True to form, H|L has nabbed even more coveted Adrian Awards for our work with Missouri Division of Tourism and the St. Louis Convention and Visitors Commission.

Missouri Tourism’s “What’s Not to Like?,” and the CVC’s “The Meeting Guru,” “St. Louis Summer Blockbuster Radio” and “St. Louis Welcomes ASAE” have earned six of the prestigious honors, which celebrate the travel industry’s very best advertising. Not too shabby. Two of the campaigns have won gold. Which means they are in the running to bring home platinum. Which is the best you can get. Really not too shabby. At least until you can win weapons-grade titanium.

More on this after the event in late February.

Mom Bomb 	

Dad Freaks Out 	

Kid Caribbean 	

If only meeting planners had one all-knowing icon they could confide in to choose the perfect location. A benevolent Sherpa…

Wait. What’s a meeting planner, you say? Okay, let’s back it up.

Meeting planners are those who coordinate their company or organization’s events. And for the purposes of the St. Louis CVC, they are the people who decide where said events are to be held.

And guess what—there’s a meeting for these meeting planners coming up in Washington, D.C.

Enter The Meeting Guru.

He’s the breakthrough author of “The Meeting Guru: The Quintessential Guide to Successful Events” and definitive authority on meeting planning.

And he’ll be unveiling his new book at the meeting for meeting planners.

Bull’s eye.

Using a mass transit takeover, in-person appearances, e-blasts, posters and more, meeting planning meeting attendees are driven to the Guru’s website.

Once there, they are welcomed to watch his “Speaker Series,” in which—get this—St. Louis emerges as the perfect city for your next meeting. They’re also invited to purchase his sold-out book and otherwise bask in his vast knowledge.

After all, he is The Meeting Guru.

This campaign made its first appearance in our pitch that eventually won Hoffman Lewis a new piece of business.

From there, we put together a massive initial launch. Then, Together We Save picked up steam (along with several more iterations).

Touchstone Energy co-op members all across the country logged onto TogetherWeSave.com to calculate their potential energy savings. The crowd went wild. All were happy.

But that was only the beginning.

This time around, Together We Save continues to drive home the message that co-op members can save energy and money, but now we’re able to broaden the ways we say it.

Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be rolling out sections of this campaign here on the agency website (below in the callouts). Then you, like the over 700 co-ops who have the opportunity to run the ads, can pick your favorite executions.

And therein lies the beauty of this campaign.

We have a chance to produce TV, print, radio, outdoor and posters in multiple mini-campaigns that all payoff the bigger idea.

So, get ready for the onslaught. In the meantime, here’s the anthem spot for this latest incarnation of Together We Save.

Updates:

Get ideas for what you can do with the money you save here.

See what Together We Save means for our future here.

The foundation for Together We Save was built when cooperatives were founded. See where it all started here.

The final posting on Together We Save can be viewed here.

Blues Ticketfest is coming to McDonald’s. You know what that means. Hold on. You don’t? Well, maybe that’s because it’s the first time Blues Ticketfest has come to McDonald’s, but here’s a hint. It’s kind of like Cardinals Ticketfest except customers can get tickets to see the Blues with their extra value meals.

It also means we get to make a commercial with one of the stars of the St. Louis Blues, Eric Johnson. Check out his acting chops, and look for a cameo from the one and only Towel Man.

TV

Radio

Blues Ticketfest – Play

Blues Ticketfest – Memorabilia

Interactive

Normally, we don’t strive for that reaction, but this radio spot proves a point. And if it makes you yawn, chances are you could use an Egg McMuffin.

McDonald’s – Rooster

McDonald’s – Yawn

The Missouri Division of Tourism recently held the annual Governor’s Conference on Tourism at Union Station, right here in St. Louis.

For two days, state senators, city tourism officials, vendors, Hoffman | Lewis and, yes, the governor himself, Jay Nixon, exchanged ideas on how to boost travel to and within the state.

As anyone who’s been to a conference knows, there’s a lot of time between events for standing around and making small talk.

To facilitate people getting to know each other, a mobile website (promoted via customized packs of gum) was put together full of random fun facts about Missouri.

Attendees were able to impress each other with tidbits like the fact that Rock Port, MO is the first US city powered completely by wind energy. Bet you didn’t know that.

And there’s plenty more where that came from at HLicebreakers.com.

Missouri’s very own Negro League Baseball Museum is going into its third decade of existence. 

To commemorate the achievements of this institution and those who are enshrined within, the state of Missouri asked Hoffman | Lewis to place an ad in the 20th Anniversary museum program.

A simple, thoughtful tip of the cap was created. But there was a chance to do more. With a few conventions coming to Kansas City  in the coming months, a collector’s set of three posters was produced to tout this one-of-a-kind gem to visitors from out-of-state.

New Missouri tourism campaign takes road trip to Humorville.

When you start with a line like, “Don’t take less of a vacation, take a vacation for less in Missouri,” you’re bound to get dads pulling kids on skis behind lawn tractors and couples taking a spa day at the local public fountain, right? No? Okay, let’s back up.

Fact #1: Hilarity is not a natural byproduct of extensive research and focus group testing. Fact #2: Tourism ads must consist of wall-to-wall destination shots. Fact #3: Don’t trust facts.

Going into this campaign, team H/L delved deep into research, finding that although the recession had impacted traveler motivations, 70% of them still expected to take a vacation and that value was a top driver for making travel decisions. Armed with this knowledge, several different concepts were created, four of which went into testing. As the process unfolded, it became clear that not only was a value message important, but that humor more effectively drew people in and broke through the clutter.

So let’s recap… By following all the rules of conventional tourism marketing, we created a campaign that breaks all the rules of conventional tourism marketing. Funny how that works out.  Enjoy.

Poof. Adios. Gone missing. That’s the verdict on the Kidnapped Chicagoan—according to several posters plastered in and around The El and buses throughout the windy city.

Each poster playfully points out that one of Chicago’s 2.9 million people has disappeared and directs the reader to KidnappedChicagoan.com to find out where he is.

Once there, the viewer gets a whirlwind tour of the mystery city (St. Louis, in-case you couldn’t tell) along with tweets, Foursquare updates, a streaming ‘Kidnap Kam’ and plenty of other content to dive into.

This is the first-ever campaign from the St. Louis CVC directed exclusively toward Chicagoans. And it’s a bold one, forgoing the traditional imagery of the city with a big St. Louis logo in favor of an intriguing message to pull you into the story of one man’s journey to the gateway city. Wait. Just noticed “gateway” is an anagram for “getaway.” Maybe we should’ve done “The Great Gateway Getaway” instead . . . Na. This is way better.

In February, Hoffman | Lewis got a request by the Governor and the Missouri Division of Tourism to see if we could create some new work to promote the value of Missouri’s state parks.  Should be fun, right?  Wait, there’s no money to shoot new footage?  Oh… Okay.  Should be next to impossible, right?  Wrong.  So away we went,  pouring over hours of b-roll footage and photography from previous shoots, wrote new scripts to fit the footage we had, and presto – one brand new print ad and two new television spots.  Pretty good ones, too.  Or at least that’s what the Governor said, right before he asked to keep one of the storyboards to hang in his office.  Impossible?  Yeah, right.