Alabama Tourism Commercials Feature Mobile, Gulf Coast Region

Oct 18th, 2012

The Alabama Tourism Department today unveiled two television commercials promoting destinations along Alabama’s Gulf Coast, with each expected to receive about a $1 million worth of airtime on 42 stations from Baton Rouge to Cleveland to Savannah.

State tourism director Lee Sentell said the 30-second commercials are part of the state’s three-year Road Trip campaign that features a vintage Cadillac convertible that visits rural areas as well as popular destinations. The new commercials spotlight the USS Alabama, the Battle House Hotel, the Grand Hotel, Mardi Gras, Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail, the state’s white beaches and seafood restaurants.

The commercials to be shown through the end of the year will air without cost to the state because of support from Raycom Media. The Retirement Systems of Alabama, the pension funds for many public employees and teachers, is a major investor in the television company, Sentell said, “Thanks to RSA, we are able to promote Alabama’s beautiful Gulf Coast to more than half of the homes in the lower Midwest and Deep South, and expand our state’s $10 billion tourism industry.”

He said employees of the state tourism agency have written 40 of a projected 100 road trips that range from a visit to see the quilters at Gee’s Bend in Wilcox County to a romantic weekend in downtown Mobile, and from a mountaintop weekend at Mentone to a girlfriends getaway to Gulf Shores. The tourism agency will also promote the trips in the 2013 Alabama Vacation Guide published by Compass Marketing in Gulf Shores as well as ads in Southern Living magazine.

The commercials were shown to tourism officials at a press conference at the Battle House Hotel on Thursday morning.

Road trips and accommodations as well as 1,500 festival and event listings are featured at the state tourism department’s website www.alabama.travel.