PORTLAND – One year after it was launched, a Maine Office of Tourism ad campaign appears to be boosting the state’s recognition.

Surveys of the “It must be Maine” campaign suggest Northeast residents who previously first thought of Massachusetts or Vermont ads are now remembering ads for Maine, said Dann Lewis, Maine’s tourism director.

The three-year campaign targets people who have never been to Maine and highlights the state’s diversity of outdoor experiences. Television and print ads have run in southern New England and New York.

It’s too early to say if the campaign will result in more tourist visits, but Lewis considers the survey results promising.

“It’s an early indication that the ad campaign is working,” he said.

Lewis presented those and other findings Tuesday at the Governor’s Conference on Tourism in South Portland. The annual event features workshops geared to businesses associated with the travel and hospitality industries.

Tourism is Maine’s largest employment sector, directly responsible for 77,000 jobs. Travelers in 2002 spent $6.2 billion in the state and contributed $556 million in tax revenues.

Still, research shows the state is lagging behind most other ocean states in attracting coastal tourists, and that Maine captured only 3.5 percent of the Northeast tourist market in 2002.

The “It must be Maine” campaign, which will cost the state roughly $9.6 million, was developed by a New York City marketing and ad agency, Warren Kremer Paino.

Before the start of the campaign last April, the firm interviewed 400 people in Boston, New York, Hartford, Conn., and Albany, N.Y. and found Maine ranking third, behind Massachusetts and Vermont, in what people remembered from state destination advertising.

A follow-up survey in July put Maine in first place for ad-campaign recall. Participants also ranked the state as the region’s top vacation destination.

Peter Warren, chief executive officer at Warren Kremer Paino, said his staff tried to distinguish Maine from ad campaigns for other states, and to broaden public perception of the state.

“Maine is perceived as lighthouses, lobsters and moose,” he said.

That is why the campaign theme highlights unusual or surprising activities that visitors can experience in Maine, such as the balloon festival in Lewiston-Auburn or sled dog races in northern Maine.

One image for this spring and summer’s campaign shows a man and woman sitting in lounge chairs in the surf as the ankle-deep ocean flows around them. The headline reads, “Head to the south seas,” but the shot was taken in Ogunquit.

Aaron Perkins, who owns The Dunes, a 36-room seasonal resort in Ogunquit, said the image counters Maine’s reputation of being a frigid place with an ocean too cold to enjoy, even during the summer.

“That image is designed to speak to the misconception that Maine is near the Arctic Circle,” said Perkins, who also chairs the Maine Tourism Commission’s marketing committee.