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Entries from March 31st, 2008

Free Adirondack Photography For Everyone

March 31st, 2008 · 2 Comments · Destination Marketing

Are you a Destination Marketer? Do you need some pictures for promotion and marketing?

I’ll bet you’re tired of paying huge professional photographer fees and expenses only to get a dozen usable photos. Why not simply tap into the power of the people?

Flickr LogoCheck out Flickr right away. Using the Advanced Search, you can search for images you can use for FREE. Just plug in your desired search terms and make sure you check the Creative Commons filter and either/both “Find content to use commercially” and “Find content to modify, adapt, or build upon“. Here’s a link to all the Adirondack pictures freely usable by anyone, anytime. Enjoy.

Free Adirondack Photography

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Lake Placid in the Finger Lakes

March 28th, 2008 · 5 Comments · Destination Marketing

Villa Serendip, Lake Placid NY

For a variety of reasons, I should keep my mouth shut. Oh well.

In some previous post, I mentioned the selection of a new PR Agency of Record for our Empire State. If anyone has been following this stuff, even with a stable administration, there has been some big changes regarding state tourism marketing. New leadership, repositioning of the brand, Saatchi & Saatchi, etc. etc. Well, change is good, right?

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Branding New York

March 19th, 2008 · 2 Comments · Destination Marketing

Here’s an interesting little piece that I found this morning:

Chewing the ‘Big Apple’

A report entitled ‘The Branding of Cities’ by Julia Winfield Pfefferkorn in 2005, reveals that for a city to be adjudged a brand, it must possess certain criteria. This includes defining characteristics that can be readily identified, in terms of functional as well as non functional qualities, including city appearance, people’s experiences of the city, their belief in the city, what the city stands for and the kind of people that inhabit the city. Case studies of cities that have been successfully branded would be those of New York and Paris, wherein the above criteria was met. Berlin too tried the branding exercise, but failed somewhere along the way because of confusing non-distinctive brands, economic problems and a negative history. In the case of New York City, the title ‘the big apple’ is claimed to have originated somewhere in the 1970s, when jazz artists began using it as slang for a desirable location to perform. The New York Convention and the Visitor’s bureau decided it was an innovative strap line that presented the city as a ‘cheery’ place and New York officially became ‘the Big Apple’. At the same time, an effort was made to promote tourism in the state and the ‘I Love NY’ campaign kicked off. Pfefferkorn, in her report, refers to it as one of the most successful and longest branding campaigns in history. Iconic sites like the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, and Central Park soon came to be the props that held the entire branding strategy together. A well-branded city will withstand the test of time and this can be seen in the case of New York. Post 9/11, the city was shaken, but regained its composure quickly. If brand New York is associated with all things cosmopolitan, Paris, with its cobbled streets and intricate architecture, became the romantic city. And if it bodes well to play on historical associations while branding a city, Rome would be one such instance. (link)

And thus the problem of “I Love NY” and branding the rest of the state with that tagline. Here in the Adirondacks, our image seems diametrically opposed to the perception of “all things cosmopolitan”.

So, when you hear “The Adirondacks”, and based on the criteria above, what comes into your mind?

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