“In the 1960′s little Leavenworth, Washington’s population had dwindled significantly since its boom days as a railroad and logging town east of Seattle. Town officials dreamed up a last ditch effort to save the town from total demise and converted it to a Bavarian-themed destination. Businesses caught on and now the town is as alpine as can be in the Cascade Range. Surprisingly without being too kitschy, Leavenworth is a must-stop town for tourists and Washington locals alike. Now with their nutty mascot, Woody Goomsba and this hilarious video, Leavenworth is making the most of its reinvented location.”

This is brilliant. I’m still amazed that small town leadership would take such a huge risk, but it has paid off big time. They did something fun, the campaign got noticed and they are reaping the benefits. (A nice outcome given the dire straits the town was in before they conceived of this.)

Here are the takeaways for economic development and tourism professionals – it works because:

• It takes a stand and takes a risk
• It embraces a niche market and sells the hell out of it
• It’s a complete campaign that engaged the local community
• It’s funny, memorable and completely unexpected from LEAVENWORTH (!) – how can you not take notice?

Sure beats “Live. Work. Play.” now doesn’t it?  

#5 Teleflora – Faith Hill

No rocket science here, this one just made me giggle. Faith’s delivery of “So you just sent that?” and Sound Guy’s subsequent delivery of “My heart told me to” make the spot.

#4 Career Builder – Parking Lot

I love it when a brand revisits something that worked well and puts a new twist on it. This ad gives the viewer enough credit to remember the excellent 2006 chimpanzee spots Career Builder ran, and revisits our miserable employee and his chimp coworkers in the parking lot.

#3 Bridgestone – Reply All

An excellent spot that actually shows the product it’s advertising in use. For your next email gaffe, make sure you’re riding on Bridgestones.

#2 Chrysler – Imported From Detroit

The cinematography is gritty and beautiful, and this one gets on3 bonus points for the excellent place branding for Detroit. “Imported from Detroit” is the best piece of copywriting of all the Superbowl ads.

#1 Audi – Escape Old Luxury

And our pick for top spot goes to Audi for a spot that is genuinely creative from concept to the final line “Escape Old Luxury”. Nice to see something really different, although it would have been much better without the Kenny G cameo at the end.

The campaign asks residents to submit their “with love” idea in the hopes of  having them selected to appear on one of the billboards along I-95 purchased for the campaign. They are also encouraged to share their billboard ideas via social networks, thus increasing the reach of the campaign further.

Although crowdsourced campaigns often have the potential to go terribly wrong (see Gap logo fiasco October 2010), this one falls less on the side of exploiting the crowd being sourced, and more on the side of rallying that crowd to create pride in the city they love. It is admittedly a very fine line.

This campaign is smart and they are already getting great material for the billboards. The sharing, bragging and smiles that will come from this campaign will have a positive effect on the city and its visitors. A nice initiative all around.

You can learn more here.

Found via Place Marketing Group.

This post represents the best of what I thought was tweet-worthy in 2010. I challenge you to do the same and post your best of in the comments section or @ me on Twitter.

You can follow me here. I’d love to connect.

- HC

Best Tweets of Q4

One of the best posts I’ve read on writing for the web and email: http://ow.ly/3vMX3

RT @mashable 5 Ways Cities Are Using Social Media to Reverse Economic Downturn – http://on.mash.to/hm2l2n #econdev #placebranding

Very cool. RT @fastcompany San Francisco Aims for 100% Green Power by 2020 http://bit.ly/fKJpO0 #econdev

Hip does not equal sustainable. RT @mellormurray Great post – Cool or uncool cities? What really matters is prosperity http://ow.ly/3p20G

Need a social media policy for your EDO? Good database of corporate, gov’t and non-profit examples here: http://ow.ly/3hq2k #econdev #sm

RT @mellormurray How do you measure economic development success? http://ow.ly/39xqD

Approaching tourism from a regional perspective. Applies to #econdev too. http://ow.ly/35v4G (via @sandyratliff)

RT @jupia Low corporate taxes not a major draw of foreign investment; Conference Board http://bit.ly/c7TRa7

Business incubators as an #econdev tool – more likely to succeed AND stay local when they do – http://bit.ly/b4H7KK (via @EcDevComDev)

Best Tweets of Q3

Data as a municipal asset. http://bit.ly/b2A36R (via @MartinProsperiT) We were pretty impressed when Vancouver did this: http://ow.ly/2K8OH

Interesting ideas in here for cities/ #econdev too RT @mashable How Universities Can Win Big With Location-Based Apps – http://mash.to/2Io3I

Good news for small cities! RT @urbanophile Michigan State Study: Networks, not size, give cities competitive edge – http://is.gd/eTB9H

Don’t rely on clean tech industries for job creation: http://ow.ly/2qoIT via McKinsey Quarterly

How cities are using mobile apps for tourism and economic development http://ow.ly/2qoFL #econdev #tourism #placebranding

Why low taxes alone won’t get the job done for economic development. http://bit.ly/apHlhT via @edmarketingpro #econdev

“I‘ve seen thousands of ads that were too complicated or too generic. I’ve never seen one that was too simple or too specific”-@adcontrarian

Is marketing really the job of economic developers? Damn right it is. Our thoughts on why: http://ow.ly/2keu5 #econdev

Best Tweets of Q2

Make lemonade out of a tourism lemon: Wales sells the hell out of its shortcomings http://ow.ly/21aSs #placebranding #tourism

Real-life example of the diff’ce a copywriting tweak can make: Adding the word “not” increases organ donors like crazy! http://ow.ly/23leJ

For economic developers, tourists in your city are like fish in a barrel. They are here, loving the place – take aim and market like crazy!

Marketing in lean economic times is a competitive advantage. Here’s why: http://ow.ly/1Tvn1

One of the most pragmatic and intelligent articles I’ve read about social media measurement. http://bit.ly/c5qI4B @AmberCadabra

A great tourism campaign rises from the ash cloud: http://ow.ly/1VENs Iceland’s new commercial is sooooo good. #econdev #tourism

Australia seeks to attract business investment with new logo. http://ow.ly/1PKhx Australia Unlimited? I give it a 4 out of 10.

@PureMichigan deserves their own “Ads We Love” blog post I think. Amazing job guys. http://bit.ly/9O8ldx

on3 is THRILLED to announce that we’ll be opening an Atlantic Canada office! http://bit.ly/de5OXk

Best Tweets of Q1

Colorado tries to woo California companies away with campaign professing their love: http://bit.ly/baITtc

Email marketing you can measure: http://bit.ly/bKy5WU

Love how this CEO thinks about digital vs. traditional – i.e. there is no “vs.” http://bit.ly/cyY1kD Found via @danaditomaso (via @acriley)

Why companies are choosing to locate in smaller cities. http://bit.ly/7KGiaM

Survey of 1,000+ EDOs (US): Median marketing budget for effective marketers? $99,000. Ineffective ones? $40,000 from http://bit.ly/aIJ1BE

The avg company that blogs: 55% more visitors, 97% more inbound links, 434% more indexed pages. via @hubspot. Only 11% of Cdn EDOs blog.

Test your email campaigns to improve results! Lots of studies that show why it’s so worth it can be found here: http://bit.ly/9CUsIV

Eleven myths of economic development. http://bit.ly/5v9Og

Neat tourism/ec dev idea: private company sponsoring free parking. In this case, very colourful! http://bit.ly/c6fbgv via @ibelieveinadv

Place Branding: 5 ways to get it right http://bit.ly/ak7esO

If you are a city/region on Twitter, you WILL get negative feedback. The opportunity lies in how you respond.

Why you shouldn’t hire a local marketing agency: http://bit.ly/8Ah0oo

The towns of Gamvik and Lebesby in Norway have developed a new regional identity that embrace their volatile weather conditions by linking the online version of their logo directly to the Norwegian Meterological Institute data. The online logo updates every 5 minutes, and when the temperature or wind direction changes, so does the colour and orientation of logo:

What a great concept for an identity. In the case of Nordkyn, with its arctic and rapidly-changing weather conditions, this is a distinctive and smart logo that deserves a big kudos for doing something really different and fun. The tagline – “Where Nature Rules” – is reflected directly in the execution of the logo. Neat.

Here are some applied executions from the website of Oslo’s Neue Design that did the work:

PRINT AD:

VARIOUS ITERATIONS OF LOGO DEPENDING ON TEMP/WIND:

T-SHIRT:

STATIONERY SUITE:

ANOTHER PRINT AD:

I love that some of the most creative ideas are coming out of tiny places that you’d never expect it from. Great work.

(Found via Brand New)

Here’s the print ad:

It doesn’t make sense to develop our marketing programs in isolation from each other anymore. Great marketing will work across platforms, and great economic development marketing is rooted in a region’s ambitions for attracting investment and opportunity.

(Version A)

And this?

(Version B)

Well, when it comes to getting people to click on a link,  the first email increases the likelihood that they will click by over 100%. But why?

Every year, the Economic Developers Association of Canada (EDAC) conducts a survey about the marketing practices of its membership. This year’s survey was receiving a much lower response rate than 2009, and EDAC wanted to send out a final reminder to try to boost response rates. To ensure that the email garnered the maximum response, we conducted a simple A/B test with the emails you see above. The emails were identical in subject line and message content, but we swapped the image of a smiling, pointing human face with a pie chart in versions A and B.

We started by picking the pie chart image that fit with the idea of the survey. But then we got to thinking that there is a lot of research out there that shows a big jump in clicks and opens when you have human subjects looking at or pointing to the call to action in your message. We decided to test it out for ourselves and sent Version A and Version B to a subset of the overall email list (10% each) and ran the test for six hours. The results are shown below:

Open Rates

• Version A (smiling pointer) – 25%
• Version B (pie chart) – 13%

Click Rates

• Version A (smiling pointer) – 8%
• Version B (pie chart) – 4%

Based on the size of EDAC’s mailing list, we can extrapolate that they received an estimated 46 extra clicks (100%) and 93 extra opens (90%) by sending the winning Version A to the remaining 80% of their mailing list, rather than Version B.

Results:

Sure enough, the response rate to the survey doubled within a week of sending out the reminder email, bringing them back up to 2009 levels. Had we sent out original pie chart version without testing, we’d likely be extending the survey deadline and sending another email plea.

We’ve blogged before about the importance of doing A/B testing with your email campaigns. This recent A/B test for EDAC using our 3mail Email Campaign Tool (shameless plug) demonstrates the incredible difference in results that can be achieved by something as simple as changing a single image.

• Be Specific in Your Messaging: Why “Live, Work, Play” and other clichés will harm your marketing efforts.
• Does Your Economic Development Website Speak Effectively to Site Selectors?:  Highlights from a US-based study of site selectors regarding their frustrations and preferences when it comes to ec dev web properties.
• 8 Tips for Getting Started with Social Media and Email: As more economic developers embrace new social tools, it is important to realize that when it comes to these new marketing channels, the old rules simply don’t apply. Here are 8 tips that cover ideas, etiquette and advice for getting started.
• Has Branding Become a Dirty Word? Our most popular EDAC White Paper, where we explore myths and misconceptions about place branding.
• Branding a City: One of our very first blog posts, this one covers off why place branding is different, and more complex, than other types of branding.
• Place Branding Inspiration Gallery: Over the years, we’ve reviewed quite a few logos and re-branding efforts from cities and regions around the world. Here are 7 posts to get you thinking about your own visual identity and branding program.

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My reaction when I saw this was “Neat!” And it is. It’s a really different and interesting concept, and a surprisingly hip little move on the part of the Canadian government (for which they should be applauded). That said, I’m skeptical about how effective it will be. Surely the American passerbys will also think it is neat, but will some random tweets and photos be enough to lure their tourist dollars to Canada? Or will they simply say “neat” and carry on with their lives? The displays ran until the end of July, so time will tell if they had any measurable impact.

You can learn more here.