How I finally made peace with a stupid slogan
It could be so much worse
Hello and thanks for reading.
I’ve been quite critical of Visit Fort Worth in this newsletter. As longtime readers know, I’m genuinely attached to the 1977 short film “Fort Worth: The Unexpected City,” and last year when Visit Fort Worth, the city’s defacto tourism bureau, rolled out their marketing campaign under the same name, I called it hollow and shallow and said it completely flubbed its stated goal of highlighting “unexpected” things about Fort Worth.
Here’s some of what I wrote at the time:
Visit Fort Worth’s commercial lacks the same charm. When Jimmy Stewart’s words are lifted from a slow, meandering, grainy film and grafted instead onto an over-edited, rapid-fire sequence of shiny images, the effect is unnerving. The undeniable warmth of his voice evaporates, leaving behind a flat, affectless, almost robotic residue.
The new commercial also steals the rhetoric of the original film without seeming to understand the point it was trying to make or the particular historical moment in which it was created. The 1977 film was produced at a time of transition, as part of a concerted effort to transform Fort Worth’s public image into the city of cowboys and culture. But cowboys and culture has been the dominant story the city tells about itself for nearly half a century now — due, in part, to the original film’s influence.
So when Visit Fort Worth announced they were releasing a series of short films under the branding “Unexpected Stories,” I was skeptical. Nothing about their marketing material from the past year — the billboards on I-30, the multi-page spreads in Texas Monthly — gave me confidence that they were doing anything besides exactly what you’d expect.
The films, which each focus on a particular local artist, business owner or other professional, are out now; I missed last month’s premiere screening at Tulips because I was in my lazy era that week, but they’re all available on YouTube, and after watching them I’ve decided that, well, I actually don’t hate them. A miracle!
A few are forgettable, or at least difficult to classify as “unexpected.” I like Paris Coffee Shop as much as any diner enthusiast, but a local restaurant that is routinely described as “iconic” was an uninspired choice. Likewise the dean of the Texas A&M law school— or someone like him — was probably an inevitable pick, given how central the university’s new downtown campus is to Fort Worth’s future development plans.
But some of the videos were visually creative and featured genuinely compelling personalities beyond the usual suspects. The films about TaKiyah Wallace-McMillian, of Brown Girls Do Ballet, and local director Erica Silverman were two standouts, and taken together, the 17 shorts do showcase interesting sides of Fort Worth that I suspect haven’t made it into marketing copy very much. It probably helps that instead of hiring some guy in Brooklyn whose local connection is that he was “raised in Dallas” (oops) which is what happened with last year’s “Unexpected City” video, Visit Fort Worth tapped into the growing pool of local filmmakers. An honestly admirable choice.
I’m even starting to think I can coexist with “The Unexpected City” campaign. (Another miracle!) That’s only partly because of these videos, though.
This past week, I traveled to Columbia, Missouri, for the True/False Film Fest and, while flipping through the festival program, experienced a bit of a jump scare. There, on page 16, was an ad from Columbia’s own tourism department, featuring the city’s catchphrase, a grammatically contorted version of what Visit Fort Worth could, in a grim alternate timeline, have landed on:
We’re Columbia, Mo… What You Unexpect!
I guess what I’m saying is that I may never actually like the “The Unexpected City” as a marketing slogan. But in Columbia, I gazed into the void and the void gazed back into me and then whispered in my ear about how much worse it could’ve been.
I’m grateful for what I have, and what I have is a tourism tagline that doesn’t make me want to throw myself into the Trinity River in shame. Good on you, Visit Fort Worth.