PORTLAND (AP) – Maine tourism officials for years have targeted out-of-staters with ad campaigns to boost the state’s tourism industry.

Now, the industry is going after Mainers.

In television commercials that began airing last week in Portland, Bangor and Presque Isle, the industry is suggesting that residents might want to plan their next vacation somewhere special – in Maine.

The industry has scraped together $100,000, an amount matched by broadcaster contributions, for what is thought to be the first formal campaign to convince residents to recreate within state lines.

The reason is money. Direct tourism spending hit $6.2 billion in 2002, with nearly $2 million of that spent by Mainers. While nobody is sure of where the money came from, there’s a sense that much of it flowed from the more populated and prosperous communities in southern Maine to rural, economically challenged regions in the north and east.

Galen Rose, an economist at the Maine State Planning Office, said in-state travel is worth promoting because it helps keeps money in the Maine economy that otherwise would go elsewhere.

“If you go to Bar Harbor and spend the weekend there, you’re not going to Cape Cod,” he said.

And for rural areas such as Washington and Aroostook counties, southern Maine represents the greatest potential market to tap.

“For them, southern Maine is just as important a market (as other states),” Rose said. “They don’t care if people come from Connecticut or Cape Elizabeth.”

The 30-second TV commercials, which began last week and run into May, don’t identify specific regions. But the spots do present a diversity of enticing images of a Maine vacation.

One ad features a golfer teeing off along a hill-framed fairway, children flying kites on an ocean beach, a woman admiring paintings at a museum and mountain bikers cresting a summit trail.

The voiceover concludes: “For your next vacation, enjoy what’s right in your own backyard.”

“It’s sort of an in-state branding campaign,” said Nat Bowditch, assistant director of the Maine Office of Tourism. “So if you’re thinking about vacationing in Cape Cod or Nova Scotia or Vermont, think about Maine.”

The campaign is being promoted by the tourism office and the Maine Hospitality and Tourism Alliance, which includes the Maine Tourism Association and the state’s eight tourism regions.

AP-ES-04-06-04 0217EDT