Michigan could learn from Gotham's rebirth.

Miriam Greenberg’s piece in the Brooklyn Rail on New York City is a fascinating read about re-branding a hellhole.  Greenberg illustrated New York’s bottom with a brilliant anecdote: upset over a series of Alitalia Airlines ads in 1971 predicting that New York City was going to disappear (and specified a date).

The airline was promoting its new non-stop Philadelphia service.  The ads displayed ominous images such as the Statue of Liberty sinking in a national media campaign to alert passengers that they no longer needed to connect through Kennedy:

That these over-the-top ads were at once so strangely believable and politically volatile reveals both the deep anxiety that they tapped into and the wider, inter-textual universe in which they emerged. They invoked the trepidation, even dread, with which the “average tourist” now boarded their New York City-bound planes, buses, and trains. And they were only the latest addition to a vivid and disturbing set of images portraying New York City as a sinking, dying metropolis, imagery that was seen repeatedly in magazines, newspapers, movies, and the TV news, and which—in combination with real events on the ground—was to help shape the public perception of the city for a generation.

New York City’s huge comeback from the 1970′s is now the standard playbook for how places with damaged reputations can bounce back (the Israeli government uses it as a model).

The Economist had a story about struggling Michigan, one of the worst-off states in America, and their attempts to re-brand and attract tourists:

The news out of Michigan has been relentlessly gloomy. The one area in which Michigan leads the country has been its unemployment rate—15.2% in June, compared with a national average of 9.5%. But in recent months Michigan has tried to present a more cheerful message. A $10m tourism campaign, aired on national television from March to June, was the state’s most ambitious yet. Though Michigan faces a $1.7 billion deficit, new bills propose to raise money for more promotion.

Here’s one of the commercials that is part of the new campaign, Pure Michigan:

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