ANGUS & DUNDEE UPDATE REAL SCOTLAND A LOCALS GUIDE Real Scotland - A Local s Guide Earlier this month VisitScotland s new marketing campaign, Real Scotland The Locals Guide was launched. The new guide is an initiative that aims to attract UK visitors to Scotland. The guide promotes areas across Scotland and will feature Angus and Dundee prominently through an exclusive partnership with premier travel magazine Conde Nast Traveller. The guide is designed to highlight the more authentic, off the beaten track Scotland experiences revealing many hidden secrets. It also features insider tips and Top 10 lists from the people who know best including caddies favourite courses, pub musicians favourite haunts, rangers wildlife hotspots and fishermen s best fish & chip shops. A number of Angus and Dundee locations are highlighted in the guide including unmissable attractions such as RRS Discovery, The Reekie Linn, Glen Cova and The Retreat at Glen Esk, plus a number of areas worth a look including Edzell Castle and Gardens, the Arbroath Smokie and White and Brown Caterhuns. Accommodation and local events, including Homecoming Scotland 2009 events, will also be showcased giving potential visitors everything they need to plan a trip to Scotland. The main crux of the promotional activity will be through an exclusive partnership with Conde Nast Traveller magazine which will see readers encouraged to order their free copy of the guide online at www.visitscotland.com/real. Visitors will also be encouraged to get their guide at a local Visitor Information Centres through a radio and poster campaign running throughout October.
RELATIONSHIP MARKETING CAMPAIGN Our Relationship Marketing campaign is on-going with e-zines showcasing events and things to see and do across Scotland being sent out to around 300,000 UK consumers each month. The October e-zine has just been sent out to consumers. This month the Dundee Mountain Film Festival featured in one of the e-zines together with features on the Real Scotland Guide, Burns Homecoming Suppers and inspiring ideas to come to Scotland. WINTER WHITE 07/08 SUCCESS AND WINTER WHITE 08/09 Angus and Dundee benefited from this major winter tourism campaign that generated 46 million in revenue for Scotland. The campaign ran from November 07 March 08 and used a broad mix of e- marketing, direct mail, on pack offers, competitions and web led activities to promote accommodation & activity offers. Over 170 Scottish tourism operators participated in the campaign and hotels across Scotland offered special winter accommodation deals. The campaign scooped top prize at one of the UK s most prestigious public relations awards. Winter White 08/09 The Winter White campaign will run again for 2008/09 with a similar theme and offers. Businesses and partners are currently being recruited for the campaign but, as with last year, will feature there will be a campaign website, direct mail and competitions incorporated in the campaign. AUTUMN BRAND ACTIVITY VisitScotland has been airing its Winter Events and Festival advert, both on TV and in Cinemas over the autumn months to encourage visitors to come to Scotland this autumn. TV advertising will have reached around 34.6 million adults in the UK who will each have seen the advert on average 4.8 times each over the period of 1-28 September. The advert will also be screened in cinemas from 29 October.
The TV adverts will be accompanied by full page print adverts (example below) carrying a Homecoming Scotland message as we gear up for the Homecoming year in 2009, and will encourage people to Celebrate Scotland. The adverts will appear in the following titles: Good Housekeeping, Coast, Guardian Weekend, Observer Sport magazine Saturday Telegraph, Saturday Independent, Irish Times and Irish Independent. The combined circulation for all of these titles is 1.9 million and two insertions will be made in each title. Adverts will also be featured on several new digital screens throughout London, providing even more opportunities to see the advert among one of our key UK markets. Consumers will be driven to the URL www.visitscotland.com/celebrate, which links to the existing www.visitscotland.com/beinspired website, which provides inspirational ideas for visiting Angus and Dundee and the rest of Scotland, as well as special offers from businesses. CONSUMER PR Our consimer PR teams regularly host press visits to Scotland recently, Benny Tao, a journalist who writes for Golf vacations and Golf Punk in Singapore, visited Dundee on a trip to Scotland. In the coming weeks another journalist, Iain Aitch from the Telegraph, will also be visiting Dundee, staying at the Apex Dundee Hotel. We will update on any further press trips and coverage generated at future meetings. GENERAL UPDATE Homecoming Local Authority Web Pages THE Homecoming Scotland team has developed a section on our Homecoming Scotland 2009 website entirely dedicated to each of Scotland s Local Authority areas. This resource has been designed to either complement existing Homecoming Scotland information that you may already have on your own websites or as an alternative to creating your own Homecoming dedicated websites / sections within existing websites. It is an ideal means of informing visitors to the Homecoming Scotland website of what is happening on a local level and the Homecoming team will highlight this section prominently within the website. This is a resource, provided by the Homecoming team to each local Authority free of charge and they would urge you to populate these pages (particularly the general 'landing page' and the 'local events page') with relevant content focussing on Homecoming events, news and activities taking place within your
area. Each Local Authority has been contacted with details on how to access and upload information on their dedicated section. Partner Programme Featured Events will appear on our web search engine. Partner Programme Local Events will not appear in the search engine and so the Local Events page on the website has been created specifically so that you can add these events here. The World Famous Burns Supper Homecoming Scotland 2009 in partnership with Scotland s favourite whisky The Famous Grouse has launched The World Famous Burns Supper Celebration as part of the Homecoming Scotland programme that will mark the 250 th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns, Scotland s national poet. For the first time ever The World Famous Burns Supper Celebration will unite both experienced Burnsians and Burns novices around the world encouraging them to come together online, registering their celebrations big, small, traditional or unusual. The aim is to show the world that Burns legacy is still alive and kicking today and that his message of friendship and Auld Lang Syne lives on, joining people all over the world. A new website www.burnssupper2009.com has been created to capture everyone s plans for celebrating this landmark Burns Night and establish a new World Record for the greatest number of Burns suppers ever held. Every supper registered will be flagged on an interactive world map demonstrating the global reach of Burns today. The website will also provide a range of Burns material including a step by step guide to hosting a Burns supper complete with menu ideas from some of Scotland s leading chefs, invitation templates, poems, songs, film clips and music downloads. To mark the occasion The Famous Grouse has also specially commissioned 250 bottles of a limited edition of The Famous Grouse, 37 year old blended malt, signifying every year of Burns extraordinary life. The bottles will be auctioned to some of the most prestigious Burns Suppers around the world helping raise money for charity. CURRENT ECONOMIC CLIMATE Scotland s tourism industry is currently facing challenging times due to the economic climate. While this does not mean that the industry cannot achieve its ambition for growth, indeed, VisitScotland welcomes the Economy, Energy & Tourism Committee s recent endorsement of the growth ambition through its Tourism Inquiry, we also have to be realistic. Given the current climate, our immediate goal and priority is to ensure an effective response to the economic environment. Our core marketing strategy remains the same but we are monitoring developments closely and making tactical adjustments and shifting our expenditure to capitalise on the positive opportunities that exist. In practice, this means increasing marketing and using levers such as Homecoming Scotland 2009 in areas of opportunity including Canada, Europe, Northern
England and Scotland (whilst still maintaining a presence in markets such as the USA that are currently more challenging). Approximately 1.5 million of VisitScotland s marketing budget has been allocated to these campaigns. As an organisation we always target resources where we will achieve the most growth. However, in the current environment, we are concentrating our efforts on the areas where we will most effectively capitalise on short term opportunities. We are continuing to work with the industry to extend the season, for example with the UK-wide Winter White campaign which generated an additional 46 million in tourism revenue last year. In addition, we are committed to more short-term and niche marketing with a focus on markets closer to home. In 2007, for the first time, we ran a TV campaign in August, targeted specifically at London and the South East. We are also refining our understanding of the way our customers are segmented, and how those segments behave. In Europe, through our 1 million European Touring campaign we are promoting different activities for each month of the year, changing people s perceptions of why they might choose to come to Scotland. In another new departure, we have started running Scotland specific training for travel agents in territories outside the United States. This supplements the work we have already started to do with the travel trade in the emerging markets of Russia and China. For example in mid-october we led a trade mission to Russia with eighteen of Scotland s leading tourism businesses to showcase Scotland and Homecoming Scotland 2009. In addition, we continue to deliver a world class quality assurance scheme to visitors and quality advice to industry partners to help the industry meet and strive to exceed the expectations of visitors. We also provide marketing opportunities for the industry through channels like VisitScotland.com, brochure advertising and exhibition space. Richard Pinn Regional Director