Mississippi, Believe IT! campaign back with new stories

One might not believe it, but acknowledging the 800-pound gorilla in the room - outdated, false stereotypes of Mississippi elsewhere in the country and world - instead of ignoring them led to the successful pro bono campaign by The Cirlot Agency called Mississippi, Believe It! (www.mississippibelieveit.com), that has now gotten an estimated 120 million hits.

In addition to the website hits, the campaign has been featured in many of the nation's largest media outlets ranging from "The Today Show" to The Washington Post, Washington Times, The New York Times, USA Today, The Christian Science Monitor and "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered" on National Public Radio.

"We started by writing on a poster board every Mississippi stereotype we could think of, and then developed an ad campaign that acknowledges the stereotype but then gives the myth versus the reality to show that is really not how it is in Mississippi today," said Rick Looser, CEO of The Cirlot Agency. "The campaign is great and a very unusual look at Mississippi, which gets publicity. If it were an uninteresting campaign, then none of the publicity would have followed it. What's unique about these ads is that they're in your face, in a gentle Southern way. We're not afraid to confront the criticism head on."

It is one thing to build a website and another to drive traffic to the site. Looser said that the publicity on other media is what has helped generate so much traffic to www.mississippibelieveit.com. For example, "The Today Show" alone has six million viewers.

"Most all of our traffic has been generated through the media and hasn't cost us anything," Looser said. "To get traffic to a website, you start with the most important ingredient, which is great content. It doesn't matter what your site is. Content is king. This is an effort to tell a story about the other side of Mississippi. It is by no means to gloss over our troubled past, but it is to demonstrate that Mississippi's image has been caught in a time warp."

His estimation about why the campaign took on a "viral" nature, spreading rapidly in the media, is that some of the subject matter and facts revealed were far outside ,the perception most of the world has about Mississippi.

"It would be like finding out Larry the Cable Guy had done a duet with Pavarotti," Looser said. "Some of the facts revealed throughout the campaign just don't fit the box Mississippi's image has been stuffed into. And I think it filled a void for folks who live in Mississippi, or have ties to Mississippi, who wanted to really demonstrate pride in the state's accomplishments."

Based on the e-mails he has received, the way people demonstrated pride in Mississippi was by cutting and pasting every ad from the campaign into their own e-mail and then sending that e-mail to everybody in their e-mail address book. That happened over and over.

"To me it is a great example of a viral campaign," Looser said. "We just put it out there. It would be disingenuous to take credit for the viral aspect of it. You can't really control that. It is controlled by the marketplace. In this case, the marketplace was Mississippians, for the most part. I've gotten e-mails from 23 different countries and that is just the people who cared enough to sit down and comment. The viral aspect of the campaign can't be overstated."

Mississippi, Believe It! recently launched new public service announcements and ads because of the attention on the state expected when the state hosts the first presidential debate in a few months. They have designed more posters to counteract the negative stereotypes about the state. The posters are being printed by Service Printers, Flowood, whose donation in support of the campaign exceeds $50,000.

One of the new ads states, "Yes, we have running water...right next to the world's finest kitchen appliances. It started with a range. A special range Fred Carl's wife wanted for her new kitchen, but that he couldn't find anywhere. So what did he do? He took his Mississippi-bred initiative and built it himself. From that one range grew an appliance empire-Viking Range Corporation right out of Greenwood, Mississippi. Now, Viking's full line of appliance can be found in gourmet home kitchens across the globe. And each one is still made in Greenwood."

Another ad says, "Yes, we can read. A few of us can even write. From Pulitzer Prize winners to revolutionaries who initiated momentous cultural change...oh, yes, Mississippians can write. No other state in the country can claim as many honored, awarded and revered writers as Mississippi. Yes, Mississippi. Where words transcend."

The ad points to the accomplishments of famous Mississippi authors such as William Faulkner, John Grisham and Eudora Welty.

Other ad headlines include:

"Yes our roads are paved ... and we have the best student drivers under the Sun." (A tribute to Houston High Schools world champion, student built, solar car.)

"Yes, we wear shoes. A few of us even wear cleats." (Highlighting the athletic achievements of Jerry Rice, Brett Farve, Steve McNair, Walter Payton and Eli Manning.)