“The American Experience” wasn’t cutting it.

Washington D.C.’s tourism tagline was ginned up in 1998, but less than a decade later felt stale and flat—especially compared with the sexy campaigns other U.S. cities had launched in the intervening years. So in 2006, local tourism boosters kicked off the search for a new slogan. They started with focus groups and an online survey, asking residents and travelers what they thought of the city. Not surprisingly, the museums came up. And history. But also: power.

After a few months of research, three different concepts were fleshed out into ads and tested on consumers. There was “Secret’s Out,” featuring a younger couple in a club—too dark. In “Powerful Moments,” an emotional tearjerker: A mother and child are moved by the Lincoln Memorial. Ads for “Power Play” used bright colors and images of city monuments.

Officials just couldn’t get past the city’s image as a magnet for the power hungry, so they decided to embrace it.  The result, revealed this morning: “Create your own power trip.”

“It plays to the core of who we are,” says Rebecca Pawlowski, communications director at at Destination D.C., formerly the Convention and Tourism Corporation.

For years cities didn’t pay much attention to marketing, focusing instead on things like building convention centers, says Bill Siegel, chairman of advertising research firm Longwoods International and a consultant on D.C.’s campaign. Branding was left to states or regions: Think “Pennsylvania is for Lovers” and “California: Find Yourself Here.” Though “I Love New York” is often associated with the city, the pitch comes from Albany, not Manhattan.

Destination D.C. undertook the new effort because the city was on the verge of losing travel money. Tourism is the capital’s largest private employer, and brings in $564 million in tax dollars annually. But despite a new baseball stadium, the opening of attractions such as Madame Tussauds and the Newseum, and a fresh abundance of hotel rooms, forecasters expected the number of visitors to hold steady at 15 million or even decline during the next few years. That came as weak housing prices, gloomy economic news, and high gas prices began eating away both at city tax bases and consumer appetites for leisure travel. On a positive note, it was also just as the presidential campaigns were getting hot.

Meanwhile, other cities have kicked up their spending. Last year Orlando launched a $68 million ad campaign—a 240 percent increase over the year before. New York boosted its marketing budget by a third, to $45 million. Las Vegas just announced it was spending another $30 million on its new “Experience Vegas” ads, bringing its annual total to $83 million.

Without state coffers to raid, Washington D.C. has only a fraction of the budget. It is spending about $3 million on the whole process, betting on the conventional wisdom that tourism can generate quick returns for locales—nine dollars in tax revenues for every ad dollar, by some measures.

When the city began taking its image temperature, even Siegel was surprised at how positively visitors viewed Washington D.C., going so far as to compare it with Hawaii. The problem was that tourists came for history and monuments: The capital didn’t have the hip factor of New York or even Philadelphia, which has worked hard to get noticed for its dining scene. How to attract young, urbane travelers, while remaining appealing to families? In the end, “power” was what seemed to bridge the gap.

It’s not quite “What happens in Vegas”—though given the city’s constant stream of sex scandals, that might work too—but the low-budget campaign plays to Washington’s strengths.  

“The campaign gets to why people go there, because it’s a place where important decisions are being made,” says Siegel, who helped New Orleans, Hawaii, and Ohio create ad campaigns.

The power motif will play out in a series of print ads running in national magazines like Condé Nast Traveler, Saveur, and Black Enterprise, but only from Georgia to New York, from May to August. On television they will be in four cities: Washington, New York, Pittsburgh, and Raleigh-Durham. There is “Seat of Power,” in which a white family gazes up at the Lincoln Memorial. In “Soul Power” a black couple smiles at each other across the table at a jazz club. “Power Play” has a shot of Mayor Adrian Fenty jogging through Rock Creek Park with a friend.  

The theme will be applied to various events throughout the year—“Flower Power” for the spring cherry blossoms and “Fire Power” for July fireworks.

When the project started, city officials weren’t looking to leverage the presidential election. In fact, they were wary of reinforcing the city’s wonky CSPAN image. But with the possibility of the first female or black president, the timing couldn’t be better, Pawlowski says. “It’s a great time to show off a different side of power.”