Apparently the city of New Orleans is reaping benefits from the BP oil spill by using money from BP to advertise to tourists. According to “a recent study,” in the wake of the oil disaster, 26 percent of travelers planning to visit the city have canceled their trips, even though New Orleans is about 100 miles inland from the Gulf Coast. So the New Orleans Convention & Visitors Bureau launched an ad campaign to make sure people still come to visit. But it’s gotten off to a rocky start. The first ad took a swipe at BP with its headline “This isn’t the first time New Orleans has survived the British.” But the New Orleans CVB decided to not run the print ad because they thought (after the fact) that it “might be misinterpreted by many people as anti-British.” The city’s second-largest international market is Britain, after Canada. Ouch! I wonder if the CVB and the ad agency even talked to each other before this hit the street. Actually I thought the campaign was kind of funny in a snarky sort of way. If British tourists were offended enough to stay away from New Orleans because of the supposed “dig” at the British (like BP doesn’t deserve it anyway), then maybe they don’t need to visit New Orleans anyway, where our sense of humor is pretty skewed and we don’t take ourselves that seriously. The campaign probably should have run. Personally, I don’t think it would affect the Brits traveling to New Orleans. If someone can provide statistics on British groups cancelling trips to New Orleans because of this little ad campaign, I’d sure like to know about it. Most of the hoteliers and restaurants I’ve spoken to aren’t seeing a massive drop-off in business from the BP spill, but I sure agree that we should use BP’s dough to the max while they’ve still got the money to try to make amends. The people who will suffer the most from this, tourism-wise, are the people on the Gulf Coast of Alabama and Florida. No amount of advertising is going to help get Brits or anyone else to an oil-soaked beach.

Our new mayor ran on a campaign of culture, but we’ve yet to see any of that culture in any of the city’s advertising materials. My humble suggestion: instead of leaving an ad campaign solely up to an advertising agency, perhaps the ad agency should involve some of the city’s residents who are actually involved in the culture as consultants when they devise an ad campaign. Maybe if the tourism marketers had been involved with the “anti-British” campaign, the big brouhaha over the supposed diss wouldn’t have happened.