You are only as good as your last month, or in this case your last year. A year ago, I was thinking of was to generate and create more awareness before our summer season and I got it stuck in my head that I could pull off a lip dup. At the time, it was probably my favorite this to work on. We created a music video tailored to Lake County, Illinois to the song, Best Day of My life by American Authors – https://youtu.be/iphhBSYiE44
Flash forward a year, well I definitely out did myself and launched a “music video that has gone viral with 74,000 views on Facebook and YouTube”, according to Bill Geist. Well, it was not as easy as that. It started out like any other passing water cooler talk in the office, “What are you going to do now to top Best Day?” I did not know at the time and wasn’t sure how to take that concept to the next step. I attended eTourism Summit last October and decided to sit in a music video session. Speakers from other destination spoke about what they did and how they used music to sell their destination. I took notes and wrote down some ideas that came to me. When I returned to the office, I told my boss I came up with idea to top ‘Best Day’, that included a way to generate website views during out off-season and increase the music section on our website. The idea sat with my until January, I then talked to my boss again, and this time I had the while idea flushed out. Granted there were some obstacles and hurdles along the way, otherwise, I thought it was a great idea.
Idea – Let’s create a ‘I Love Lake County Song Search’ contest, where local musicians would have the opportunity to write a song about Lake County. We would then have a fan vote where the musicians can promote their song and get their fans / friends to vote for them and we would push the contest. The winner of the fan vote would then get to play their song and a few others at Mickey Finns Brewery, where we would then announce the Grand Prize winner of our ‘I Love Lake County Song Search’. We would have a panel of judges that are affiliated with the Lake County music industry in one capacity or another. The Fan Vote and Judges Vote would be kept separate and not be combined. The Grand Prize winner would then receive a music video, their song recorded professionally, used as the song in our Summer Campaign TV commercials, and play at area festivals throughout the summer.
That is exactly what happened. Musicians heard about our contest through radio promotion, social media, venues mentioning it, us contacting them and going to see them perform and from their relatives. We even had people contacting us to be a judge. The fan vote went as smoothly as we could have anticipated with no hiccups. We announced the winner live on the local radio station 102.3 XLC where they played a portion of the song live on air, which was pretty cool. We then invited all of the musicians to Mickey Finns for the announcement of the grand prize winner, as everyone was still eligible, and they were informed they could bring as many people as they would like. The Fan Vote winner ended up being the Grand Prize winner as the judges felt it was the best song to represent Lake County. The Grand Prize winner then kicked things by performing his winning song live on 102.3 XLC. Local Waukegan resident, Dylan Kroll, swept the contest winning the Fan Vote and Grand Prize.
While all of the entries conveyed the wide range of things to do in Lake County, the judges felt that Dylan Kroll‘s song best captured the essence of Lake County. Now that we had the winning song, it was go time to film a video to it. We came up with script to the song and passed it along to Dylan. We kept things local, as Dylan was re-recording his song with local recording artist, Dustin Bennett, we enlisted local YouTube filmmaker Jake Jarvi of Pineapple Boy Films to start filming the video. We found 4 different groups of people to film the spelling of L-A-K-E C-O-U-N-T-Y scenes and continued to build the story of people living their life in Lake County. In we included couples, shopping, dining, roller coasters, water slides, families, bonfires and more into the video.
The end result was better than we could have anticipated and we received incredibly well throughout Lake County and in our target markets.
This project has now turned out to be one of my favorite things to ever work on and I am extremely proud of how it turned out. Something that started from nothing and grew into its own audience and went mini viral, is something I will forever cherish and be proud of.
