JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry hopes to capitalize on new work-from-home flexibility to persuade residents in other major cities to move here.
A four-city billboard campaign launched Tuesday targets digital nomads, newly freed from traditional office spaces due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
According to Curry’s Chief of Staff Jordan Elsbury, the city chose Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City and D.C. as targets, with each ad directly appealing to that city’s residents.
The Chicago billboard promises “Zero Avg. Annual Snowfall,” for instance, with an image of a woman waiting for a bus in the snow. The D.C. campaign, located in city transit shelters, urges residents to “Ditch your swamp for ours.” The New York billboard, located near the Lincoln Tunnel in Manhattan, compares the cost of a 950 square foot apartment in New York to a 2,400 square foot Jacksonville home with three bedrooms and a pool.
All billboards emphasize Florida has “no state taxes.”
“We're showing them in Duval County, what you can get an apartment for here. You can work from home on one of our beaches and our park system. This is a great opportunity the mayor's looked at to really showcase our city and what we have to offer.”
The billboards and transit signs are paid for out of the mayor’s contingency budget, a discretionary annual fund of $100k. The current campaign is costing $40k for a month and could be extended depending on response.
“Just in the past couple of days since they went life, we've had over 2,000 hits to the website that's on the billboard,” says Elsbury. “So right now, we're seeing a tremendous amount of success. If we continue to see that, yeah, maybe we'll look at expansion.”
Elsbury says the billboard campaign was the mayor’s idea, and that using him as the face of the sales pitch makes sense.
“I don't know who it is, if it's not the mayor. He's the executive of the city. He's the face of the city and all things we do, and when he's receiving national media attention -- the city is -- he's the person to do the interview. So I think it's a no brainer that it's Mayor Curry.”
Elsbury says even if the signs don’t prompt someone to move here, it may put the city “on the map as a tourist destination. They realize how cheaply they can rent here and they come here for a week and patronize local businesses. There's a number of opportunities here to celebrate our city.”
The full list of billboard locations provided by the city is below:
- Just North of O'Hare in Chicago that catches commuters
- The LA option is only available for two weeks but is just north of LAX, the Forum and the new SoFi Stadium (home to NFL Rams and Chargers)
- NYC has a 2-week option on the Lincoln Tunnel digital in Manhattan
- D.C. has no digital in the district itself. They are on digital transit shelters
