Yes, it’s really: “Honestly, It’s Not for Everyone.”
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| © Courtesy of Visit Nebraska Nebraska’s new tourism campaign relies on self-deprecating humor to attract visitors. |
By Lyndsey Matthews, AFAR
Just a few months after Vilnius, Lithuania, unveiled its cheeky new tourism slogan—“Vilnius: The G-Spot of Europe”—Nebraska has followed up with an even funnier tagline to draw tourism (and attention) to the state.
Instead of promoting itself as “Nebraska Nice” anymore, the Midwestern state announced its new slogan is “Honestly, It’s Not For Everyone” at the Nebraska Tourism Conference on Wednesday, October 17.
“It was important . . . to be true to who we are and honest about what we are not,” Deb Loseke, Nebraska Tourism Commission Chair, said in a statement. While the slogan is brutally honest, the resulting ad campaign attempts to use that self-deprecating humor to change the perception that Nebraska is a boring place where there’s nothing to do.
In one of the new ads, two people are seen hiking across the unusual rock formations in Toadstool Geologic Park in the northwestern part of the state along with the phrase “Famous for our flat, boring landscape.” Another ad (seen at the top of this article) features three groups of people “tanking” down a river. “In Nebraska, we believe that only boring people get bored,” it reads. “So we invent our own fun. Like when we realized that a livestock tank would float, and thought, ‘It’s a boat.’”
So far, it looks like the campaign is working. Within one day of the announcement, the Nebraska Tourism Commission says they’ve received an “overwhelming” number of requests for T-shirts with the slogan on it. They say the resulting media coverage has reached more than 384 million people already. But will people actually go to check it out in person? Maybe not everyone, but tanking certainly looks like a lot of fun.
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