Connecticut: Creative or complacent?
John Winthrop became the earliest apostle of the place that would become Connecticut, Kip Bergstrom thinks, when he established a colony in New London as a creative center for the New World.
Bergstrom got an earful from the state”™s latest evangelist, Marian Salzman, as the Euro RSCG Worldwide Inc. CEO works to plant Fairfield County on the marketing industry map.
At a Stamford meeting of the Fairfield County Public Relations Association in late January, Salzman invited Bergstrom to hear her plan to draw more advertising and marketing companies out of New York City.
Gov. Dannel P. Malloy recently freed up $22 million for Bergstrom”™s Connecticut Department of Culture and Tourism to spend on increasing the state”™s overall profile to the world. The department hired New York City-based Chowder Inc. to lead that effort, with the ad agency”™s principal Tony Kobylinski a resident of Westport. Ad-buying duties went to Norwalk-based Media Storm.
Entering December, the Fairfield County Business Journal reported on Salzman”™s early efforts to bolster the local sector via her twin perches at Euro RSCG, which has a Wilton office, and the Fairfield County Public Relations Association, of which she is president.
That effort now has a name ”“ the Fairfield County Creative Corridor ”“ a Twitter feed titled ConnecticutIsCreative, a 140-page booklet making the case and a slogan: “You can”™t spell ”˜creative”™ without CT.”
The letters ”˜CT”™ are in ”˜complacent”™ too, Salzman noted, saying she had some difficulty getting local industry leaders to appear in a promotional video touting Fairfield County”™s creative industries, due to some not wanting to even let the cat out of the bag that they work in sleepy Fairfield County rather than in New York City. Simply put, there are people who feel the county is where they go for the “the last job before they die,” in Salzman”™s words.
That is a sentiment that cuts across industries, according to Jeff Dunne, a commercial real estate broker in the Stamford office of CB Richard Ellis, who briefly discussed the dynamic at a January meeting of BOMA International in Stamford.
“I can assure you more (professionals) want to work in Manhattan,” Dunne said. “The lifestyle is better than sleepy Norwalk or sleepy Rye. There”™s nothing wrong with those towns, it”™s just (New York City is) where they want to be.”
Add to that the very fact of Connecticut being a land of small cities, which Bergstrom said puts certain industries at a disadvantage out of the gate.
“The innovation game (needs) critical mass.”
Chris Bruhl, CEO of the Business Council of Fairfield County, said the local industry should build off Salzman”™s early work by “caucusing” to figure out immediate next steps. Salzman has several ideas on that front, including a “hybrid” agency model that would feature companies partnering together to win business ”“ becoming “co-conspirators” in her words rather than competitors.
If catchy in concept, that may not be the easiest thing to implement in the hyper-competitive world of advertising and marketing.
“I really never thought of it that way before, but she”™s right,” said Melissa LoParco, a manager at Catalyst Marketing Communications in Stamford. “In order to attract more creative types to live and work here, we have to look beyond our individual businesses and work together.”