Utah travel ads hit mark

Utah spots are prompting more rings and clicks.

Translation: The state's tourism advertising campaign — primarily TV commercials — is off to a white-hot start, causing huge increases in telephone calls and Web site visits, as well as requests for Utah travel guides.

"There's been an unbelievable response to our campaign," Leigh von der Esch, managing director of the Utah Office of Tourism, said Monday.

Costing more than $3.4 million, the campaign will be used on a variety of ads depicting tourism options in Utah for potential visitors. Eighty-one percent of the money will be used for TV spots on local stations in Denver and Los Angeles and on a few cable channels.

The TV ads started March 19. Their impact quickly followed.

Phone calls to the tourism office last week grew 981 percent. Travel guide requests shot up 238 percent. Traffic at the utah.travel Web site featured on the TV ads climbed 325 percent.

The unexpected response has the office scrambling to consider ways to meet the demand, perhaps through hiring extra staff, increasing the ability of the automated system to handle more calls or getting help in shipping out the requested travel guides.

"It's been unbelievable," von der Esch said. "And it's a good thing to have, a good problem to have."

A TV campaign last year in Los Angeles, Denver and Las Vegas did not resonate as well, she said, but she attributed that to poor timing.

"Probably some of that was that with the brand launch and the timing last year, we weren't able to go into market until the first of July. That was just the nature of the beast. We had to create the brand, and we tried to get in market as soon as we could, but when you're getting into market when the market you're going after is in full swing, you've got a much smaller slice of the pie that you can attract," she said.

"Now is the time when people are looking at, 'Gee, where's the family going to be in July?' or 'Before the kids go back to school in the middle of August, don't you want to take a road trip or this or that?'"

Still, the tourism office did not know what to expect from this round.

"We didn't, and we couldn't have, really. There's no way we would have anticipated a 900 percent increase, and we really didn't have a baseline because we've never had this much money go into market this early. You had nothing to compare it against except a campaign that went into the market and because of timing it was just late," she said.

"Now we'll have a baseline, and that's quite a baseline to have set."