All 50 states have a tourism department that creates marketing and advertising campaigns to showcase their popular cities and landmarks. The state of Florida has beautiful beaches, the Space Coast, Miami and Disney World. Colorado has the Rocky Mountains, hiking, white water rafting and much more. If you watch any television, there is no doubt you have seen an advertisement to visit either one of these states; Minnesota just took it one step further.
Minnesota brought to YOU
Minnesota Tourism decided it would be best to capture two scenes that make Minnesota unique and create a tangible setting where people could interact and share images and video via their social media. These scenes were housed in 8x8x8 steel shipping containers.
Tourism In a Box
The shipping containers were exhibited in Kansas City, Denver and Chicago. They visited various street fests, MLB baseball games, RibFest in Chicago and a final Stint on the Navy Pier in Chicago before returning home.
We had weekend pickups and drop offs. We had late night trips to the office to arrange storage and middle of the night pick and runs as we navigated between events. – Brian Blalock, Sales Coach at BlueGrace Logistics.
Minnesota in a Box: To Get You to Visit, the State Will Now Visit You First
See Colle+McVoy’s MNstagram booths
AdWeek.com By David Gianatasio
Take a vacation to Minnesota? Nah, it’s too cold and dreary with all that snow and dreary-ness. Brrr…
To combat this common misperception, Explore Minnesota Tourism tricked out a pair of steel shipping containers for an immersive campaign that invites prospective visitors to “sample” a pair of the state’s diverse attractions and share their experiences via social media.
One of the 8-by-8-by-8-foot containers—they’re dubbed MNstagram booths—sports a wilderness motif that evokes the state’s Boundary Waters region, complete with wispy cattails, a morning mist generator, lilting loon calls on the soundtrack, and best of all, a wooden canoe for faux-paddling.
The other container simulates Minneapolis’ iconic First Avenue music club, complete with a fog machine, “bouncer,” purple stage lighting (a tribute to Prince, who featured the venue in Purple Rain), and best of all, a full drum kit, allowing folks to jam along with tunes playing over the sound system.
So, what prompted this inside-the-box approach? “Committing sight unseen to a Minnesota vacation can be a tall order,” says John Neerland, group creative director at Colle+McVoy, the agency behind the effort.
Hey, maybe that’s because they’ve all read about how it snows there in July! Oh wait, that was just an ad campaign. Never mind.
Plus, “running TV is often cost-prohibitive for a state tourism agency with a finite budget,” Neerland says. “We wanted to supplement our other efforts with a more hands-on, interactive, sharable and press-worthy experience.”
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