CHARLESTON, W.Va. — “Take Me Home, Country Roads” are the lyrics now getting the attention from hundreds of millions of viewers who happened to be watching the commercials in the first half of Sunday night’s Super Bowl.
A Rocket Mortgage advertisement featuring West Virginia’s famous, unofficial song, Country Roads, may have not been specifically designed to promote the state during Super Bowl 59 Sunday night, but officials are saying that it definitely helped shed a positive light on it amid the state’s growing tourism industry and its goal for more population growth.
While the ad’s primary goal was to sell homes through the mortgage lender, it’s emotional, heart-warming style with the famous John Denver song playing in the background, as well as its visuals and messaging, seemed to paint the Mountain State as an ideal place to call home.
That’s at least what Tourism Secretary Chelsea Ruby seemed to think, along with the dozens of people who she said reached out to her after the commercial aired.
Ruby came on MetroNews ‘Talkline’ the following day on Monday. She said it’s very surreal.
“It was absolutely incredible, no matter which team you were cheering for, I think all of us can agree that West Virginia was the big winner of the night,” Ruby said.
When the broadcast returned to the game with the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles at Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, over 65,000 fans had broke out into a live rendition of the song, Rocket Mortgage stated.
The entire #SBLIX crowd singing Country Roads 🎶
📺 FOX pic.twitter.com/k0YqQPfNUp
— ESPN (@espn) February 10, 2025
As West Virginia actively tries to attract new residents to live in the Mountain State, Ruby said the high-profile placement of the ad that features such a sentimental portrayal of our home state, and particularly during one of the most-watched television broadcasts of the year, could reinforce this ongoing effort of population growth.
She said it was the best free advertising they could ask for.
“It was just a magical moment, and I think it emphasizes the magic that we have in that song and using that song in the ad,” Ruby said. “That song is a song that makes people all around the country and around the world have like this amazing feeling.”
She said she knows that ad certainly made everyone who has an attachment to the Mountain State very proud.
Ruby said efforts to promote population growth in West Virginia is not the only initiative underway, but tourism promotion also continues.
The West Virginia Tourism’s annual vacation guide was released on Friday, and people can now go and request their free guide on the Tourism Department’s website. Ruby said they have received around 13,000 requests so far.
She said, however, that tourism often can lead to people wanting to move to the state and that this guide could also indirectly inspire that as well.
“It’s a great guide to what there is to see and do in the state, but it’s also a tool that we use to inspire folks to think about moving to West Virginia, people who have left the state to come back, people who are looking for a new, uncrowded place to live,” she said.
Ruby said, in fact, one of the strongest aspects about West Virginia tourism seems to be its return-visitation rate.
She said research shows that 87% of people who come to West Virginia on vacation came back, marking one of the highest return-visitation rates in the country.
So, Ruby said all they have to do is get people to come here that first time, and that Super Bowl ad could potentially be a major factor supporting that effort.
“Opportunities like the one we had last night on the Super Bowl that make people think about West Virginia, that put West Virginia into their minds are exactly the things we need to be doing to continue getting more and more people here for that first time,” Ruby said.
Ruby said that if the Tourism department wanted to deliver the same kind of awareness on that scale, she believes it could have costed them somewhere in the ballpark of $10 million dollars.