You may already aware of the huge number of vacation days that American’s leave unused each year - Expedia used the facts and figures surrounding this in an advertising campaign last year. The estimate is that this year we will collectively lose 439 vacation days. Couple the unused days with the fact that Americans already have less vacation time than the rest of the industrialized world, and you have the basis for the Five Day Weekend movement.

The Five Day Weekend Movement claims to have been was born in Asheville, NC, and is pretty clearly from the number of ads and links taking you to www.exploreasheville.org, the product of the Asheville Convention & Visitors Bureau. The “movement” website contains funny slogans, media downloads, man on the street interviews about the 5 day weekend concept, a petition to send to congress, a cafepress shop, ideas on what to do with your new longer weekend, and links to information on their upcomign rallies. The rallies are a very interesting way to take this “offline” as the 4 cities they are visiting outside of Asheville - Atlanta, Charlotte, Greensboro, and Raleigh are all an easy drive and my guess are the top points of origin for visitors to Asheville.

I think the concept of the Five Day Weekend is a refreshing, different, whimsical and fun way to promote a destination. It is indeed a whack on the head and may be enough of a whack on the head to “go viral”. And believe it or not, the swag is great. I am an Asheville evangelist and frequent visitor, but would never sport an Asheville tee shirt. I might, however, wear a “Work Less, Live More - Fivedayweekend.org” shirt or a “Take it all Off - Fivedayweekend.org” shirt.

My one concern is over the disclosure on this site. It was clear to me that this is a CVB ad campaign, but am not sure it would be clear to everyone. The “R” of the WOMMA ethics code’s “Honesty ROI” is to always disclose the relationship of the speaker to the brand (in this case, my guess is that the “movement leader” is paid directly or indirectly by the CVB). If my guess is correct, they have some work yet to do on the diclosure front. I invite the Asheville CVB & their agency to join WOMMA and anyone interested in doing this sort of campaign to review the WOMMA ethics toolkit before a launch of this sort.

And until then, Vive Asheville and Vive le Five Day Weekend!!!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 4:57 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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