News
A little more than a month ago, in a talk at the Poynter Institute, Peter Kageyama, a St. Petersburg resident and the author of For the Love of Cities, said cities shouldn't even have ad campaigns. They should just be Google prompts.
Why?
"You are," Kageyama said later on the phone, "who Google says you are."
The first page of Google hits for St. Petersburg has a Google map of the city, the official city website, the website of the local chamber of commerce, the state tourism agency's St. Petersburg page, a link to the St. Petersburg Times' tampabay.com and the Wikipedia page of St. Petersburg … Russia.
At least that's what Google showed me.
Kageyama, searching at the same instant on his computer, got some of that, but also more hits for the Dalí and the Museum of Fine Arts.
Go Google St. Petersburg and you're probably going to see something slightly different as well.
Eli Pariser wrote a book about this called The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. It came out earlier this year. The systematic personalization of the Internet, he argues, is turning our lives into echo chambers, and more quickly than we think. Google shows you mostly what Google has decided you want to see, based on what you've chosen to see before, which is to say you see more and more of the same sort of stuff until all of us live only in our tiny self-selected heads.
Thinking about that makes the new marketing slogan the city unveiled in October pretty interesting.
"Surprising St. Pete."
Paradise Advertising put together the campaign to emphasize the city's museums and restaurants and bars and nightlife in an increasingly vibrant downtown. Slow days sitting on green benches followed by bland early bird specials? That is not an accurate image of the Sunshine City, and hasn't been for a long, long time. The crux of the rebranding effort then is the value of … seeing things you didn't expect to see.
That first word in the new slogan is important.
Michael Kruse, Times staff writer
Loading...
