East Side, West Side, Online

Earlier this year, NY Skyride was looking for a way to convey its high-tech pizzazz to Web visitors. It had to be snazzy and engaging: Competition for the Big Apple tourist dollar is tight, and NY Skyride, a 12-minute Imax tour of the city's landmarks housed on the second floor of the Empire State Building, faced a unique challenge.

“Unlike a hotel or a visual item, we're an experience,” says NY Skyride's business development director Myron Baer. “Putting clips from our attraction online is like showing a 3-D movie without the 3-D glasses. So we went through five or 10 different design concepts. We wanted to do a real left turn.”

In fact, its marketing turn was more of a 360-degree affair. Web developer Jim Kalogerakos, vice president of 180 Marketing and in charge of the Web site's redesign, says he was looking for a marketing element that would convey NY Skyride's high-tech sizzle.

“The whole intent was to pre-sell the experience before users arrive in town,” he says.

In the course of strategizing, Kalogerakos turned to a database of 3-D architectural models that Google Earth has amassed, all created by consumer users of its SketchUp modeling application and available for free. Kalogerakos assumed New York City would be heavily represented, and it was, with 3-D versions of some 30 or 40 buildings featured in the NY Skyride tour.

Using those, he was able to put together a 1-1/2-minute Google Earth movie that swoops viewers from the Statue of Liberty and Coney Island's Cyclone roller coaster past the planned towers at Ground Zero and Yankee Stadium to the Empire State Building itself.

Building those 3-D renderings from scratch would have cost “tens of thousands of dollars,” Kalogerakos says. But using the open-source content Google had available meant the biggest expense in creating the movie was a $400 licensing fee for Google Earth Professional software.

Pat Brusha, co-founder and COO of Web marketing firm A Couple of Chicks, says preliminary analysis available at press time indicates that page views and unique views for NY Skyride's site were up in May (20,000 and 13,000, respectively) and bounce rates from the site fell below 20% — “a very strong result,” she says.

Baer says one aim in relaunching NY Skyride.com was to draw visitors to printable e-ticketing, which replaced a buy-and-mail sales system: “We really needed something [beyond] more descriptive copy and more pictures to get people to move into the site.”

And while standing out is the name of the game when marketing an attraction in New York, even getting found in relevant Google searches can be a challenge. One job for Brusha's firm was optimizing the site so it would turn up on a search of terms related to the Empire State Building.

“If people are headed here, we want them to know about us before they arrive,” Baer says.

NL

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