(AP) - Virginia's 2007 celebration of the 400th anniversary of the founding of Jamestown hits the road this week.
Billboards along Virginia's highways will deliver this teaser to motorists: "Join the quest to establish a New World. Guaranteed 12 percent survival rate."
The billboards are the first phase of advertisements designed to promote Jamestown 2007, a 20-month commemoration of the founding 400 years ago of the first permanent English settlement in America.
The campaign begins Monday, said Anedra Bourne, international public relations manager for the Virginia Tourism Corp., the state's tourism agency.
The billboards will be along Interstate 95 southbound near Richmond, I-295, I-64, Route 17, Route 13 near the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel and the Roanoke area, Bourne said.
The ads are part of an opening salvo intended to stir interest in the anniversary and draw tourism dollars from the celebration.
Ads showing an English ship sailing to the New World appeared in many Virginia newspapers this month. Billboards, public transportation ads and radio and television spots will pose a question, "Could you have survived?" The ads also direct people to
www.jamestown1607.org.
Beginning in February, an interactive game on the Web site will challenge players to see whether they could have survived the settlement in 1607.
Given the popularity of reality television shows, event marketers see a survivor-type theme as one way to generate interest in Jamestown 2007.
"We have the challenge of making 1607 significant in people's everyday lives," said VTC head Alisa Bailey. The strategy is to incorporate messages that will move today's audience: survival, free enterprise, democracy and race relations.
State tourism officials are attempting to whet the public's appetite for the historic commemoration at a time when recent surveys reveal the majority of the country might not know the significance of Jamestown.
State officials hail the multimillion dollar event as the most "significant American anniversary since the 1976 bicentennial."
(Copyright 2004 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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