Skift Take
Visit Philadelphia’s new videos target black travelers making at least $75,000 and aim to reclaim some lost market share. But the campaign sends a more nuanced message to a wider audience.
Visit Philly released a new series of promotional videos featuring a celebrity host: Tarik “Black Thought” Trotter of the Grammy Award-winning hip-hop band The Roots, founded in 1987 in the city by Trotter and Questlove.
In these videos, Trotter, a Philly native, shows off his city to visiting black influencers, taking them to well-known spots like Fairmount Park as well as black-owned businesses such as Cultured Couture, about which Trotter says in the video, “This would be my gigolo headquarters, like a speakeasy haberdashery.”
The intended audience might seem obvious — black millennials — but the videos may appeal to a broader audience.
Target Audience
Trotter is a fitting choice for tapping into the millennial-dominated black travel movement. The title of the campaign, We Got You, feels like a play on the late '90s hit song, You Got Me by The Roots featuring Erykah Badu, though Visit Philly said that connection was accidental. However, the fact that The Roots is the house band on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon broadens the audience considerably.
Back to black millennials, everything about these videos speaks to this group: The hosts are young but old enough to be smart, the music is hot, everyone’s st
