The Campaign for New Orleans
When I first got back from evacuation I called J, whose father started one of the largest advertising agencies in the city and told him I wantd to talk to him about an idea I have. We set up a lunch but that day he had a ton of fires to put out and had to suddenly go to Baton Rouge and one thing led to another and we weren’t able to hook up.
My idea was I wanted to see if his agency might be interested in doing pro bono work to get a message out across the country that New Orleans is coming back. Some time passed and we didn’t reschedule and I heard there was a $5 million pool to get the message out and thought that Steve Perry (head of the Tourism Commission here) was taking care of all this.
Well this hasn’t been taken care of, and recently I conducted an online survey for my advertising sources where I pooled the reporters who work at my company about their media habits – one of the advertising sources from New Orleans put in a question about whether New Orleans would be as fun post-K as it was pre-K and a resounding majority of the reporters who work with me said no, they don’t think it would be.
SO last night when I saw J, I said we need to talk – we need to do something about this – I am personally a proselytizer for this city and am trying to recruit every minion I come across who travels here and enjoys our largesses to go spread the word when they return that New Orleans is open for business and coming back better than before – but that word of mouth could take up to five years to be successful – we need a campaign – we need to do this now.