Here's a good example of when not to vote for a lesser evil

All of the finalists in the Zephyrs' ill-advised name change operation are stupid.

They are the New Orleans Baby Cakes, Crawfish, King Cakes, Night Owls, Po’boys, Red Eyes and Tailgators. They were picked from among 2,539 submitted last month on line by the public. A least one is the result of a combination of nicknames by Brandiose, the San Diego-based firm in charge of the rebranding the Zephyrs.

By far the dumbest name in that whole paragraph is "Brandiose" but let's not worry about that right now. First there is the task of sorting through this rubbish and figuring out what to salvage.

Disappointed fans, like general election voters, are likely to pick out the least offensive monstrosity and hold their nose over it. Crawfish, King Cakes, and Po'Boys are the very bad front-runners. If you'd asked a class of fourth graders to come up with some avatars of local culture, this is what you'd get. Technically appropriate but not very imaginative.  But they're stupid in a bland and inoffensive way that a lot of people might be in the mood to settle for at this point.  We should demand better.

Tailgators almost sounds good enough to have been a first ballot reject in a closed brainstorming session somewhere. Night Owls sounds like something someone in the brainstorming session should have been fired for. What even is a "Red Eye," though?  The San Diego based marketing team claims it's a reference to crawfish. In which case, we would very much like to know 1) Who uses this term for them ever? 2) Isn't "Crawfish" already one of the options?

Which leaves us only with "Baby Cakes."  What is that? Clearly Brandiose has no idea.

Brandiose owners Jason Klein and Casey White visited New Orleans on May 10-11. They met with Zephyrs officials and toured the New Orleans area speaking with season ticket-holders, corporate and community leaders, then local historians. Klein and White then came up with the nicknames from those submitted.

Baby Cakes was derived from a combination of king cakes, which as we know contain a plastic baby, and area people referring to each other as “baby,” which Klein and White noted during their tour.

Nobody would derive Baby Cakes from the fact of king cake babies. That's just something they made up. Similarly, their discovering the "baby" vernacular in the course of their two day cultural leanrings for make benefit glorious nation of branding tour is clearly bullshit. They really have no idea what they're doing.

At the same time, though, Baby Cakes is so weird, so out there, so blatantly unconnected to anything, that it's actually the one name this process most deserves. Rather than fumble through the rest of these lame ideas looking for a lesser evil, Zephyrs fans should just go the whole nine yards and vote Baby Cakes in protest.  Short of staging a massive sit-in to save the name Zephyrs, this is probably the best way forward now.

OIL AND GAS WILL

Anybody can be "grassroots" these days, I guess.  Even oil companies. (NOTE: Spilled oil may damage grass roots.)

HOUMA, La. — One of the state's main oil and gas lobby groups asked industry members in Houma Tuesday to help start a campaign to slow down and fend off lawsuits from landowners seeking damages for oil and gas activity.

Gifford Briggs, Louisiana Oil and Gas Association vice-president, gave a state of the industry presentation to the South Central Industrial Association, calling for a grassroots campaign to curtail so-called legacy lawsuits.

Briggs denounced the lawsuits as frivolous, saying a suit filed last year was for trial lawyers to benefit from million-dollar and billion-dollar verdicts and settlements.

In July the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority–East, which is tasked with managing levees in Orleans, Jefferson and Plaquemines parishes, filed a lawsuit in federal court asking oil companies to fill in canals they say have accelerated coastal erosion and pay a share of $14.6 billion in levee infrastructure that has been built to augment the region's flood protection as land has eroded.

Taking a cue from the hospitality industry's "NEW ORLEANS WILL" campaign, these oil lobbyists have pooled their meager resources into a creating a humble public relations campaign which you can participate in by signing up at their websiste.

Briggs asked audience members to sign up at a website, changelouisiana.org, and to call their state representatives to encourage legislative action to reduce or stop the lawsuits.

Asked if he thought the oil companies could simply fight the lawsuits in court, Briggs said "we haven't won any of these (legacy) lawsuits."

The stakes for the industry have been growing, and now almost 100 different oil and gas companies are facing tens-of-billions of dollars in litigation.

"Change Louisiana" is an especially delicious name for a number of reasons. It's lazy buzzspeak, of course. But also there's the question of just how Louisiana is being changed. Briggs, apparently would like it if we could Change Louisiana into Texas.

Part of Briggs' presentation included graphs that correlated a drop in drilling and exploration activities with an increasing number of legacy lawsuits. While he did not discuss how much of the drop in activity could be attributed to concerns over the lawsuits, he said oil and gas companies in Houston have looked to spend money elsewhere.

"We have our fair share of roadblocks that are keeping us from doing everything that we can," Briggs said. "We need to ask, what is keeping us from being Texas?"

The actual effect of the lawsuits on energy investment is unknown, said George Hite, Houston-area oil and gas engineering consultant.

"Certainly there have been a number of things that are negatives for Louisiana," Hite said. "Leases are relatively expensive. ... It would seem to me that most of the operators make decisions based on economics. It is more expensive to drill along the coastline because Louisiana is basically marsh and you have to drill using water operations. Texas is different because you have land right up to the coast that you can drill on."

That inconvenient marsh thing, though. Trust us, they're working on that. But that's kind of an opposite of grass taking root thing.

At least Benson didn't decide to call them the Tomcats

I might have gone for this idea, though.

The primarily teal color scheme of the past has been replaced by dark blue, gold and red.

While the team said the gold represents the team’s ties with the Saints, Tom O’Grady, president of Game Plan Creative, a Chicago-based branding and marketing agency, said he was surprised that black wasn’t chosen instead.

“The Saints look so good in all-black,” O’Grady said. “You would have had the look they do in Pittsburgh with the Pirates, Penguins and Steelers. That would have been a real home run.

 I'm sure O'Grady meant to say, "That would have been a real slam dunk," but the point is still a good one. Don't these ad wizzards know anything about how to brand a city?

Oh.. apparently not.

New Orleans Will Need You

You are New Orleans, and you can make a difference. It’s as simple as staying informed and supporting tourism. Spread the word to your neighbors and be welcoming to all our visitors. They bring gifts.

Last year, during Mardi Gras a tourist brought me the gift of pee on my doorstep.  I tried to spread the word to my neighbors. Not sure it helped. 

Update: I noticed the chatter about this "NEW ORLEANS WILL" campaign yesterday but didn't see this FOX 8 report on it until this afternoon.

Local tourism industry leaders' five-year goal is to increase the number of tourists from 9 million to 14 million people a year. But Schulz says the $13.5 million budget isn't enough to market the city and reach that mark.

In comparison, she says it's $4 million less than Denver's marketing budget, $6 million less than Atlanta's, and $25 million less than Orlando's.

She says one way to get more money is by having local hotels sign up to pay a new voluntary assessment fee.

"That will allow the hotels to assess a fee, and for that fee to go into marketing for the city of New Orleans," Schulz said.

They hope local support will encourage the businesses to sign up and to persuade politicians to increase funding in the future.

In other words, the NOCVB has hired a marketing firm to agitate for a revival of last year's "Ho-Zone" special taxing district to provide them with... more marketing money.  In the meantime, they're just dipping into the public money they already have far too much of while the city budget can barely afford "C" and "I" anymore.

I was just talking to someone who says this is "kind of like a NOLA 4 Life campaign but for tourism."    Could be. But I figure as long as they're spending tax money I might as well get some free swag out of it.  I signed up to receive a "WILL POWER Pak Business Kit" from their website. It includes posters and a lapel pin and many more bumper stickers than the number of cars I own.  I hope it arrives before the next major convention.

Tony Hayward gets his life back

Guardian:

BP is to hive off its Gulf of Mexico oil spill operation to a separate in-house business to be run by an American in a bid to isolate the "toxic" side of the company and dilute some of the anti-British feeling aimed at chief executive Tony Hayward, the company said today.

The surprise announcement was made during a teleconference with City and Wall Street analysts in which Hayward attempted to shrug off the personal criticism saying words "could not break his bones".

Nevermind that last comment for now. Suffice to say there are sticks and stones in adequate supply in Louisiana should they have become necessary. What's amazing about this story is that BP is yet again moving to protect its "brand" first and the Gulf coast maybe never. Yesterday, the comic genius behind the fake BPGlobalPR Twitter account wrote about BP's insane marketing obsession in this Huffington Post article.

I've read a bunch of articles and blogs about this whole situation by publicists and marketing folk wondering what BP should do to save their brand from @BPGlobalPR. First of all, who cares? Second of all, what kind of business are you in? I'm trashing a company that is literally trashing the ocean, and these idiots are trying to figure out how to protect that company? One pickledick actually suggested that BP approach me and try to incorporate me into their actual PR outreach. That has got to be the dumbest, most head-up-the-ass solution anyone could possibly offer.

It's so sad. We live in a time when the criminal dishonesty of our institutions which leads directly to widespread death and destruction is viewed first and foremost as an opportunity to build a more effective lie. The problem here is not that BP is too British or that their corporate communications have been ineffective. The problem is that they have been criminally negligent and our coast is dying as a result. What kind of people are we who prioritize the maintenance of our bullshit above the preservation of our lives and the world we live them in?