Destination DC launches

Because I wasn't in town yesterday, I didn't go to the press conference launching the repositioned Washington Convention and Tourism Corporation into Destination DC.

For a few years I've been critical of DC's tourism promotion efforts. The city didn't have a tourism plan, and the Washington.org website had to be the worst Convention and Visitors Bureau website of any major North American city.

I haven't had a chance to read any of the materials, or even checked out the new Destination DC website. Gary Imhoff is critical of the new slogan in the latest issue of themail, where he writes:

Today, Mayor Fenty and Destination DC, the jazzed-up name for the Washington, DC, Convention and Tourism Corporation, announced the new “branding” for our city, this year’s new slogan for the permanent campaign to encourage tourism: “Create Your Own Power Trip. "

I’ve been thinking about this all day, since the slogan was leaked early on last night’s evening news. I’ve been working diligently on what to say about this slogan. I’ve tried hard. But I give up. “Create Your Own Power Trip” is beyond my poor powers to parody or satirize.

I can imagine that power trip slogans were very appealing to the upper levels of the Fenty administration. It’s their style, and I can hear now the cheers that went up in the mayor’s bullpen when power trip branding was announced. But who else is this supposed to appeal to?

And are Washingtonians going to have to put up with the kind of tourists that would be attracted by a “power trip” campaign? Look, I’m not being paid anywhere near what Destination DC undoubtedly gave the consultants who came up with this turkey — I’m not being paid at all — and I can come up with two better campaigns right off the top of my head: 1) “You gotta see the monuments once in your life. Get it over with.” 2) “The museums are free, and the kids won’t be nearly as bored as you expect.” Use either of them and tourism will get a big boost; use them both together and we’ll double our numbers. And we’ll get friendly, cheerful, down-home, middle-American families who’ll be easy to live with, instead of the annoying yuppies who’ll be attracted by fantasies of rubbing shoulders with power brokers and going on power trips in DC.

----------
At the Main Street Conference, I bought some books including a book on values and place, as well as on tourism marketing.

There's a lot of justifiable criticism of tourism taglines and slogans, because they can be crap, and the logos too. Although to be fair, cities aren't the only entities that screw this up.

The issue with DC is that it has two very different stories/narratives. One is the national-federal-history of our nation story (and this is how the world interprets DC as the Capital City of the United States). The other is the local story: the typical story of local development, creation of communities, architecture, historic preservation, culture and arts, etc.

I have written a lot about these issues, see this link for past blog entries.

It's difficult for any organization to cover every point, but I think the difference in entryway signs between DC and Chicago explains a lot...

Photo from Interstate Guide. (I saw this sign yesterday, depicted in a video about Chicago played because next year's conference is in Chicago.)