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Brand New Haven
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Business New Haven
8/20/2001
By: Michael C. Bingham
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Every four or five years, New Haven decides that the remedy to its declining population and corporate base is a new, improved marketing campaign.
Here we go again.
The creative concept is - well, nobody can ever decide. Is it to entice people who, having attained some modicum of business success, managed to relocate themselves and their families from East Rock or Westville to Branford or Guilford, to move back - or at least return periodically for a veggie enchilada at Claire's or an evening at the Shubert? Or is it to entice residents of Teaneck, N.J. or West Springfield, Mass. to come for a day visit to the Yale Center for British Art?
Well, both, maybe. But the crux of the current effort, directed from City Hall through the year-old Market New Haven Inc. and executed by the Glastonbury ad agency of Cashman & Katz, is to convince 20- and 30-somethings that the Elm City can offer them a good time unmatched by any other burg between Boston and Manhattan.
The message: C'mon - live a little!
There's always something fun and exciting happening in downtown New Haven,” say the radio spots. “With world-class art galleries and museums, the performing arts, retail districts where shopping has been turned into an art form, and scores of restaurants that have mastered the culinary arts, downtown New Haven offers everything it takes to bring your senses alive. Come, visit - you'll have a great time! Or, you can stay home, watch TV and eat potato chips.
New Haven - C'mon, live a little!
Well. Will this latest effort to burnish the Elm City's image be just another giant wealth transfer from the city to the New Haven Register and WTNH-TV? Or does the city have a legitimate shot to position itself as a kind of mini-Boston?
We'll find out soon enough.
The quarterback of the most recent campaign is Susan Hartt, executive director of Market New Haven Inc., who landed on these shores last July from Baltimore, Md. She, through Cashman & Katz, shot four branding TV advertisements this spring, 15-second spots that highlight shopping, dining, entertainment and nightlife in the Elm City. Radio and print ads, by contrast, have been deployed throughout the summer to promote individual events such as the New Haven Jazz Festival or the series of G-rated movie screenings on the Green during July and August. The message, according to Hartt, is that “New Haven is a cool place.”
Who is supposed to be influenced by all this? “We have a fairly young target [audience],” Hartt says, principally people in their 20s and 30s. “The notion, with the branding advertising, was that these spots will be used [over] the three years of the initial campaign effort,” she says.
The spots ran on Channel 8 news programs for a first flight of about four weeks, beginning in April, primarily on morning and evening news programming. The campaign subsided during the late-June International Festival of Arts & Ideas, but will resume later this month, Hartt says.
“I would like to be able to come back in at holiday time,” Hartt adds, “but there is no [financial] commitment for that at the moment. Right now, we don't have the money for it, so we'll just have to see what we can do.”
This year, all told, Market New Haven Inc. will spend about $50,000 on WTNH advertising spots, although Hartt notes that, as a media “partner,” Channel 8 is donating an equivalent amount of ad time to the campaign.
A similar amount will have been spent, mostly over the summer, on print ads, principally in the New Haven Register. The objective was to get people to attend downtown events beyond the International Festival of Arts & Ideas (which had its own ad campaign). “All the radio and print [ads] revolved around events, “ explains Hartt. “Primarily our own events, but also because I felt it was very important that people began to realize that New Haven was a lot of things.”
Most, but not all, of the advertised events took place on the Green during the warm-weather months. “We have promoted the New Haven Jazz Festival, the early-August gospel festival and the “Starry, Starry Saturday Nights” concert series that have brought artists such as Little Feat and Harry Belafonte to the Green for free concerts.
Hartt & Co. “have tried to promote this notion that every Saturday night from June through [this year] September 8 there was a free event on the Green,” she says.
Who pays for all of this? A consortium including many of the usual funding suspects, including the city, Yale, New Haven Savings Bank, the United Illuminating Co. and SNET. The total annual advertising budget, including radio, this year will cost about $425,000, says Hartt. That number will decline over the next two years, she adds, since production costs for the TV and radio spots will have been absorbed this year, when the ads were created.
Cashman & Katz will bill Market New Haven in the neighborhood of $150,000 for the current year, Hartt says. She says the Glastonbury shop was chosen from an initial list of 12 because the spec work they presented during the bid process was “smart and sassy.”
So, is “C'mon - live a little” an effective message to those who might come to the Elm City and drop a few bucks? Hartt says that the Tennessee-based Marshall Research will conduct studies this autumn to determine to what extent the message is getting through. “We're going to hire them at six months [from the campaign's inception] to look at what difference all the work that we did in the first year made,” Hartt says.
Hartt adds that her group also conducted focus-group studies this spring “to gather some basic information about attitudes toward New Haven.”
Advertising professionals are loathe to criticize the work of their peers, and a number of local ad pros contacted for this story simply had not seen or heard any of the spots.
Still, offered one who had, “You would be hard-pressed to find anyone who actually looked like [the actors in the shopping and dining TV spots] in New Haven. [The actors] looked like they were from Kansas City. New Haven should sell itself as hip, international, ethnic” as witnessed by the almost limitless array of international cuisine available in Elm City eateries.
How will Market New Haven measure the campaign's success? One way is simply to count the number of attendees at summer events. Another method is continuing qualitative surveys at events to determine whether those coming to enjoy downtown entertainment are shopping or dining before or after events.
A third method, Hartt says, “is to look at sales tax revenues [year to year]. I need to have hard [statistics] to justify my existence.”
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