Go RVing’s ‘AWAY’ Resonates With Consumers

The Go RVing Coalition’s “AWAY” campaign has captured the attention of consumers, delivering a 45% increase in leads year-to-date and increasing awareness of the campaign across nearly every audience segment.

According to a press release, research commissioned by Go RVing and performed by Russell Research to measure the public’s interest in RVing and their overall awareness of Go RVing advertising shows significant gains since the last study in 2010. Conducted over the summer, the survey found:

• Respondents who were aware of the “AWAY” campaign were twice as likely to indicate they will purchase an RV someday (43% vs. 20% unaware) and are significantly more likely to rent an RV, both someday (45% vs. 25%) and within the next 12 months (28% vs. 10%).

• Respondents aware of the 2012 campaign (18%) were more than four times as likely as those unaware (4%) to have visited the website.

Another key measure of consumer engagement is visits to GoRVing.com, which has seen a 20% increase in page views. The revamped website is the workhorse of the campaign, and the new functionality and use of video/animation enhances the consumer experience while reinforcing the emotional draw of the “AWAY” campaign creative.

“When the site relaunched in February, having a mobile compatible version was key with over 107 million reported smartphone users in the U.S. today and an anticipated 50% of all web searches being done on a mobile device by 2014,” said James Ashurst, Recreation Vehicle Industry Association (RVIA) vice president of advertising and public relations. “That was the right move for our campaign because over 200,000 web visitors have come through the mobile site so far this year. Of that number, roughly 14,000 have used their smartphones to scan the QR codes in the ‘AWAY’ print ads.”

The digital space continues to perform well, pulling in 41% of new leads. Creating digital ads that virtually take over an advertising partner’s page, captures the attention of web surfers which drives them to GoRVing.com for information. Animated online ads coupled with Apple’s ground-breaking iAd product that created a game-like version of the “AWAY” ads, plus a digital game hub on GSN.com, allows Go RVing messaging to reach target market consumers in innovative and engaging ways.

Partnerships with popular media outlets this year also helped boost exposure among consumers. Partnering with the Great American Country Network (GAC) and Outdoor Channel in March and April for two successful national sweepstakes programs drew more than 811,000 entries and yielded 46,239 leads from entrants who willingly opted-in to receive information from Go RVing partners.

Other prominent multi-platform partnerships this spring and summer included Major League Baseball’s (MLB) Home and AWAY Tour, National Geographic Channel and Nat Geo Wild’s Untamed Americas series, and the Cooking Channel Memorial Day Marathon.

 

Go RVing Debuts ‘Go the Extra Mile’ Campaign

Go RVing has launched its “Go the Extra Mile” voluntary fundraising drive for 2013-2105 with new incentives for participants who wish to supplement the campaign’s new unit assessment funding.

According to a news release, in an appeal sent to industry members, Recreation Vehicle Industry Association (RVIA) President Richard Coon said, “We are wrapping up a very successful first year for Go RVing’s ‘Find Your AWAY’ campaign and already planning for 2013 and beyond. While we recognize the current business climate remains unsettled, we know you share the desire to keep Go RVing’s messaging top-of-mind with consumers.

“With growing and expanding the RV market as our key charge, we encourage you to support the 2013-2015 ‘Go the Extra Mile Program’ to expand the effort’s reach and effectiveness and to demonstrate your company’s enhanced commitment to keeping the Go RVing message strong and prominent in the crowded media space.”

“Go the Extra Mile” donors qualify for various levels of industrywide recognition based on their level of support. Some of the benefits contributors will receive include:

* A special full page ad in RV Business recognizing the campaign’s contributors and their commitment levels.

* Special Recognition for First-Time Contributors. If this is your company’s first time contributing to the Extra Mile program, you will receive special recognition at the National RV Trade Show including a listing in the Outlook 2013 program.

* Special Reserved Table for the Outlook Breakfast at the National RV Trade Show for Pacesetter and Higher Contribution Levels. If your company pledges $25,000 or more, you will receive one reserved table close to the stage for the Outlook program during the National RV Trade Show each year during the three-year campaign.

* On-line Recognition for All Contributors. All contributors will receive special recognition on the RVIA.org website.

The minimum pledge to qualify for recognition benefits is $2,000 over the three-year drive. Companies who pledge to contribute at the highest level — $100,000 or more – are designated “Go the Extra Mile Champions’ and are recognized with special publicity events. Pledge payments can be invoiced in quarterly statements over the three-year period. In order to receive recognition at the National RV Trade Show in Louisville, Nov. 27 – 29, pledge forms must be received by Oct. 5.

The “Go the Extra Mile Program’ has played in integral role in Go RVing’s success by providing additional income for the industry’s national advertising campaign. Over 16 years, it has raised more than $2.6 million for the effort.

For more information on the program, including specific benefits for the various donation levels, contact RVIA’s Margie Spence at (800) 336-0154, ext. 357 or mspence@rvia.org.

Go RVing Kicks Off Fall Tailgating Partnership

New partnerships with the NFL Network and CBS Sports will bring the Go RVing message into the living rooms of millions of NFL and college football fans this football season with both popular networks focusing on how RV tailgating is an integral part of football tradition that enhances the gameday experience, according to a news release.

The NFL Network will air Go RVing ads from September through December. The network will also produce a custom 30-second vignette that is expected to reach 68 million households, highlighting the diversity of tailgating at NFL football games.

During the network’s televised games the first week of the season, camera crews will capture RV tailgating footage prior to the game. The vignette will begin airing in late September through October during Game Day Morning on Sundays, 9 a.m. – 1 p.m. EST, and will also air adjacent to Go RVing brand spots.

Go RVing television commercials will be seen on CBS Sports college football coverage through December. In addition, CBS Sports’ Go RVing Football Series includes a pair of custom elements designed to bring Go RVing into 45 million households. The first half of SEC football games will feature an animated RV driving on screen to deliver three trivia facts about the college, stadium or tailgate experience for each week’s matchup.

CBS will also produce custom vignettes from footage filmed at SEC football games where RV tailgating is revered. These six 60-second to 90-second vignettes, titled the College Football Tailgating Tradition Series, will air during Inside College Football or SEC Studio Show throughout the season. They will celebrate the legions of faithful fans who follow their college teams, often turning stadium lots into impromptu RV towns for days preceding the game.

“America recognizes that tailgating has become one of our favorite pre-game traditions, and our partnerships with NFL Network and CBS Sports will show football fans how to take their tailgate gathering to the next level with an RV,” said James Ashurst, RVIA’s vice president of advertising and public relations. “The segments focus not only on the typical parking lot cooking, but also on how an RV’s amenities like outdoor entertainment centers, and homelike comforts including your own bathroom, can add a whole new dimension to the tailgating experience.”

 

Go RVing/GAC Giveaway Winner is Announced

Go RVing’s first-ever national RV giveaway, conducted in partnership with Great American Country Network (GAC), will culminate on July 31 when the RV is presented to the winner at Tom Stinnett Derby City RV in Clarksville, Ind.

The winner, Clifton Johnson, won the 2012 Lance Camper Ultralight travel trailer in a drawing from nearly 650,000 entries.

The sweepstakes, which ran from March 1 through April 16, generated a total of 811,000 entries and more than 46,000 leads for the Go RVing program from entrants who opted to receive information from participating Go RVing dealers, manufacturers and campgrounds.

RVIA Promotes RVing at Digital Family Summit

Go RVing Coalition and the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association (RVIA) were in Philadelphia from June 29 through July 1 to promote RV travel and camping to family bloggers with a mock campsite at the Digital Family Summit.

The Digital Family Summit is a conference for family bloggers that offered workshops and activities to help bloggers enhance their skills and network. As one of the event sponsors, Go RVing set up an outdoor camping display featuring a Winnebago Via motorhome and a Jayco travel trailer, provided by Fretz RV in Souderton, Pa.

Event attendees toured the RVs, multiple times in some cases, and learned about the freedom, fun, flexibility and affordability offered to families by RV travel.

The event was an excellent venue for RVIA’s public relations team to demonstrate the benefits of RV travel to family bloggers, who have considerable credibility with their readers. In addition, RVIA began discussions with influential “mom bloggers” with large followings about possible stories and promotions in the future.

Prior to the kickoff of the Digital Family Summit, the Winnebago Via was featured in a live RVing segment on Philadelphia’s FOX affiliate, which also included an interview with RVIA’s Kevin Broom about the popularity of RV travel.

Go RVing’s New iAd Targets Apple Device User

Go RVing’s new “AWAY” iAd, launched on June 29, is helping drive exposure for RV travel and camping to millions on Apple’s proprietary ad network.

According to a press release, Go RVing’s iAd reaches Apple iPhone and iTouch users from within their favorite app. When a Go RVing ad pops up, Apple users can play a custom Go RVing game without ever leaving the ad. Branded similarly to Go RVing’s mobile site, the Go RVing iAd features a large “Find a Dealer” option at the top of each game screen that takes users to GoRVing.com with one click.

Early results from Apple indicate the Go RVing iAd is performing very effectively, outperforming the average benchmarks for all iAd metrics. The Tap Through Rate (TTR), which measures how many people see the banner unit and then actually tap it to reach the ad unit/game, is 0.75%. This is higher than the iAd TTR benchmark of 0.60%. The time spent by the user in the ad unit/game is 93 seconds on average, 33 seconds greater than the 60-second benchmark.

The new iAd is Go RVing’s latest effort to boost the RV industry’s presence in the growing digital marketplace, joining the mobile site launched earlier this year in conjunction with the debut of the redesigned GoRVing.com.

The Go RVing mobile site quickly and easily allows visitors to be introduced to the website’s full array of information, including searching for an RV dealer or campground. More than 152,000 web visitors have come through the mobile site with nearly another 13,000 having used their smartphones to scan the QR codes in the “AWAY” print ads to reach the mobile site.

“The iAd and our mobile site provide consumers with the ability to conveniently and easily access RVing information from their mobile device,” said RVIA Vice President of Public Relations and Advertising James Ashurst. “Having these resources in place is hugely important as more and more consumers are using smartphones and mobile devices for web searches and information gathering.”

Herzogs Extending RV Message to Hannibal, Mo.

A California couple who travel across the country in an RV will be stopping by Hannibal, Mo., this weekend.

Author Brad Herzog and his wife, Amy, have traversed the country for 13 consecutive years, and he has written three memoirs from these travels.

Herzog spoke to The Quincy (Ill.) Herald-Whig earlier this week from the parking lot of the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Ark., as the couple makes their way to the area. Other locations the couple has traveled to this summer included the Great Sand Dunes in Colorado, the Grand Canyon and the Oklahoma City National Memorial.

“It’s like a big-screen movie of America is playing in front of you, and anytime you want, you can stop the film and enter the picture,” he said. “That’s a really cool feeling.”

The Herzogs should arrive in Hannibal this weekend just in time for the national fence painting contests on Sunday (July 8) at the National Tom Sawyer Days.

Herzog said he is expects to spend a lot of time in Hannibal, which excites him because it was home to Mark Twain.

“As a traveling author, it’s inevitable that I would be a Mark Twain fan,” he said. “So we’re going to take a riverboat on the river, visit the museum and (Twain’s) boyhood home and that sort of thing.”

Herzog boasts the benefits of traveling in an RV, instead of air travel.

“With an RV trip, you’re not going from point A to point Z,” Herzog said. “You’re hitting all the points in between, and it helps immerse you in a sense of place. It makes the destination that much satisfying.”

A RV vacation also could save families money when planning vacations.

A study prepared for the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association (RVIA) found that RV travel is 23% to 59% less expensive than other types of vacations for a family of four.

“The money that we save not having to pay for hotel rooms, by not having to eat three meals a day in a restaurant, by not having to deal with airlines and all the lack of control you have there, it really adds to the whole experience,” Herzog said. “The affordability is one part, and there is the flexibility. I love the fact that in an RV, you’re in control. You’re traveling at your own pace and on your own terms, and to me that is how a vacation should feel.”

The family sees many different towns and locations along the way to their destination. The treks last usually last six to eight weeks every summer, and most times they travel with their two sons. However, they are both at summer camp.

“It started in the summer of 2000,” he said. “The first summer it was my wife Amy and I, and she was pregnant with our first child.”

The Herzogs have since logged more than 100,000 miles crossing the 48 states in the continental U.S.

Herzog’s latest book, “Turn Left at the Trojan Horse: A Would-be Hero’s American Odyssey,” explores classically named towns throughout America. He focuses on small towns in America in his writing.

“Hannibal and Quincy are humongous compared to what I write about,” he said. “I pick the tiniest dots on the map, and I sort of develop a theme for an overarching concept I would like to explore in each book. Then I craft an itinerary that’s going to take me through tiny little towns with names that match that theme.”

Herzog also blogs for travel website GoRVing.com and also maintains his own website, bradherzog.com.

Go RVing Coalition Issues Upbeat June Report

Go RVing’s “Find your AWAY” ads hit the marketplace this spring, setting the stage for a reenergized effort for the program, which is owned by both the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association (RVIA) and the Recreation Vehicle Dealers Association (RVDA).

The new “Away” theme of the campaign, designed to expand the market, represents a return to a use of softer outdoor “lifestyle” imagery not unlike that used in the earlier years of the 16-year-old, all-industry campaign.

“I think it went very well,” reports Coalition Co-Chairman Tom Stinnett, president of Tom Stinnett Derby City RV, Clarksville, Ind., and a partner in Clarksville-based Equine Motorcoach. “I think that the results speak for themselves. There’s positive increases in almost everything we’re doing. There’s very interesting digital marketing improvements and a lot more feedback from our customers in that area where we’re currently expanding. I think, overall, it was a very good meeting.”

“The headline I’d put on it is: ‘How Does Go RVing Continue to Do It?’” remarked the other co-chairman, Bob Olson, the recently retired chairman of Iowa-based Winnebago Industries Inc. “I think it was a very positive meeting. You look at the strategy change that we did last year, and getting more in to the social media part of advertising platform, I think, is going to pay dividends beyond any of our wildest dreams.

“And I think that what really encouraged me most was the fact that we’re already talking about things that we’re going to move into next year and the year after that, which gives me confidence that the people that we’ve got in place right now on the RVIA side and the consulting group that we’re utilizing really know their stuff when it comes to the best way to get to that consumer.”

Among the high points in Monday’s presentations by RVIA staff, which administers the national campaign, and The Richards Group, the Dallas agency with whom the coalition has worked for several years:

• Visits to GoRVing.com have grown 16% versus 2011.

• Unique views are up 14%, page views by 34%.

• Of the visitors to GoRVing.com, more than 115,000 arrived via a mobile device, and of those, roughly 10% came via the QR code in Go RVing’s print ads.

• Total leads are up 79%.

• The Great American Country and Outdoor Channel partnerships generated more than 811,000 entries as part of the coalition’s sweepstakes. These entries also yielded more than 46,000 new leads from entrants who opted in to receive additional information from GoRVing dealers, manufacturers and campgrounds.

• The coalition is seeing a 53% increase in consumers arriving at the GoRVing.com website via digital routes.

Go RVing, meanwhile, expects 2.9 billion media impressions in 2012 from its overall advertising campaign – print, digital and otherwise, according to James Ashurst, vice president of public relations and advertising for RVIA.

“I think the new creative was the stimulus for a lot of the positive numbers that we’re seeing, along with a lot of the other interactive efforts that we’re pursuing,” observed Stinnett.

“The coverage that we’re getting across the board, whether it’s ‘Fox and Friends’ or Major League Baseball is behind the good report,” added Olson. “I think it speaks volumes for the acceptance of the RV lifestyle. And, you know, as long as we’ve got that, I think we’re going to continue to grow as an industry.”

 

Go RVing’s Mobile Site Pulling in Consumers

Go RVing’s new “AWAY” campaign is off to a strong start with leads up 70% over last year, and the effort’s new mobile site is proving to be an effective tool in providing interested consumers with RVing information from their mobile device.

According to a press release, the mobile site launched earlier this year with the introduction of the redesigned GoRVing.com. More than 93,000 web visitors have come through the mobile site and nearly another 10,000 have used their smartphones to scan the QR codes in the “AWAY” print ads to reach the mobile site.

“Having an attractive, appealing mobile site is crucial for success in the digital marketplace,” said RVIA Vice President of Public Relations and Advertising James Ashurst. “Research shows there are more than 107 million smartphone users in the U.S. today and an anticipated 50% of all web searches will be done on a mobile device by 2014.”

Go RVing is also introducing a new promotion to capitalize on the other big draw of smartphones – game playing. Digital games continue to increase in popularity and with 39% of mothers admitting they hand over their smartphones to their children for entertainment while on car trips, Go RVing teamed with the Game Show Network’s GSN.com to produce digital versions of some favorite road trip games, including “United States of Bingo,” “Funny Fill-Ins,” Destination Alphabet,” and “Drive and Spy.” The new GetAWAY Games are available as Android and IPhone apps or can be played along with other custom-created games on the branded Go RVing game hub on GSN.com.

 

Jayco Inc. Mini Gets MLB Network Exposure

The Go RVing and MLB Network’s “Home and Away Tour” Jayco Seneca Class C motorhome stopped by Jayco Inc.’s headquarters in Middlebury, Ind., Wednesday (May 30) on its way from a St. Louis Cardinals’ game to the Tigers’ stadium in Detroit.

Wilbur Bontrager, CEO of Jayco Inc., and Derald Bontrager, president of Jayco, were there to greet James Ashurst, vice president of public relations and advertising for the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association (RVIA), and Stephen Connors, director of Midwest Advertising Sales for the MLB, as the Seneca rolled into the parking lot.

“We’re always happy to help promote Go RVing’s message and this opportunity was a fun way for us to participate.” said Derald Bontrager. “It was a win for Go RVing, the industry and Jayco.”

Since April 12, the Jayco Seneca 37RB Class C motorhome has been visiting the nation’s ballparks as a touring studio broadcasting features during the MLB Network’s Game of the Week. The Jayco Seneca was used inside and outside for on-air reports and interviews with players during the On Deck Circle, the network’s signature show featuring major league baseball highlights and analysis.

There were also teasers and promotional mentions of Go RVing and the “Home and Away Tour” on The Run Down and the MLB Network Game of the Week. This special promotion was inserted as a value-added element to Go RVing’s 2012 agreement with the MLB Network.

The Jayco Seneca, wrapped with visuals from the new Go RVing “Away” national advertising campaign as well as logos for GoRVing.com, MLB Network and Jayco, will end its tour at the Detroit Tigers’ game this Friday against the Yankees.

 

« Previous Page — Next Page »