Placebranding

Turn a deaf ear to the roar of the crowd at your peril

OK. So Wellington has an international reputation as a film destination (quite apart from everything else that's wonderful about the city), and it's perhaps a useful thing to highlight and raise with visitors flying into the city (well at least those sitting in a window seat on the left hand side of a plane landing in a Southerly). To keep pushing a concept that is quite frankly insulting to all our collective creative intelligence is quite one thing. To ignore the outrage of the populous is quite another.

Place branding is one part the physical location, another part the people who live there, make up the culture and contribute to the local economy. The Airport company seem to lack an understanding of what place-branding is all about. (According to them we're also aparently 'Wild at Heart' which I don't actually mind.) They said they opened this up to the public, to get their ideas, and got diddly-squat back. But what was the forum, the brief. 

Come on, really, Wellington is held up as the creative hub of the country, and we can't come up with something more original? This is a PR opportunity waiting to be milked. An open transparent competition that's well publicised would actually do a lot of good. It would seem, however, that those sitting around the table are determined to push ahead and argue that it's all just a little too late. The fact that they aren't listening to what would seem the majority, that the idea is unoriginal, that the idea is already subject to some kind of trademark, that the threat of vandalism hangs over any planned installation should really smack this one between their ears.