Press releases

The Visit Birmingham Christmas advertising campaign, sponsored by train operator London Midland, launched on 16th November 2009.

This year’s campaign is targeted specifically to reach residents in areas along the London Midland train route which includes Liverpool and Northampton, as well as the wider West Midlands. The campaign creative features a group of people on a wintery night out at a stunningly lit Brindleyplace.

Adverts are running in targeted press including The Independent, Liverpool Echo and Northampton Echo; radio adverts are running on the Heart network, Smooth and Liverpool’s Radio City, and online across a variety of websites.  A Christmas-themed leaflet has been inserted into national press and distributed via a door drop. Take a look at visitbirmingham.com to shake the festive Snowglobe!
Work continues overseas in Amsterdam where we are also running a series of adverts to encourage Dutch visitors into Birmingham Airport. We produced a special pull-out section of The Birmingham Post, ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, which was then translated in Dutch and distributed in Amsterdam through Central Station and at a lunch for travel media in the city.

Moving into new channels we have launched our first online game “ ‘Dam to the ‘Ham ”  which is receiving excellent reviews from online gamers and creating interest in Birmingham amongst a new audience. Go to visitbirmingham.com to see how well you can do! The website goes from strength to strength, generating its highest volume ever of unique visitors last month.

Visit Birmingham continues to get positive coverage off the back of its association with the city’s two premier league football clubs.  The latest event saw visitbirmingham.com and Birmingham City Football Club team up to develop a very special Blues curry to celebrate the start of National Curry Week.

To create the dish, Blues players James McFadden and Franck Queudrue teamed up with  chefs from the award winning Lasan restaurant and students from University college Birmingham, in a competition to see who could come up with the best new dish.  Franck’s curry was chosen by a panel of top judges, including Michelin-starred chef Luke Tipping and Blues vice president Mike Wiseman.

Media coverage for this event included Soccer Saturday, Soccer Am, Premier League World, ITV Central, BBC Midland’s Today, Daily Star, The Sun, The Independent, Sunday Mirror, The People, BBC Radio WM News of the World, Sunday Express and Match magazine.

Finally, the German Christmas market continues to keep visitors flocking to the city and in the media spotlight. Coverage so far has include an excellent piece on the Daily Mail online website; as well as the Sky Travel website, French travel magazine – Petit Fute, on About UK and in The Daily Telegraph.