Our goal was to drive awareness of Lexington, KY as a fun and friendly travel destination via earned media and social conversations. This goal supports a long-standing marketing strategy for VisitLEX, the city's tourism and convention bureau. In order to outcompete similar cities, VisitLEX pairs paid media efforts with big, buzzworthy brand stunts to drive awareness via earned media and social conversation.
This strategy has made Lexington one of the most talked about destination brands in America over the last decade.
Lexington suffers from low awareness and less-than-stellar public perceptions due to negative stereotypes associated with the region. Many people believe Kentucky to be uneducated and unwelcoming to minority groups.
Yet, Lexington was named one of the friendliest places in the U.S. by Condé Nast in 2023. It was also ranked as one of the top 25 most educated American cities.
It was time to let the universe know just how friendly and welcoming it is to travelers of all kinds.
We found our opportunity when highly publicised congressional hearings around UFOs took over mainstream media and conversations on social. We also observed the public’s growing fascination with deep space and the possibility of extraterrestrial life (65% of Americans believe in life beyond Earth, Pew 2021).
This led to an out-of-this-world idea for VisitLEX: Lexington, the friendliest of cities, would launch the world’s first interstellar tourism campaign into the cosmos and invite extraterrestrials to visit.
To achieve this historic feat, we assembled a team from the University of Kentucky—experts in astrobiology, computer engineering, linguistics, and philosophy—to devise a message that we could blast into outer space with a powerful laser. It would promote Lexington’s finest qualities, including five images of local scenery, and sample 12 seconds of audio from a local legendary blues musician.
We then hosted an Extraterrestrial Welcome Party at the Kentucky Horse Park where we officially blasted our invitation into space. The message was encoded as binary pulses of light and aimed toward the TRAPPIST-1 planetary system 40 light years away, which is thought to be home to potentially habitable Earth-like planets.
While other messages have been sent into space, this was the first time in history humans have invited aliens to visit Earth—a polarizing idea sure to get people talking.
We pitched our story to local and national media outlets, first targeting science publications and parlaying that coverage into interest from mainstream media and popular social media accounts, like Pubity and Complex.
We provided journalists with a 2-minute video, images of the transmission event, graphics explaining our interstellar message, and a link to “The Extraterrestrial’s Guide to Lexington,” a tongue-in-cheek travel guide written for aliens. We also invited readers to the Lexington Visitors Center to add their own postcard welcome message, which will be preserved in a time capsule and given to aliens when they arrive.
The campaign far surpassed its goal of earning awareness for Lexington. It drove conversation and generated an estimated advertising value of $28 million with over three billion earned impressions. Remarkably, sentiment on social media around the campaign was 88% positive, a 61% increase over the average conversation around the state of Kentucky according to social listening tool Sprout Social.
The stunt earned more than 1,100 placements, including the front page of the USA Today Weekend newspaper, and graced outlets in Australia, the UK, Italy, Portugal, and beyond.
Not only was the story read around the world, it was covered with extraordinary accuracy and attention to detail. Nearly every placement mentioned Lexington in the lead before explaining why the destination’s horses, bourbon, Bluegrass landscape, and friendly people make it the ideal place for first contact.
The campaign also earned major recognition for the team of local scientists and scholars who helped make the idea possible. Their names and quotes were featured in publications like the Washington Post, Popular Science, Forbes, and Fast Company. Dr. Robert Lodder, the lead scientist on the campaign, is currently working on a scientific publication about interstellar laser transmission, which has already generated interest from scientists working on the John Hopkins New Horizons Project, NASA’s mission to Pluto.
While it will take centuries to measure interstellar ROI with extraterrestrial visitors, this campaign helped Lexington, Kentucky continue its momentum as one of the most talked about–and by far the friendliest–destinations among humans here on planet Earth.
