Indoor Billboard Advertising in New Bern, NC

Reading The Market

Three Audiences Sharing One Small City

New Bern is the second-oldest colonial town in North Carolina, settled in 1710 by Swiss and Palatine colonists under Christoph von Graffenried and named after Bern, the Swiss capital. It served as the colonial and then state capital from 1746 until 1792, and the reconstructed Tryon Palace still anchors the historic district — it draws well over two hundred thousand visitors in a typical year, money that lands in downtown hotels, shops and restaurants. New Bern is also where a local pharmacist, Caleb Bradham, invented Pepsi. For a city of roughly thirty-one thousand people at the confluence of the Neuse and Trent rivers, that is an unusually large amount of reason to visit.

What makes New Bern worth buying is that those visitors are only one of three overlapping audiences. The second is a substantial retiree population — Craven Community College runs a Lifetime Learning Center aimed specifically at older adults, and the riverfront neighborhoods around the city have been drawing retirees for decades. The third is Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, a short drive southeast in Havelock, whose payroll and contracting activity register in the billions across the region. Those three groups have almost nothing in common except the streets they use.

For an advertiser, that spread is the opportunity rather than the problem. Because the audiences separate by venue type instead of by neighbourhood, you can steer a New Bern campaign by choosing rooms rather than by choosing addresses. A cigar lounge and a pub do not carry the same crowd as a boba cafe. And unlike the barrier-island towns an hour south, New Bern’s visitor economy runs on heritage and the rivers rather than on a summer rental week, so a campaign here does not collapse in October.

Buying New Bern

How Advertisers Usually Structure It

• Pick the room type first — the audience in a cigar lounge is not the audience in a boba cafe
• Run long enough to catch both the weekday local crowd and the weekend visitor crowd
• Pair New Bern with Greenville if you are selling across eastern North Carolina, or with Jacksonville if you are selling to the coast
• Ask what is actually open before you build the creative — seven venues is a finite inventory