It’s 9⁰F. There’s snow everywhere. Your job, as tourism director for the Ithaca, New York and Tompkins County Convention and Visitors Bureau in the Finger Lakes is to convince people to visit that place of their own free will.
Good luck.
Yesterday, the website for Visit Ithaca briefly gave up, pulled out a bottle of whiskey from a drawer, and crawled under the desk for a rest. The site admitted that there was no good recreational reason to visit Ithaca and suggested that people instead travel to the warm and sunny Florida Keys.
This was a marketing scheme dreamed up by Bruce Stoff, the director of the Visitors Bureau of Ithaca in cooperation with the Florida Keys Tourism Council, which was glad to cooperate. CNN reports:
A spokesperson for the Florida Keys Tourism Council called the initiative "the wackiest thing I've ever seen in my life from a tourism marketing standpoint."
Andy Newman got a call from Stoff last week pitching the idea and asking for permission to use pictures of the Florida Keys homepage.
This wasn't an advertising campaign, Newman said, and no money was exchanged.
"I didn't believe he'd actually go through with it," Newman said.
But considering the weather conditions in the Keys right now, he understands.
"It's in the 70s, there's no snow and no frost on the ground," Newman said.
"Come on down. Why wouldn't you?"
-via Huffington Post