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LONE WOLF ADVERTISING
Believing in Magic
Forget ‘inclusion' — successful Marketing requires a Magician (and a Junta)
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Business New Haven
9/6/1999
By: Russ Madison
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As a person inner city-educated (Hillhouse High School), a former businessperson in the city, official ad agency for New Haven (1990), and agency for the Regional Growth Partnership (RGP, 1995), I'm responding to BNH's request for a marketing point of view. Therefore I will tell it like it is, as I see it.
A Look Back
New Haven can be Marketed or marketed. For decades it has been marketed. Small m. In 1990, chosen to help Market the city, I chose uppercase. I failed. Here's why:
There are two New Havens: the City of New Haven and the City of Yale. The latter is outpacing the former in real estate, corporate profitability, professional personnel and every other relevant category. Yale is rich; New Haven is poor. They are competitors, not symbiotic bed partners. New Haven can do no better than to sell its streets to Yale.
1990, a city Marketing budget was appropriated, boosted with corporate funding; in escrow, it was never spent on media. A few ads were produced and run, pro bono, in the New Haven Register.
A New York PR firm was retained and proved embarrassingly ineffective. They were not into Marketing. They spoke, and spoke well; a few articles appeared in far-flung media. They wrote thick plans. They spoke to all the right insiders, who spoke to one another. Virtually nothing was done.
Lowercase marketing is people talking to one another. It all sounds marvelous, but it is not Creative. They speak well, but Creativity stops with words formed by the tongue.
A Look Ahead
Here is what New Haven should do:
1. If there is Creative Magic in an "outside" consultant, hire them (although there are many Marketing professionals in and around this city).
2. Secede from the City of Yale. Let them Market themselves. Do not suck up to their academic prowess and economic power.
3. Create a serious Marketing Junta. Two people, no more. Exclude all city officials, attorneys and power brokers. The outside consultant Magician reports to the Junta, no one else. The Junta reports to itself.
4. Hold no more marketing (lowercase) meetings with the historic eclectic corporate volunteers. Suspend interactive chamber-RGP-COG-city-Yale meetings pertaining to city Marketing. Just the Junta and the Magician. For once, let Marketing experts create the Marketing sans steering committees. The latter may mean well, but carry too much clutter and baggage. They are conservative and revisionist. New Haven Marketing needs bold, aggressive, outrageous, head-turning spins to become successful in the 21st century. There is too much competition.
5. End "inclusiveness." It wastes time, patronizes and strangles the creative process of the Junta/Magician.
6. End the agonizing, polarizing, symbolic search for a socio-economic panacea: the Long Wharf mall. A new mall is just another future housing project for retail. In 50 years it will be under water anyway from the inevitable melting of the polar caps and the rising waters of Long Island Sound. Rather, the Junta and Magician should begin to think of New Haven as a city of saltwater canals, like a Venice of the Northeast, with tourists shopping from gondolas along lower Chapel Street and Grand Avenue. The mall, in light of Internet shopping, e-commerce and our electronic compulsion to crash our culture, will become redundant. If this factors into the Junta's Marketing plan, let them suggest retaining an architect capable of planning and converting the mall into low-income family units.
7. Create a cross-Sound high-speed ferry service (something I strongly suggested in 1990, long before the Mashantucket tribe created a similar service in New London) to access the wealthy North Shore of Long Island. Co-op tourism programs with Long Island cities.
8. Raze the Hill section and build a new airport. If that's "impossible," extend Tweed-New Haven's runways out into Long Island Sound to accommodate large jets. Eventually extend this runway to become a causeway that, like the Florida Keys highway, bridges the Sound to tap the Long Island market.
9. Enroll New York as a Sister City - not a city in Israel, Ireland or South America. Since New York draws sustenance from New Haven County, let it become reciprocal. Let "the world's greatest city" feed some energy into "the greatest little city in the world." Swap mayors for a day. Get horse-drawn carriages around our Green.
10. Jousting on the Green. Relieve ethnic tensions and build rapport with New Haven police. Blacks, whites, Latinos, police - all interact in jousting. On foot, on horseback. Attracts national media.
A Look Sideways: Regionalism
While it begins at Church and Chapel, give it a Marketing profile of its own. Let RGP administrator Bob Santy do his thing with the biotechnologies. Do not integrate or confuse Marketing tourism (the current culture syndrome, et al.) with economic development.
Regionalism is an ideal promoted by an elite in rooms with circular tables. It makes good speak, and therefore good lowercase marketing. The Magician will need to concoct two disparate Marketing/marketing plans. Regionalism is noble, but the Junta and Magician will have to deal with the circular tables. It is a tough bunch.
The Wrap
Suggested Marketing theme for the next century:
"New Haven: Long Island Sound's New Wave City."
Uppercase Marketing, lowercase marketing. "You pays your money and you takes your choice."
Russ Madison is principal of Lone Wolf Advertising in Woodbridge.
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