During this time of transition for Visit Jacksonville, we thought it would be helpful to extend the Marketing Blog into an Interim President's Report addressing the topics and opportunities available for our partners.

Sales Update

The sales team has developed a renewed commitment to selling city-wide conventions under the leadership of Marcia Noon, Associate Director of Sales.  Marcia and Kim Ritten, Senior Director of Sales, along with other team members' support and assistance are reviewing our city-wide sales plan and updating the plan.  This new sales plan will be reviewed and discussed at the various committee meetings.  The hope is that selling more city-wide conventions will create compression for the area and result in more bookings not only for downtown but for the outlying areas as well.

SMG hired a new sales person to focus on selling the Prime Osborn Convention Center and other SMG managed assets.  SMG also has a new general manager for the Jacksonville area.  Visit Jacksonville will be working with SMG to develop a reception possibly at the Prime to welcome the new team members.  Stay tuned for more details.

The Cash for Contracts program was a huge success and is wrapped up.  The program awarded $350,000 in grant funds representing 58,470 room nights and an economic impact of $5.4 in room revenue alone.  This represents 52 hotels in all regions of the city.  We hope that Visit Jacksonville will be given the opportunity to offer a grant fund like this again in the future.  The Cash for Contracts was part of the TDC grant of $875,000 awarded to the organization last September to support the industry during this economic downturn.

Public Relations Update

The Communications team hosted the family travel writers FAM trip, Jacksonville from A to Z, to coincide with the reopening of the Riverside Arts Market this past weekend.  There were five writers in attendance.  Three of the writers are brought a child with them to get a true experience of a family vacation and one brought their mother for a multi-generational vacation experience. The group stayed at the Quality Suites Oceanfront in Jacksonville Beach with trips scheduled throughout the city including: Riverside Arts Market, Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, MOSH, Kingsley Plantation, Hanna Park, Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens, Adventure Landing and others.  Two of the writers tweeted while they were in town (@TravelingGal and @ThemeParkMom) about their experiences during the trip and we expect more coverage in the following weeks/months.

For information on the itinerary and writers, visit www.visitjacksonville.com/familyfampartners.

Jacksonville was selected to attend the VISIT FLORIDA Toronto Media Mission and all three media receptions in New York (Consumer, Outdoor and GLBT).    The Communications team will be traveling for them in April.

Marketing Update

The new http://www.jaxeventcalendar.com/ launched providing visitors and locals with a great tool for researching and learning more about events taking place in our city.  The calendar is a feed from Jacksonville.com and includes the major events taking place annually.  This is especially a great tool for your front line staff to access when assisting visitors.  We encourage all partners to link to this site.

The spring marketing co-op's will close on Wednesday.  If you have an interest or questions, please contact Jacqueline Simard at jsimard@visitjacksonville.com. 

Also, make sure your business has the spring rack card available for guests.

Partner Update

Mark Your Calendars for Upcoming Events:

• o Wednesday, March 10, 4pm - 6pm on the Jacksonville Princess II for John Reyes Going Away Gathering
• o Tuesday, March 23, 8:30am registration; 9am-10am Program, Hilton Garden Inn Jacksonville/Ponte Vedra Beach - Visit Jacksonville for Breakfast - Maximizing the Multicultural Market
• o Wednesday, April 7, 8:30am registration; 9am-10am Partner Quick Connect/Partner Benefits Refresher; 10am - 11am Web Site User Overview - UNF University Center

Do you want a Visit Jacksonville consultation for maximizing your Partnership or tapping into a new market?  Call your Partner Development Team today to schedule an appointment!  Contact Sarah Gibson at 421-9166 or Kimberly Morgan at 421-9154. 

Tomorrow's marketing panel at 3:30 at the Museum of Science and History is a don't miss event!  Jim Dalton will be presenting the results of last week's Atlanta Focus Groups study and revealing our new campaign direction.

The Atlanta focus groups were instrumental in helping us develop a campaign that resonates with our consumers.  We now have an even deeper appreciation for the Florida brand and how Jacksonville fits into that brand.  We also understand what consumers don't want, what they enjoy most about our great destination and what imagery they appeal to most. 

The team learned just how important it is and continues to be for us to build awareness for Jacksonville as a destination.  This is a long term goal and will require dedicated marketing funding for Jacksonville to become a destiantion that has strong awareness among our core consumers. 

Tomorrow we will also review the new spring/summer campaign, provide an overview of the media buys, and showcase our new events calendar that will be a great resource to all partners and tourism industry employees.  Don't miss this great event and enjoy a Let the Sunshine In Mixer at River City Brewing immediately afterwards.

Well 2010 certainly kicked off with a frenzy of activities, projects and new opportunities for the destination.  We are in the middle of our new branding efforts and close to having a campaign that the entire destination can get behind.

Our focus group study in Atlanta will take place in the next couple of weeks and the recruiting for participants is going very well.  The study will give consumers and meeeting/group planners the opportunity to talk about their impressions of Jacksonville, the images the city brings to mind and will examine their thoughts on some new campaign concepts.  Our goal is to develop a campaign that speaks to our consumers and truly represents the destination.

We are hosting a Marketing Panel on February 23 at 3:30 at the Museum of Science and History where Jim Dalton will walk us through some the findings and the campaign concepts.  We will also debut our new events site and sports facilities site.

Our newly designed meeting planners email went out last week with great response.  We are also developing a new concept for our leisure email campaign to maintain our relevance with our audience and bring life to the program.

Make sure you take advantage of our spring rack cards for your front desks, concierge desks and sales staff.  The cards feature the main events taking place this spring and have fantastic discounts from great restaurants, attractions and activities partners. 

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact the team.  Contact Jacqueline to reserve your materials jsimard@visitjacksonville.com.  We hope to see you on the 23rd!

Nowadays, you can do pretty much anything on your mobile device. Have your hands been cold in this recent balmy Jacksonville weather? Warm them up with the new mobile pocket heater from iPhone. Crunching for the Bar Exam? Try the newly released BarMax, which includes 1,371 real MBE practice questions, practice essays, audio lectures, 1,000+ flash cards and e-mail support with Harvard lawyers.

This mobile-craze is not a phase, but rather, one of the leading tools for destination marketing.

How can you, as a Visit Jacksonville partner, build lasting relationships and communicate timely messages to your audience? While e-mail marketing has been an instrumental tool in this process, the effervescent emergence of mobile marketing is a tried and true tool for reaching these individuals while on the move.

Visit Jacksonville is already on the mobile-wagon with iJax.mobi and you too can join. The mobile site compiles our Web site's offers, coupons, listings and events for visitors on the go. We highly encourage you to take advantage of this great resource as smartphone unit sales are projected to reach more than 700 million of the 1.8 billion handset market by 2012. At those levels, smartphones will represent 65 percent, or $200 billion of the $312 billion total mobile phone market.*

Convinced yet? Become a part of our mobile team by simply loading your deals onto ARES and events to our RSS feed on Jacksonville.com's event portal. Once loaded, your information will be aggregated and streamed to our mobile site.

Stay tuned for Visit Jacksonville's upcoming work with iPhone and a potential application for our city and greater Northeast region.

*statistics provided by MocoNews