It's all over the news, all the beaches along the Gulf Coast that have been ruined by the BP oil spill.

Yet beaches further down the coast are still pristine, and that's created a public relations challenge for businesses in those areas. How do you tell the public, specifically vacationers, that your beaches have not been affected?

That was the issue facing the Panama City Beach Convention and Visitor’s Bureau, which was worried that potential tourists would forego a visit to its beaches because of their proximity to the spill.

The bureau hit on an innovative solution: Each morning it uploads pictures of the oil-free Panama City beaches to digital billboards across the Southeast, where most of its tourists hail from.

"Everybody here very much wants to make sure we're doing everything we can to get the message out that there is no oil along any of the beaches in northwest Florida," says Dan Rowe, president and CEO of the Panama City Beach Convention and Visitor’s Bureau. "There's no better way to reassure the public than to show a photo that is live as you can be."

Each morning, a CVB staffer drives to the beach and snaps a picture. Upon returning to the office, she uploads the photo to a site belonging to Lamar Advertising, which owns the 25 billboards on which the message appears.

Lamar updates the billboards with the picture, which includes a date stamp so that those passing by know it was taken that morning.

The photo appears on the left side of the billboard, with the day's date below it. On the right side is the Panama City Beach logo and web address, below the words, "Today's forecast: clear waters and clean beaches."

The billboards began appearing in cities including Atlanta, Birmingham, Ala., Nashville and Montgomery, Ala., on May 20. The updates will continue for at least four weeks, though the CVB says it may extend the campaign, which was conceived by Lamar.

"We're going to actually start to tweet to the billboards soon and change the headlines," Rowe says. "And we're going to take the same concept to broadcast television with the message that PCB is open for business."

Lamar says the daily impressions for the billboards are 1,148,587.

The campaign works because it's a simple but smart way to correct the misperception that the oil spill has shut down everything along the Gulf Coast.

The images are credible because they are updated each and every day, and there's nothing heavy-handed about the message.

Most of all, it's a smart way to use digital technology to deliver a timely message.

"It's a way to offer real credible information to the public in a way that they may not be expecting to see where it can resonate," Rowe says. "It cuts through the intense nature of this story, because whenever you turn on the TV and look at the news, they're showing images of oil coming out of the leak. It does give that perception that the entire Gulf of Mexico is covered in the stuff."