Last June, with a good deal of fanfare, the Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau announced a bold new advertising campaign for the city. Bankrolled with money from a recently doubled tax rate on cab and bus rides from the airports, the bureau had put together a $6 million program that would open Chicago tourism offices overseas, establish a sports commission, and be the first “true branding effort,” promoting Chicago as a “global visitor destination.”
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The whole thing would be hung on a great new slogan, which they were just then revealing: “Chicago: Second to None.”
It wasn’t just that nobody around here has heard that musty old phrase in the last three or four decades. Or that even then it was attached to snake-oil pitches, guaranteed to be, at the very least, a gross exaggeration. And it wasn’t only that to work at all it depended on bringing to mind the tired second-city moniker the CCTB was trying to jettison.
This month, when CCTB launched the first part of the program—a $1.8 million regional campaign targeted to potential visitors within a day’s drive, and featuring “unprecedented television and digital advertising”— they weren’t talking up Second to None.
“Few convention centers compare to McCormick Place. Come to think of it, none do.”
