This week Tel Aviv will be celebrating its traditional Pride Parade, which in pre-Covid years brought 30,000 foreigners from around the world to fly to Israel and take part in what is considered the “biggest Pride parade in the Middle East” (over 250,000 people in 2019). Ok, so that’s not too hard a feat considering our neighborhood, but hey, we’re a tiny country and yet the Pride Parades of Rome, Buenos Aires and Miami are smaller than Tel Aviv’s. Good enough for us!
The Israeli Ministry of Tourism, which is back in full throttle now the borders are fully open and PCR tests are a thing of the past, is eager to bring back tourists to Israel, match the record numbers of 2019 (almost 5 million tourists, as compared to approximately 2.5 million five years earlier), and hopefully exceed it. Yes, they’re continuing the uber-successful Jerusalem-Tel Aviv City Break campaign, sharing images of our beaches, the sun, food, heritage and culture, and in a really cool way to entice young people to visit…
…but what we’re noticing this year is a welcome departure – if temporary – from that messaging, into something more specific, yet infinitely – in our opinion – more effective.
If you happen to be in Times Square, or at a bus stop in London or Amsterdam, you may come across these digital and print ads for Tel Aviv’s Pride Parade, inviting people to attend. This is what’s known as “targeted marketing” to a very specific audience, albeit in very public places, with a very specific “Call to Action“: come to Israel for Pride Week this June!
We think it would have been even more impressive if the website shown at the bottom was a direct link to purchase a subsidized Pride Package (rather than a general link to Tel Aviv’s great tourism website). We think that’s a missed opportunity, but perhaps there were considerations there we’re not aware of. Same with the YouTube videos shared by Tel Aviv Global and the Ministry – there definitely could have been a link embedded into the videos that takes any one of the over 8 million people who viewed it to a subsidized package landing page. If they didn’t want or were unable to subsidize it, they could at least have offered local travel companies such landing page to advertise their packages, like this one:
But even without the “Click to buy a package” Call to Action, what we think is so great about this campaign, is that it’s not just your average tourism ad-spend. There are three things at play here:
So we like this campaign because what these ads are doing is much more than encouraging tourism to Israel. What they’re really doing, is telling a story of Israel that not enough people know about. And not only are they telling it, they’re celebrating it! This is absolutely crucial for Israel’s global reputation, and we cannot assume the world already knows about this specific aspect of what Israel can offer, just because we – the Israelis and Jewish Diaspora – know.
We hope to see many more ads like this, that highlight an aspect of Israel that is unexpected to the masses, and has major appeal. But honestly? We don’t even care if people actually buy tickets (after all, we at Vibe Israel aren’t measuring success based on the number of tourists visiting Israel, like the Ministry and Tel Aviv Global & Tourism are). We’re in the business of building brand awareness for Israel, and we think this is one helluva way to achieve that!
Featured Photo by @OrKaplan