Energetic Bodies. Energetic Minds.
With this new slogan, the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp. on Wednesday unveiled a $4 million, five-year national ad campaign branding the region as a prime place to locate a business.
Designed by local agency Pure, the campaign marks the region’s first major economic development marketing effort since 1992, said Tom Clark, executive vice president of the group, an affiliate of the Metro Denver Chamber of Commerce.
“We have a lot to brag about, we have so much to sell,” he said. “We just wanted to raise our hand and say we’re back in the game.”
The first ad, which features a water cooler filled with a sports drink and touts Denver’s highly educated and active workforce, appears in this month’s United Airlines Hemispheres magazine.
“We always tell our clients, ‘Be famous for who you are,”‘ Pure co-founder Dan Igoe said. “When we started working on the brand for Denver, we realized what we’re famous for is our smart people and our energy.”
The ads will roll out this summer in publications such as BusinessWeek, Forbes, Fortune and The Wall Street Journal. Industry-specific ads also will be featured in publications targeting what Clark describes as “the five clusters that are actually producing jobs here” – aerospace, bioscience, energy, software/information technologies and financial services.
The $13.3 million raised by the group’s recent fundraising campaign will pay for the ads. The group’s goal is to attract an additional 100,000 local jobs over the next five years. “Denver is an easy place to attract and recruit labor,” Clark said. “The people here are energetic, they’re active and they’re engaged.”
The campaign is also designed to drive companies to the group’s website, which, they say, is the country’s largest economic development site.
“These people, in most cases, are making a multimillion-dollar decision,” said Pure co-founder Gregg Bergan. “We happen to believe that we can’t tell them everything through advertising, so one of the primary directives is to get them to the website, where they can learn a lot more.”
Staff writer Julie Dunn can be reached at 303-820-1592 or jdunn@denverpost.com.
