Arkansas and travel have been intertwined in song ever since, well, “The Arkansas Traveler.”
Now, nearly 180 years later, it’s time for an update, thanks to the Arkansas Department of Parks & Tourism and its marketing agency, CJRW.
The “Traveler” song, circa 1840, inspired comedy routines, a celebrated painting, hit recordings, a certificate for distinguished visitors to Arkansas and the name of Little Rock’s minor league baseball team.
But it’s not exactly a song of praise.
Its story of an uncouth, fiddling squatter visited by an urbane traveler instilled an image of Arkansas as a barefoot, hillbilly state for well over a century.
“As long as there is an Arkansas, there are going to be folks in Little Rock wringing their hands over the state’s image problems,” Arkansas-born professor and writer Brooks Blevins told Arkansas Business. “Even if the rest of the country were content to let it go, we’re determined not to.”
To revamp that narrative, CJRW and Parks & Tourism commissioned a different tune, or more precisely three, to anchor their spring and summer advertising campaign, “This Is My Arkansas.”
“We absolutely want to chip away at old stereotypes,” CJRW Creative Director Wade McCune said recently. “Arkansas isn’t what many people think it is. With world-class art at Crystal Bridges [Museum of American Art], the Clinton Museum and everything going on in Little Rock, Hot Springs and all over the state, social media gives us a chance to constantly push back.”
CJRW has used Arkansas musical talent exclusively for its tourism commercials in recent years, he said, but for the new campaign, McCune and his team wanted “something a little different.”
So they hired three Arkansas musical acts to interpret what the state means to them. The performers are two duos, Melody Pond and Dazz & Brie, along with former Nashville recording artist Josh Noren. McCune said they were selected to represent diverse musical styles, but “mostly because they are all really talented.”
Dazzmin Murry and Kabrelyn Boyce are Dazz & Brie, a rock-and-soul act based in North Little Rock. Emily Rowland and Candy Lee make up Melody Pond, an Ozark indie folk twosome from Fayetteville. Noren, a singer-songwriter, is from Bentonville.
The only prerequisite for the songs, recorded at Haxton Road Studios in Bentonville, was that they include “My Arkansas” somewhere in the lyrics. They’ll be heard on all television and digital advertising for Parks & Tourism’s new campaign, offering “another element to differentiate Arkansas from other destinations,” CJRW Senior Vice President Mark Raines said.
CJRW has a long history of tourism marketing. Chairman Emeritus Shelby Woods — who basically invented Arkansas tourism marketing with his brother Wayne and a ragtag collection of resort owners, hoteliers and attraction owners — brought the work over when he merged his Woods Brothers Agency with Cranford Johnson Robinson & Associates in 1990. CJRW won its current Parks & Tourism contract, worth about $15 million a year, in 2017.
MORE: Parks, Streams & Woods: 50 Years of Arkansas Tourism and the Ad Man Who Saw It All
The musical performers certainly celebrate Arkansas’ natural beauty, but that’s just part of the message. “I have thought about this heavily,” Noren said in a video promoting the ad campaign. “To me, Arkansas is not an accumulation of the beautiful things you see; it’s the relationships and the people that I have come to know while living here.”
Still, sightseeing will always be a staple of tourism, and visitors most often drive to Arkansas from nearby states.
“The 2019 campaign will focus heavily on Arkansas as a ‘road trip’ destination,” Raines said. “Travel data indicates that road trip travelers represent a growing segment of the tourism population with no signs of slowing down.”
To convey the fun of driving Arkansas, the firm hired two social media influencers from Utah, Kait VanHoff and Samantha Wright, to take a four-day road trip with friends, documenting their experiences in Little Rock, northwest Arkansas, the Buffalo National River and Hot Springs.
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VanHoff has more than 50,000 Instagram followers and has partnered with Anthropologie, Back Country and Lululemon, McCune said. Wright has promoted many brands to her 40,000 followers, and CJRW is running a “My Arkansas Road Trip Giveaway” tracing the influencers’ path. More information on the contest, which has drawn 5,000 entries since March 1, is available at the Arkansas.com website.
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