Several hundred shoppers were treated to a free cup of tea on Wednesday, when Visit London kicked off its "Only in London" campaign with a complimentary tea party inside the Time Warner Center.
"New York is one of our key markets," said Visit London senior publicity manager Jacqueline French, "and as the Winter Olympics just wrapped up, this has been a way for us to jump on 2012." London, after all, is hosting the next summer games, and the marketing team wanted to maintain the Olympic momentum in the wake of the Vancouver games. They also wanted to reach out to people who hadn't given much thought to international travel lately.
"Last year was so terrible for tourism globally," said French. "We saw this as a unique opportunity to really showcase the city as a vacation to not feel guilty about."
As the city's official visitors organization, Visit London generally stages two or three rolling stateside campaigns a year but rarely makes a foray into experiential marketing. It turned to Retail Md to produce and design an open pop-up that would facilitate heavy traffic and draw the attention of passersby. The result: Two butlers from Eye5 were stationed on either side of a spread of tea and biscuits and ushered guests into a pop-up cafe area, where they could snack while looking over London tourism information.
