Columbia needs a more positive brand and image, according to two of the eight transition committees charged by Mayor Steve Benjamin with generating ideas for Columbia’s future.
The current brand — “Famously Hot, Surprisingly Cool” — is “inferior for the capital city of South Carolina” and should be replaced, wrote the Government Operations and Efficiency committee in its report to the new mayor
Another committee didn’t recommend a re-branding campaign outright, but did say the city needs a more positive image.
“We need to come up with something to support our lakes, our rivers, so when you go out of state, people don’t say, ‘Oh, that’s that miserably hot place,’” Rick Cohn, co-chair of the Economic Development committee, told City Council at a meeting last week.
Developed by local company ADCO in 2008 for $70,000, the “Famously Hot” branding camping has been widely used by the Midlands Authority for Conventions, Sports and Tourism, appearing everywhere from freeway billboards to banners on Main Street.
Ric Luber, who heads the tax-funded Midlands Authority and helped lead the charge for “Famously Hot,” is also on Benjamin’s Economic Development committee. But Luber denies that the committee’s recommendation is about getting a new brand, despite what Cohn said.
“The brand is who we are. And they’ve bought into it,” Luber says of Mayor Benjamin and other regional government officials. “We can’t dwell on the negatives that are being thrown out.”
Like the slogans that preceded it, “Famously Hot” has been much mocked. Free Times readers voted it runner-up for Biggest Waste of Public Funds, second only to Innovista, in the 2009 Best of Columbia awards. And local iconoclast Chris Bickel is currently working on a takeoff campaign called “Morbidly Humid.”
But the slogan also has its defenders, among them Free Times columnist and ad executive Kevin Fisher, who once wrote that the slogan is “separating [Columbia] from the pack and giving it that much-needed identity hook.” It’s also proven a favorite crutch of local weatherpersons and headline writers during summer heat waves.
It's that there used to be a blog called The Palmetto Scoop. It's salient features were hating on gays, McCarthyite outing campaigns against bloggers who annoyed TPS, demands for privileged parking legislation his own party wouldn't pass in the legislature (thanks, Senator Sheheen!)- and ragging on Columbia for wasting money on branding campaigns that could have been better spent protecting blogster Adam Fogle from scary drag queens like RuPaul.
You can't read these things, alas, because Fogle, who used to regularly praise himself for being a self-identified right-wing blogger and transparent as all-get-out, has scrubbed his entire blog under a "maintenance" screen. There's a link to his Twitter account, where nothing has appeared since late April.
So what's all this got to do with Columbia seeking a new brand and Fogle having been against all the previous ones?
This: Fogle was new mayor Steve Benjamin's campaign manager.
Presumably, Le Fogle now sees all kinds of hidden goodness in what he hated before he got a ticket to City Hall.
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