Visit Hot Springs unveiled the 2023 advertising campaign at Thursday's Hot Springs Advertising and Promotion Commission meeting, a mix of traditional and digital advertising that will focus on the city's top draw -- water.
The 2023 campaign, "Soak It Up," includes print, digital and video advertising across multiple areas, including many streaming services.
"Water, it's where Hot Springs draws its name," a promotional video shown during the meeting said.
"It's what the city was built upon and centers around. Water is the foundation of what makes Hot Springs such a unique destination. It nourishes, refreshes and inspires. It's part of the people, the place and the culture, and it's the inspiration for the 2023 creative campaign," it said.
The commission approved a total recommended 2023 budget of $644,358 for CJRW, the Little Rock agency that handles the advertising program for Hot Springs; the media for the consumer campaign accounts for $506,076 of that budget. The remainder is made up of account services, production costs, paid social ad management and updates to the VHS website, https://hotsprings.org.
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According to Visit Hot Springs CEO Steve Arrison, the commission will be spending a total of $2,193,576 in 2023 on advertising and events, which represents a combination of the CJRW campaign and Visit Hot Springs' in-house advertising and public relations efforts.
The advertising budget, which amounts to about 20% of the more than $11 million 2023 budget approved by the commission on Thursday, does not include the Visitor Information Center, Visitors Service fulfillment, payroll, sales, or convention sales, Arrison said after the meeting.
"Advertising is just one segment of the plan that sells Hot Springs. We have the VIC downtown, we have the Visitors Services Department that answers the questions and fulfills the requests for information by mail and internet. We have special events and a sales staff that sells the entire city, not just the convention center.
"Putting all that together for 2023 we hope to have yet another record year in tourism for Hot Springs," Arrison said.
The 2023 ad campaign will rely primarily on 15-second videos that feature different things that relate to water in the city -- from fishing to enjoying the water park to tasting the different foods available in the city. This will be paired with digital and print campaigns based on the same premises.
Visit Hot Springs Director of Marketing Bill Solleder said there were 132,699 new people who followed the VHS social media accounts in 2022, marking an increase of 22.7% over 2021. Out of 1,151,973 visits to https://hotsprings.org, 76% were new visitors with most of the traffic coming from Google searches, he said.
Feast Mode, Checkin Inn and Check It Out, three of the social media campaigns VHS runs, will continue into 2023 with six new episodes of Checkin Inn and 12 episodes of Check It Out expected for the new year, Solleder said.
All of the events held in 2022 -- including the World's Shortest St. Patrick's Day Parade, Baseball Weekend and Bridge Street Live -- will be returning for 2023, and the Hot Springs Fishing Challenge will return next year after a two-year hiatus due to the coronavirus pandemic, he said.
In addition to approving the new advertising campaign, the ad commission voted to select a new commissioner and new leadership for the upcoming year.
Robert Zunick, who was named to replace former commissioner Paul Lynch who moved out of state, was approved via ballot to retain the position. Parth Patel, the president of development for VIPA Hospitality, was the only other person to apply for the open position.
The commission also voted to retain Chairman Wayne Smith and Vice Chairman Chris Dunkel in those positions for 2023.
The commission also learned of a 19.94% increase in collections of the hospitality tax for November, pushing the receipts from the tax to 15.05% for the year before the December collection. The tax has collected $8,526,065.30 for the year so far.
The majority of the November collections came from lodging as several hotels had not paid their portion of the tax for "several months." A total of $277,202.28 was collected from lodging in November, a 56.50% increase over 2021, and $547,009.24 (7.24%) was collected from restaurants for a total of $824,211.52 for the month.
"We had a great collection in November that got our hotels back up," Vicky Ross, the chief financial officer for the commission, said during her report. "We were behind like five months on about six hotels, and that got caught up, which brings us back into line on what this really looks like."
Visit Hot Springs Director of Marketing Bill Solleder talks to the Hot Springs Advertising and Promotion Commission about Visit Hot Springs' upcoming advertising campaign and gives a review of the 2022 campaign. - Photo by Lance Porter of The Sentinel-Record