New York City!

I got a call Monday morning that changed my week, my marketing plan, and my outlook on what we might accomplish with the Trail. Our program was offered the chance to partner with two West Texas communities on a ridiculously discounted advertising opportunity--THIS video billboard, the CBS Super Screen, in Times Square!

So we're frantically gathering photos for our 15 second spot, which will be seen twice an hour for 92 days this summer. We're building a new common website to post on the spot to ultimately drive traffic to http://www.texasmountaintrail.com/ for information about the region.

I spent a long time Tuesday afternoon on the phone with a Senior Analyst with Florida's Department of Agriculture (a previous user of the same billboard) who kindly ran our numbers through their statistical formula to estimate our return in the number of people who will actually SEE our spot. Given that 1.5 million people walk by the billboard every day, we estimate 6.9 will stand there and watch our images of Big Bend and Fort Davis and hopefully get it in their heads that they'd like to leave the city on their next vacation and head for the Texas Mountains.

We're going to combine this effort with my already planned contact with media in NYC, again trying to get coverage and raise awareness of the region.

I sure do like thinking big.