Convene - February 2016

specific crisis. Take Visit Salt Lake, which decided
to overhaul its advertising campaign for the meet-
ings market on the spot during a CAB meeting in
2007. “It wasn’t pleasant,” said President and CEO
Scott Beck. “Literally, we scrapped three entire
creative concepts — not just the colors and the
pictures, but the entire content and messaging
behind them. We heard a lot of comments like,
‘This is great, but take your name off and every city
can claim this.’”
Right there in the meeting, the DMO and its
14-person CAB — made up of mostly senior-level
meeting planners from multiple industries —
came up with a entirely new direction for its ad
campaign. “What we heard from them, loud and
clear, was you have two ways to go: Address a
really serious problem your destination has and
focus all your energy on it, or talk about what’s rel-
evant,” Beck said. For Visit Salt Lake, that meant
changing a campaign that felt more consumer-
focused than meetings-focused, and highlighting
the destination’s specific strengths — including
solid airlift and a newly expanded convention cen-
ter with enough square footage to compete with
first-tier cities.

Beck had only joined Visit Salt Lake two years
prior, in 2005. “I feel absolutely like the luckiest
CEO in the country early on in my tenure,” he said,
“to have that interaction with this board of, again,
very seasoned professionals who are very willing
to give their feedback and, I think, come from a
very positive place [and] a place of big commit-
ment to who they are, what they do, and how they
look at destinations.”
Fast-forward to this past summer, when Visit
Salt Lake was busy preparing its host-city mes-
saging for ASAE’s 2016 Annual Meeting, and again
used its CAB to refocus its advertising and media
strategy, this time to help change the destination’s
out-of-date perception. “We’ve heard this idea
that Salt Lake is dry, white, and Mormon. Or [that]
‘the number-one problem Salt Lake has [is that it’s]
a second-tier city … with nothing to do,’” Beck said.
“[ The CAB], again, encouraged us with the idea
[that] we should tackle it head on. They said, ‘You
can’t advertise and market your way out of this,
but you can be fun and make fun of yourselves in a
way that maybe can break down this stereotype.’”
Using that as a starting point, Visit Salt Lake
created a campaign called “There’s Nothing
to Do in Salt Lake,” complete with a website
— theresnothingtodoinsaltlake.com — that Beck
says serves as an attendance-building tool for
planners; one of the most popular requests the
bureau has seen come from its CAB is to act as
an event’s marketing partner. “I think a lot of
second-tier cities are being asked to do this,” Beck
said. “Instead of having the meeting planner for
the [hypothetical] Emergency Room Nurses
Association be the one who comes up with the
marketing plan and how to talk about Salt Lake to
her group to encourage attendance — partner with
the bureau, partner with the DMO, and have them
step in as the marketing partner and use those
resources in a very strategic way to really focus on
what the message is to drive attendance.”

CRISIS CONTROL

A CAB can also fill a more urgent, short-term need.

In November 2014, just after a St. Louis County grand jury announced it would not be issuing an indictment in the police-shooting death of Michael Brown, Explore St. Louis convened a special meeting of its CAB. After taking CAB members on a driving tour of Ferguson, the St. Louis suburb where Brown was killed, Explore St. Louis asked them to share their perceptions of the greater destination in light of the recent events.