By Bob Plain in
Rhode Island’s Future
 |
| ...And Dumber. What was wrong with "The Ocean State?" |
No Rhode Islander has more reason to be outraged at the state’s
“cooler, warmer” tourism campaign than Myrna George and Bob Billington.
As the
executive directors of the South County and Blackstone Valley tourism councils
respectively, the now infamously-failed marketing campaign was effectively paid
for out of their budgets.
For the South County Tourism Council’s $100,000 investment in
the new statewide tourism marketing campaign, George said she didn’t see one
scene of South County in the promotional video.
“Not that I could identify on my iPhone,” she said. “They took
it down too quick!”
Neither are thrilled with how the new relationship has worked to
date.
“We didn’t have much of a stake in it,” said Billington of the
new logo and marketing campaign. “Trickle down doesn’t work,” said George.
Both said the regional council directors were given 51 requests
for proposals to tackle the entire marketing campaign for the state.
“They were book thick,” George said. “They did a boatload of
work on them.” Both she and Billington said they were each tasked with scoring
individual aspects of each proposal – and thought one proposal would be chosen
at the end of the process.
“It didn’t happen that way,” she said. “They fractured it into
little pieces. Glaser got the logo, Havas got branding…”
Billington added, “We weren’t really allowed to be part of the
process. They gave us a rubric and asked for our ten favorites. We thought the
next step was going to be get together as a group and sit down with the
finalists.”
George suspects this process has something to do with the
resulting product. “You can’t have diverse groups in silos,” she said. “You
can’t just hire a pr firm, you need to understand the DNA of our region.”
Billington, who was an ardent opponent of statewide tourism
marketing, said he’s ready to move on.
“They told us it would only make things
better but it worked out differently. It’s painful to watch because it could
have been done so much better. I’ve reconciled and am ready to move on. We
can’t expect a logo, or a campaign to fix things. It’s got to be the rank and
file, it’s got to be a million people strong.”
Bob Plain is the editor/publisher of Rhode Island's Future.
Previously, he's worked as a reporter for several different news organizations
both in Rhode Island and across the country.
