Colorado is taking a nontraditional approach to the usual efforts of creating ads that are meant to help burnish the brand image of a state. With an initiative — Making Colorado — to be announced on Tuesday, the state will ask its residents for advice that will shape the development of a campaign that is to be introduced in August.
And rather than hiring an advertising agency to create the campaign, the state will rely on a team of 10 to 12 professional copywriters, graphic designers and creative technologists who are Colorado residents. Those team members will be selected by Dave Schiff, a founder of Made Movement, an agency in Boulder that specializes in work for companies that sell American-made products.
Acting as a kind of overseer for the initiative will be Alex Bogusky, a resident of Boulder who became famous as the wunderkind creative leader of the Crispin Porter Bogusky advertising agency — and notorious after he left the industry in 2010 and began speaking out against the way products like fast food and soft drinks are marketed.
Information about Making Colorado will be available on a Web site, makingcolorado.gov, which is to go live on Tuesday. The initiative is the brainchild of Aaron Kennedy, who was appointed last year as the state’s first chief marketing officer by Gov. John Hickenlooper.
“The idea we have is to create a unifying brand identity” for the state, Mr. Kennedy said, “a clear and concise statement of what Colorado stands for” that would be separate from campaigns that seek to encourage tourism or business development.
The initiative may or may not “end up with a slogan,” he added, or perhaps may produce “a graphic identity that could tie together all the messaging from the State of Colorado.”
The plans for Making Colorado call for residents of the state to be asked on the Web site to critique the work of the ad professionals who are chosen by Mr. Schiff. First up: asking for answers to the question “What makes Colorado Colorado?”
There will also be elements to the effort that include a committee called the Making Colorado Brand Council, to be composed of senior managers like chief executives and chief marketing officers from leading state businesses, and a committee called the Making Colorado Youth Advisory Council, composed of high school seniors from each of the state’s 64 counties.
Mr. Bogusky, in an e-mail, wrote that he became involved “because the governor and I got to be friends when he was the mayor of Denver.”
Governor Hickenlooper “doesn’t do anything without talking to people first,” Mr. Bogusky said. “A lot of people!”
The initiative “draws on the strength of the passionate population” of the state, he added, “and the incredible pool of professional marketing talent to build Colorado’s branding from the ground up.”
“We think Colorado is a state on the leading edge,” Mr. Bogusky concluded, “and we want this campaign to be the first and best example of how you promote your state in the 21st century.”
Mr. Kennedy, the state’s chief marketing officer, worked for brands like Oscar Mayer and Pepsi-Cola before founding a restaurant chain, Noodles Company, which is now based in Broomfield, Colo., and controlled by Catterton Partners.
Mr. Kennedy said he hoped the initiative would generate ideas about expressing Colorado’s identity beyond familiar images like “mountains and ski resorts.”
For instance, he described how Colorado is a state with “a young, healthy population” that has been enjoying job growth.
Another goal is to avoid having the state “identified by headlines in the news,” Mr. Kennedy said, alluding to the movie theater shootings in July 2012 in Aurora.
The elaborate schedule for Making Colorado ends on Aug. 29, with the planned introduction of the initiative’s handiwork by Governor Hickenlooper in a conference in Denver called the Colorado Innovation Network Summit.
Mr. Kennedy estimated the budget for the initiative at just under $1 million.
Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/colorado-looks-to-its-own-people-to-burnish-its-image/?partner=rss&emc=rss