Connecticut unfurls new ad campaign

After focusing the initial rollout of Connecticut”™s new “Still Revolutionary” advertising campaign on tourism, the state unfurled a new phase featuring cutting-edge companies in Connecticut ”“ though with little focus on Fairfield County, which offers perhaps the best opportunity to lure businesses given its proximity to New York City.

Since Gov. Dannel P. Malloy took office in 2011, ESPN and Alexion have secured incentives under his First Five jobs program in exchange for promises to create jobs, with ESPN building a digital production facility at its Bristol headquarters and Alexion building a headquarters in New Haven, with plans to move there from Cheshire in 2015.

Pratt & Whitney, a division of United Technologies Corp., won a different set of headlines a few years back after UTC executives publicly criticized Connecticut for having too high a cost of doing business, turning down $100 million in state aid to keep aircraft engine refurbishment facilities open here. Since Malloy took office, however, the company has publicly softened its tone and recently chose Danbury for a consolidation within its new UTC Aerospace Systems, bringing more than 100 jobs from other locations.

The ad campaign bypassed the opportunity to highlight equally ballyhooed projects in Fairfield County, including NBC Sports Group”™s headquarters under construction in Stamford, the adjacent Chelsea Piers sports entertainment complex that opened this summer and Bridgewater Associates”™ commitment to build a $750 million headquarters in Stamford, a deal that has yet to be finalized but nevertheless marking a major vote of confidence by one of the financial industry”™s most sophisticated companies.

The campaign will be delivered through TV, print and digital and a new website at connecticutforbusiness.com, which features an innovations timeline running from David Bushnell”™s 1775 invention of a functional submarine through the 2012 groundbreaking for The Jackson Laboratory genomics center in Farmington in partnership with the University of Connecticut. In between, the timeline includes milestones for several Fairfield County companies including General Electric Co., Xerox Corp., Sikorsky Aircraft Corp., Priceline.com Inc. and Blue Sky Studios, as well as myriad inventors.

The new ad can be viewed on the BusinessinCT YouTube channel. The connecticutforbusiness.com website has a flashy home page, with links after that taking visitors to pre-existing web pages maintained by the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development, which also oversees the Connecticut Office of Culture and Tourism.

That office is not forgotten in the new campaign ”“ after debuting its initial advertising push last spring that focused on recreational draws in Connecticut, heading into the fall foliage season the renewed tourism campaign will also highlight additional tourism sites, including the iconic West Cornwall Bridge and Kent Falls in Litchfield County.

Malloy”™s office said visitations to major Connecticut attractions are up 7 percent from a year ago. The state”™s tourism website has seen traffic double since the ad campaign debuted.

The Alexa web traffic service operated by Amazon Inc. tracked a 34 percent increase in visits to visitct.com over the past three months, though traffic dropped 12 percent between mid-August and mid-September, possibly a function of the start of the school year, though tourism websites for New York, Vermont and Massachusetts all registered increases over the same period.

In August, the state Office of Culture and Tourism revealed the top 10 destinations voted “still revolutionary” through a social media ballot it ran with the list, including Curtain Call Inc. in Stamford, Levitt Pavilion in Westport, and the  Westport Country Playhouse.