Pittsburgh Branding
My hometown's at it again. Pittsburgh has spent the past couple of years in a serious self-promotion drive, and their latest effort involved training taxi drivers as ambassadors for the city, encouraging quality service through a reward system.[via JRE] I'd be seriously disturbed if my taxi driver started playing the clarinet when the traffic got bad.
At least it's better than their $200,000 effort to develop a "Pittsburgh brand" - a major flop, generating a 45 word statement whose only use is fuel for mocking, such as in the Pittsburgh Branding Phrase Generator Tool, provided by the Pittsburgh-centric weblog YinzerMullet. The existence of a weblog with that name is the best summation of modern Pittsburgh I've seen in a while...