Is This New York City?
11 10 2007
Brand: New York City
Execution: A 30 million dollar campaign launched by NYC & Co. aims to attract 50 million tourists to the Big Apple annually by 2015. The tagline of the campaign “This is New York” and the campaign were ironically commissioned to a British agency, Bartle Bogle Hegarty, partly owned by a French holding.
Description: The commercial spot is a few minute video with a remix of Ella Fitzgerald as background music portraying well-known attractions of the city in a cotton-candy way: a cab ride from JFK into Manhattan, the Flatiron building, the water towers, the Fashion Week with Vogue models (???), the subway with the F train to the Wonder Wheel in Coney Island, the Brooklyn Bridge, Madison Square Garden, a Van Gogh’s Starry Night painting at the Metropolitan Museum, Central Park, the Yankee Stadium, New York World’s Fairs in Flushing Meadows Queens, a double-decker tourist bus, Times Square and the Empire State Building.
What We Like: the video is dynamic and flows from place to place without boring the viewer. It is ironic too: the Flatiron building is topped with whipped cream and a cherry, the Statue of Liberty waves at the tourists, etc. The spot is really well-packed graphically and has the ability to talk to new target markets, ie. families.
What We Don’t: most New Yorkers will hate the spot. It is cheesy and New York does not seem the Big Apple you see every day. The city looks more like Disneyland in the video. Plus, anybody with a little background in destination marketing knows that too many icons to represent a place can do more harm than good. New York is many different things to every body, but a basic marketing principle is that you cannot be everything to everybody. The target market in the spot is not clear.
Conclusions: Is New York going to make the same mistake as Las Vegas trying to attract families? If so, the city will certainly lose some of the charm that turned the city into the myth that “never sleeps”.
I do not like the spot. It is not New York. I do not think it is going to harm the city though. It is the first time that NYC is adopting such an integrated campaign. It will work. BUT I wonder… Does NYC need more tourists?