With any destination marketing campaign, you may attract one group but alienate another. In this case, the marketing campaign for Jersey City is really designed to be shown to audiences outside of JC. It's to get the spillover from Brooklyn, Manhattan and other parts of Jersey to live and work here. So the language is going to sound a bit off and at times disingenous. Of course, residents are going to look at these and compare to whether the projected image truly reflects their own view of the city. For some it may, for others it will not. Factor in neighborhoods, ethnicities, economics, ages, etc. to this equation and you can see how difficult it is to come up with one unifying brand. You may ask, well, do we really need to market Jersey City?

In my opinion, we have the benefit of not having to try to hard sell the city — people are moving in here already but Jersey City and New Jersey both have a negative reputation and that's something we do need to counter. Whether that's done in a direct way, tongue-in-cheek, or bypassed entirely by focusing on what Jersey City has become as to what is was. This is why the new ads focus on the new — it's an opportunity to distinguish ourselves from a reputation of corruption and violence.

Will everyone be happy with this approach? Of course not, but the city has never marketed itself before and we may need to try a few approaches to see what resonates with both, internal and external audiences. If you ever read about successful campaigns like, What Happens in Vegas or I Love NY, you'll realize that it took years of misses before these finally took off, not to mention the millions of dollars of media time to pound these little slogans into people's skulls.

Someone mentioned here that they were happy that the city didn't spend a lot of taxpayer money on the slogan. The slogan is the cheapest part of the deal, the most expensive is the media you have to buy to drive the message and pulse it out regularly so that it registers. This is where most marketing efforts fail because they simply run out of money.

In 2006, the Brooklyn went through a borough slogan contest. They had gotten thousands of submissions and despite having a landmark they can call their own (Brooklyn Bridge) it was decides that no one slogan can encapsulate Brooklyn. Instead of one, they used the top favorites and created signs at strategic arteries into the borough. Some were tongue in cheek like "Welcome to Brooklyn: Believe the hype" or "Leaving Brooklyn: Fuhgeddaboudit." It was fun and helped to uphold the feisty image of Brooklyn.

Can we do this with Jersey City? Maybe. But I think it has to be a grass-roots effort as much as it is a top-down one. But we need a place to start and this might be it.

These last two frames below were part of a commercial animatic.