Alisa Bailey is president and chief executive officer of Virginia Tourism Corp. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the ubiquitous “Virginia is for lovers” slogan, which was just named one of the top 10 travel campaigns of all time by Forbes.com. Bailey discusses the phrase’s history.

What’s the story behind the slogan?

The office, which is now the Virginia Tourism Corporation, was called Virginia State Travel Service at the time in 1969. They’d done some research that indicated that Virginia was not capturing this market of a large segment of the population, a younger demographic which we now call the baby boomers. … They had a team with an ad agency called Martin & Woltz; they came up with “Virginia is for history lovers,” “Virginia is for music lovers,” and then they just branded it as “Virginia is for lovers.”