Ohio's $50 million ad blitz must've failed miserably

Ohio spent $50 million advertising our corporate tax rate and insulting prospective resident's current homes. It's now back to the drawing board.

I wasn’t born in Ohio, but I’ve spent 28 of 36 years alive within a 44-mile radius of Columbus.

I grew up in Marion, which, like most towns its size by the mid-1990s, was already seen as a city that died with American manufacturing. Like most of my friends when I turned 18, I wanted to get as far away from that place as possible.

Like most of my friends, I came back, albeit to Columbus.

Columbus, like Cleveland and Cincinnati, is a fine place to live if you have money and don’t mind driving from your car-free suburban neighborhood down the highway to the city’s urban core.

People from California and New York move here and say it’s cheap. It’s not cheap. Some of us just had the sense not to live in the most expensive areas of the world.

Still, not enough young people are moving here while droves of our youth continue to flee at the first opportunity.

From David Dewitt of ohiocapitaljournal.com in November 2022:

The vast majority of the state of Ohio is growing older, losing population, and losing workers — a trend offset only by growth happening mostly in Columbus and surrounding areas, a new report shows.

From 2000 to 2020, the state of Ohio saw its population grow by 3%, but if the city of Columbus and surrounding areas are removed from the equation, the rest of the state experienced population loss of about 1%, or 100,000 people, according to a new study from the nonpartisan nonprofit Greater Ohio Policy Center.

Ohio’s labor force decreased by 91,000 workers over the same time period, but Columbus and its larger metro area gained twice as many employed workers as the rest of the state, the report said.

Governor DeWine isn’t actually interested in doing anything politically to fix that issue. The status quo is just fine for him. He’s literally made a career out of it.

Gimmicks are the only thing his administration can apparently offer. He already blew $50 million on a honey ad blitz featuring billboards that appeared to have been slapped together by a teenager in msPaint instead of Madwell, the New York City consulting firm that actually designed them.

Here are four taglines pulled at random from the campaign:

• “Work from ‘home,’ not an ‘overpriced studio apartment.’”

• “Keep Austin weird. Like high cost of living weird.”

• “300 days of sunshine doesn’t matter if you’re always inside working.”

• “Operating system update available: Ohio.”

• “See L.A. traffic from a new perspective 2,279 miles away.”

There was even a commercial, too:

This is what happens when you ask non-Ohio residents to pitch Ohio to non-Ohio residents. Not that Madwell actually cared about the results—that check was clearing regardless.

The good news, at least, is that $50 million went to a marketing firm that at least has the decency to call itself pro-abortion:

Pretty funny when you consider DeWine’s recent comments about the proposed enshrinement of abortion rights into the Ohio constitution is out of step with what residents actually want. If that’s the case, then why not let the people vote on it, old man?

But I wrote about the waste of $50 million in February and March 2021. Since then, it’s garnered bewildered reactions from coast to coast, and also presented here anecdotally:

As for more evidence the campaign failed miserably, the DeWine Administration is back with another half-baked idea to try to dupe fellow Americans into life in Ohio.

From Susan Glaser of cleveland.com:

COLUMBUS – State officials want to change the name of the agency tasked with attracting more visitors to Ohio and broaden its mission.

The Ohio Department of Development, which oversees TourismOhio, has proposed that the agency be called the State Marketing Office and that its mission be expanded to include not only attracting visitors to Ohio, but also workers, residents and students.

Well, maybe they’ll have a better angle than advertising our corporate tax rate and insulting the current homes of prospective new residents. I don’t know. Just some ideas from an amateur as you generally need more than slick marketing gimmicks to persuade people to make a life-changing decision like moving to Ohio.

THOSE WMDs. The 20 most mispronounced brands… The undercover organizers behind America’s union wins… The real reason trains keep derailing… New York City’s black market for temporary license plates… Clarence Thomas and the billionaire.