turns out, may signal a new trend in tourism outreach.
In the pre-pandemic era, competition rather than cooperation was the order of the day in much of the travel advertising space. But in the past few years, more destinations are banding together to try to lure in visitors, per a report in Skift that cited Bermuda-Fort Lauderdale, Ottawa-Montreal-Toronto and a handful of Vancouver-area groups vying for Washington State tourists as examples of recent alliances.
Hospitality marketers in Central Kentucky have had long-standing relationships, but this is by far their most significant program to date, according to Mary Quinn Ramer, president of VisitLex.
Drive time
The old-school, car-centric campaign is a strategic fit because 75-80% of travelers to Central Kentucky drive there, per Ramer, who spearheaded the effort with Robbie Morgan, director of the Lawrenceburg-Anderson County Tourism Commission.
“We loved that this campaign is less about being in a hurry and more about enjoying the journey,” Ramer told Adweek. “It leans into our beautiful topography, and it gives people multiple reasons to visit––so many that they’d have to lengthen their stays to see them all.”
“Joy Ride” will run nationally on connected TV channels like Discovery Networks and Hulu, along with YouTube, Google and other digital platforms. There’s a significant push planned for the fourth quarter, with 2024 getting additional media buys around busy seasons like spring break, the Kentucky Derby, summer and beyond.
