Note: This post has been updated. Any and all updates appear at the end of the original post.

So that's the new slogan for promoting the State of Oregon: "We Love Dreamers". While I await the actual presentation here at Leadership Summit 2003 which will officially unveil this new slogan and its accompanying campaign, we can check in with today's article in The Oregonian:

The slogan -- which replaces the old "things look different here" catchphrase -- was devised by Wieden+Kennedy, the well-known Portland advertising firm that invented "Just Do It" for Nike.

The "dreamers" slogan and a series of sample ads, which will be presented at an Oregon business summit today in Portland, are designed for a wide variety of purposes, including tourism, business recruitment and state-product marketing.

Dan Wieden, one of the ad firm's founders, said the campaign is built around the "basic sense of idealism" that defines the Oregon culture. As a result, the advertising extols Oregon innovations such as publicly owned beaches as well as the notion that you can find a man in a suit and a man in dreadlocks side-by-side on a bus, chatting pleasantly.

...

Debby Kennedy, marketing director for the Port of Portland, is heading the "Brand Oregon" project out of the governor's office, and she said few, if any, states are trying to develop a marketing plan that is as far-reaching.

The idea, she said, is to create a buzz about Oregon by developing a consistent theme across a wide variety of advertising. Kennedy said she envisions a software executive in the Bay Area someday seeing an Oregon business recruitment ad in a workplace publication, going home and reading a tourism ad in a consumer magazine, then spotting an Oregon agriculture display in a supermarket produce section.

Which is all well and good, and I understand the intentions of such an integrated brand and campaign. But is "We Love Dreamers" really the best that the allegedly creative minds of Wieden+Kennedy could come up with? Does this slogan really do anything, without further elaboration and explanation, to spark a sense of Oregon's uniqueness?

Yes, okay, I'm biased. As I've said here before, I firmly believe that I have what would be an utterly killer concept for a "Brand Oregon" that elegantly captures everything they are trying to do in a short and sweet thematic wrapper. And if I felt like I could reveal it without losing it altogether, I'm confident that people would see it as leaps and bounds beyind the tepid conceptualization dreamed up by a company that is considered to be an exemplar of Oregon's (and Portland's) creative industries.

I'll post more later today when the reveal the ads themselves, and discuss (hopefully) how this particular brand concept came about. But I don't expect anyone to be able to sell me on it.

This entry was posted by The One True b!X on December 1st, 2003, at 11:57 AM and is filed under Design & Development, State of Oregon. There are three comments (most recently on May 22nd, 2005, at 6:14 PM) and .