Always remember: a brand is the most valuable piece of real estate in the world; a corner of someone’s mind.1
When the city announced in 2014 that pop celebrity and recent Manhattan transplant Taylor Swift would become global ambassador for the “Welcome to New York” city branding campaign, New Yorkers did not seem impressed. The choice of a 24-year-old Nashville-bred singer, who had just moved to the city and into her $20 million Tribeca apartment, and whose “Welcome to New York” song had been labeled as a “gentrification anthem,” generated a firestorm of media controversy, with headlines like “Taylor Swift’s Unwelcome P.R. Campaign” and “New York City Has Rejected Taylor Swift.”2 The choice of Swift over more tenured New York celebrities, say, Robert de Niro or even Jennifer Lopez, however, was an accurate indication of how marketers and branding consultants have chosen to represent the “new New York”3 to the world: hygienic and safe for a new population of millennials whose food of choice is a latte Frappuccino rather than a pizza or a bagel.4
Some people say that a great product needs no advertising, while others say that a good brand will sell almost any product. In an era in which our cities have become just another product to be sold in the global marketplace, city producers will work hard to give them the finest advertising they can. And hip branding campaigns can provide cities with that certain competitive edge that will attract new city consumers—businesses, professionals, and tourists. But the realm of city marketing has expanded way beyond glossy leaflets and brochures of times past. Today, city magazines, consumer guides, lifestyle magazines, movies, and even city-based TV shows all play a major role in training us to be consumers of a city that has become, in all effects, a commodity. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the TV sensation Sex and the City managed, more than any institutional marketing campaign, to popularize a fashionable “New York way of life” for an international mass audience, making New York a city of aspiration for millions of women (and even men) around the world. Almost everything represented in the show, from the trendy restaurants to the groovy bars, from the fashion catwalks to the upscale apartments, conformed to the charming vision of a hyper-consumerist urban lifestyle (Figure 6.1). In the show, Manhattan had become “a sophisticated wonderland, replete with nightclubs and cocktails, spacious terraces and skyline views, elegant shopping streets and sidewalks filled with stylish women”5—a tantalizing, cleaned-up version of reality. In sum: a brand.
Figure 6.1 A movie still from the series Sex and the City, Season 1, Episode 4.
The spectacular success of this and other recently produced urban-based TV shows, with the corollary of desires, dreams, and emulative behaviors around a liberal, trendy, and fashionable urban lifestyle they have helped generate reveals the huge appetite of an ever-growing population of consumers for glittering representations of urban life, and their seductive power. After all, today’s world has a cultural obsession with the city, fueled by a whole new marketing emphasis on trends and lifestyle choices that are exquisitely urban. The urban myth advertised by the media, and the conspicuous consumption of experiences and goods it suggests, have become the new handbooks for both urban and suburban individuals. For many of us, the choice to “consume” one city instead of another (and with the city, the urban experiences and the “urban way of life” it offers) has become an indicator of lifestyle or status, or even an essential step in the process of individual construction of the self.
But isn’t this consumerist approach turning us into passive spectators of a show that has been staged for us by image-making experts and media-savvy individuals? Haven’t we all become consumers of the city?
Earlier in the book, I described the “symbolic space” of the city as that dimension in which the countless representations of the city in the arts and literature, the media, institutional slogans, and the popular imagination crystallize over time. It’s a clash of dissonant representations, which includes our subjective perceptions of the city and those representations produced by alternative culture, but also official narratives codified in the slogans of elected officials and the popular imagery of the city we see on TV and in the newspapers.
Urban scholars Hubbard and Hall said that the entrepreneurial city is “an imaginary city, constituted by a plethora of images and representations.”6 They are referring to the symbolic space of the city, a space in which our direct, individual perception and experience of the urban realm is constantly permeated, challenged, and reframed by more established representations and discourses propagated through press reports, official statements, and the visual media.7 The way we see the city is constantly reshaped by a number of different powerful actors—including the media and cultural producers, but also city government and the real estate and development industries—each producing specific representations of what the city is, has been, or ought to be.
Clearly, different representations reflect each group’s specific visions and their own social and economic agendas. Inasmuch as different representations of the city reflect the interests of specific groups, it is important to understand who are the actors in charge of producing dominant representations, why they produce them, and for whom.
Marx argued that the capitalist relations of production are the foundation of society, while legal, political, and cultural forms are “superstructures” that serve to reproduce its economic structure—capitalism: in this framework, popular media are “means of production” owned and managed by the elites, and their aim is to disseminate a specific hegemonic culture that reflect the elites’ values and interests, while defusing or even invalidating alternative or conflicting standpoints.8 This is a claim that still stands true today, if we look at the role mainstream media often play in educating viewers along certain ideological orientations that are promoted as beneficial to everyone, even when they aren’t.
With the concept of cultural “hegemony,”9 Gramsci described how the ruling classes of post-1870 industrial Western Europe established and maintained their control over the masses by establishing a position of moral and intellectual leadership. According to Gramsci, it was the imposition of a hegemonic culture—a dominant ideology that reflected bourgeois ethics and interests—that ensured the dominance of the capitalist elite and justified the social, political, and economic status quo. According to Lefebvre, capitalist societies are the arenas of a constant struggle, in which the institutional cultural space of state power tends to establish its hegemony by gradually incorporating the affective, personal space of our everyday lives under its control.10
In other words, the dominant culture of capitalism has a tendency to devour and co-opt all forms of alternative culture and make them part of its inner workings. This is something we have seen occurring over and over again in modern times, for instance, each time rebellious elements of youth counterculture (from street art to hip hop music and other subcultures) have been appropriated and exploited for the profit of corporate apparel giants like Nike or Adidas.11
Mass culture is hence a bloody battlefield where the struggle between capital’s desire for hegemony and individuals’ response to these hegemonic messages is played out.12
Over the last four decades, the application of marketing and branding principles to the toolkit of urban governance has become one of the hallmarks of the shift to urban entrepreneurialism. City branding consists of the formulation and communication of a unified “image” of the city, one that delivers a very filtered impression of a much more complex reality: usually, city branding campaigns call attention to “business friendly,” “green,” “vibrant,” “multicultural,” “high-tech” urban destinations that may appeal to the favored class of city consumers. Their role is to emphasize specific positive qualities of the city while downplaying its negative attributes—crime, poverty, or social inequalities have notably no room in these glittering representations. As a result, all forms of urban promotion and marketing presuppose a process of manipulation of the city’s image, or “city re-imaging,”13 which simplifies the city’s complexity and marginalizes pesky realities or other possible perspectives. It is an image of urban living that reflects the demands of the regime of consumption and capital accumulation and gives precise instructions about the way people should make use of space.14 A rather eerie example is provided by the billboards and banners at construction sites: sanitized renderings of spectacular architectures completed with digitalized images of young executives sitting on park benches while using their laptops, of athletic joggers in branded jumpsuits, or of dressed-up women window-shopping in front of apparel stores. These images not only tell us, “These are the desired people we want in this new development,” but also tell us, “This is how people should behave in here.”
This process of manipulation is inextricably connected to the question of power: according to British cultural theorist Stuart Hall, the role of power in the process of production of representations is “to stop the flow of possible multiple meanings, to narrow the range and diversity of possible meanings.”15 A similar perspective is shared by Lefebvre. In his view, the production of hegemonic “representations of space” results in what he calls “dominant space”—a uniform, unimaginative space that disciplines human interactions and flattens diversity, as its only function is to serve the interests of capital.16
In the process of producing and consuming representations of the city, both city producers and city consumers are mutually linked: while city marketing campaigns and branding strategies produce representations of urban lifestyles as appealing as possible to affluent consumers, the latter’s demand for specific spaces and experiences, strongly influenced by the media, leads to the production of a city that is more and more tailor-suited to their demands and desires.
Although forms of urban boosterism have been quite common practice in Western cities since at least the 19th century,17 a consistent application of marketing and branding principles to the sphere of public management emerged only in the early 1970s, as city producers turned to aggressive growth-oriented agendas to promote localities in a regime of increasingly fierce interurban competition for investment, visitors, and consumers.18 In this phase characterized by the emergence of new “entrepreneurial,” growth- and competition-oriented urban governments, marketing and branding strategies began to be deliberately integrated into broader policies of urban restructuring to provide cities a competitive edge in the global marketplace, and to attract inward investment from companies, visitors, and prospective residents.
Sociologist Miriam Greenberg draws a parallel between city branding and corporate branding, whose origins she traces back to the times of economic crisis in the late 1960s and early 1970s: in these years, global companies started employing branding strategies as part of more generalized internal restructuring processes, which usually entailed cuts on manufacturing expenses by outsourcing production to developing countries where labor was cheap, and an emphasis on aggressive advertising and marketing strategies directed to the mass consumers inland. Similar restructuring processes were adopted by municipal governments across the US in the midst of the urban crisis of the 1970s, when potentially unpopular, neoliberal pro-market reforms that were conducted backstage were combined with new promotional strategies which borrowed heavily from the advertising culture of the corporate world.19
Today, in an entrepreneurial era in which cities are run like businesses, the notions of “corporate branding” and “corporate identity” are routinely translated to the sphere of public management.20 Corporate branding presupposes a regime of fierce competition in a global marketplace in which companies need to differentiate their products from those of their competitors21 and is strongly related to the emergence of the so-called experience economy22 in which, branding specialists say, what is sold is not a product but a memorable experience or, as Naomi Klein puts it, “a way of life, an attitude, a set of values, a look, an idea.”23
Translated to the realm of urban policy, the manufacturing, staging, and communication of a city brand is believed to bestow a place with a memorable identity, which will provide that certain je ne sais quoi in the struggle for capital investment and tax-paying businesses and residents. The corporate branding of cities thus consists of the manufacturing of a single, consistent representation of the city as a one-of-a-kind destination, and of its consistent communication at every level of interaction with city consumers (residents, prospective citizens, visitors, investors, and businesses) through all forms of marketing channels. In so doing, branding sets the strategic base upon which different marketing programs can be launched.24
Essential to the translation of corporate branding principles to city branding are the concepts of “company brand” and particularly “corporate identity”25—the crucial interface of communication with consumers that “articulates the corporate ethos, aims and values and presents a sense of individuality that can help to differentiate the organization within its competitive environment.”26 In the corporate world, a brand is successful when it embodies intangible attributes to which consumers can easily relate, because, as the branding logic goes, “consumers relate to a product with their brain, but to a brand with their heart.”27 A similar logic is applied to the branding of cities in the “destination branding” industry. The branded city “is given an ontological status as a ‘personality’ with a specific identity and set of values.”28 This “personality” orientates the emotions and needs of a target market of city consumers in a mobile, globalized society in which choosing a destination over another becomes an indicator of lifestyle or even social status.
The city brand is then condensed into a collection of images that are mass-reproduced in different forms of media including tourism and business magazines, travel and real estate sections of newspapers, in-flight magazines of major airlines, travel brochures, and urban lifestyle magazines, or broadcasted on TV ads or online on city homepages. In some cases, this brand is summarized in catchy slogans aimed at conveying the city’s “personality” in a concise, memorable way. But today, most promotional brochures and video ads present an increasingly generic selection of urban imagery—fashionable star-architectures, gleaming office buildings, vibrant ethnic neighborhoods, bike lanes and the ever-present jogging promenades—while slogans such as “Always Turned On” for Atlantic City, “Cleveland Rocks!” for Cleveland, “Keep Austin Weird” for Austin, and “So Very Virginia” for Charlottesville suggest how branding campaigns consist of rather lofty values and concepts that don’t necessarily have much to do with any specific experience the city has to offer.
In fact, the very idea of a straightforward city “identity” is a rather abstract construction that whitewashes the complexity of a rich and multifaceted organism and the multiplicity and diversity of its residents. This unifying narrative for the city is nothing but a hegemonic representation29 that has less to do with the city to which it is applied than with the private interests of city producers that are in charge of manufacturing it. After all, contrary to a company’s board of directors, how can cities reach a shared consensus on issues such as “identity,” “mission,” and “values”? This is the dilemma with city branding: although branding initiatives are shaped behind closed doors at the board meetings of elite interest groups, they are then championed to residents as a collective citizen endeavor.30
Over the last four decades, city producers have been at the front line of unprecedented branding and marketing efforts in major cities around the globe. To attract businesses and tourists, the city is presented as a playground for consumption, leisure, and entertainment. In this vision, issues of social inequality, poverty, or conflict need no mention. Routinely, “amenities that are considered attractive to Florida’s creative class and, more generally, to tourists—are most prominent, while images that refer to work, schools, and public safety—factors that are important to many residents—are largely absent.”31 In so doing, city branding is based on a misrepresentation of the city and its citizens32 as it strives to turn almost every possible exploitable aspect of city life—from its historical landmarks to its ethnic neighborhoods, from its underground art scene to its nightlife—into a commodity for sale.
But there’s more. Cities willing to join the global branding competition often end up caught in a zero-sum game in which public resources are diverted from local needs toward image-enhancing ventures whose benefits are often questionable.33 They routinely invest public funds in the promotion of flagship architectures, sport arenas, art museums, and entertainment complexes or strive to attract large international events such as the expos or the Olympics, and sometimes they may even do so at great risk for the city budget, as happened with Rio de Janeiro’s overspending for the 2016 Olympics. This is why branding strategies, although often labeled as apolitical practices of city management, have instead thick political ramifications. Branding is not limited to the advertising and promotion of localities; instead, it articulates into a broader set of practices of production of the urban space.34
In a detailed history of branding endeavors in New York City from the fiscal crisis through the de Blasio years, I will illustrate how branding practices have triggered processes of sweeping reorganization of the symbolic, physical, and socioeconomic space of the city. I will tell the story of how the apocalyptic urban jungle of the 1970s has gradually dissolved to make room for a new New York, a pricey wonderland for the new hordes of global consumers.
That gleaming filmic metropolis, born with the rise of the talkies in the early 1930’s, had been displaced in the late 1960’s by what was, in many ways, its exact opposite: the cinematic vision of the city as a gritty urban battleground…. Films as varied as “Taxi Driver,” “Death Wish,” “Little Murders,” and “Escape From New York” inflated a city struggling with immense social and economic problems into a spectacularly dysfunctional urban environment, separated by an almost unbridgeable gulf from the rest of the country. But in one of the swiftest and most stunning transformations in the history of cities, New York emerged in the mid-1990’s from its decades of troubles to become the safest big city in the country—a burgeoning, prosperous and essentially orderly (indeed, some might say too orderly) metropolis.35
The 1970s are regarded by many as the time when New York City hit rock bottom. Economic stagnation battered the city particularly hard during the administration of Abraham Beame, as trading on the stock exchange dropped precipitously, while the city’s welfare spending continued unabated. The city’s tax base was further eroded by the relentless “white flight” of middle- and upper-class families to the suburbs, while the inner city remained stuck in a spiral of poverty and unemployment; the city’s poorest neighborhoods were ravaged by the heroin epidemic and by the spread of violent crime associated with drug abuse, while innumerable buildings in the poorest areas of Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn had been left abandoned or boarded up (Figure 6.2). Meanwhile, the city’s subway system was wrecked by vandalism and continuous breakdowns, the once-glorious Times Square had become a haven for prostitutes and shady sex shops, and Central Park by night was notorious in the nation as the dreadful site of muggings, murders, and rapes. Labor strikes, racial tensions, and soaring crime rates led to a widespread belief that New York City’s collapse was imminent, and that its decline was irreversible. Horror stories about New York City culminated with the city blackout in the summer of 1977, which initiated a spiral of devastation and looting in low-income areas in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the South Bronx. By the end of the 1970s, not only many large corporations and tourists but also nearly a million people, mostly middle-class residents, had abandoned the city since the 1950s—a population loss that would not be recouped until the 1990s.
As a consequence, the 1970s represented one of the bleakest periods for the “image” of New York City, which was perceived worldwide as an unmanageable, apocalyptic mayhem.36 Shocking representations of a crime-ridden, anarchic metropolis were constantly propagated in movies, novels, and frightening TV and press reports. These images of a decaying, pathological urban nightmare terrorized middle-class Americans and amplified conservative political discourses about the causes of the “urban crisis,”37 consolidating citizen support for the tough policies of welfare reform and war on drugs of the era to come.
Figure 6.2 Macombs Road, Bronx/World Telegram & Sun photo by Phil Stanziola, 1964.
According to Greenberg, it was in this decade that a sentiment emerged among New York’s city producers that the horrific public perceptions associated with the city were contributing to the exacerbation of the broader social and economic crisis,38 as they were holding back prospective businesses and tourists. Only the manufacturing of a brand-new, cleaned-up city image would bring New York back to its feet.
It was in this decade that powerful groups representing New York’s business elite, the real estate industry, and the financial sector became increasingly involved in the making of urban policy, while local authorities assumed the role of enablers of the private initiative—a task they zealously carried out by endorsing growth-oriented and business-prone policies and by financing private ventures as engines of development.39
As already mentioned in chapters 2 and 4, by mid-1975 New York City was on the verge of insolvency. As a response to this emergency, a “crisis regime”40 was put in place, which brought about a sweeping reorientation of policy priorities away from the provision of public services and toward a regime of municipal assistance to privately led development and growth initiatives. Until 1974, federal subsidies and huge borrowings had allowed the city to function and to sustain its strong welfare system, which provided among the best public health, housing, and education in the country. However, once the city’s financial management was put under the control of supra-governmental emergency institutions like the Municipal Assistance Corporation and the Emergency Financial Control Board, a sweeping process of restructuring was initiated, which dictated austerity measures and drastic cuts on city services amidst an unprecedented wave of subsidies to the business community. Along with the wave of tax breaks, subsidies, development grants and zoning changes to stimulate development of high-end office and residential space in Manhattan, funds were channeled into a sweeping operation of image restructuring that would forever transform the public perception of the gritty, anarchic metropolis into that of a cleaned-up, business-friendly city.
In 1976, the Department of City Planning released a report titled Economic Recovery: New York City’s Program for 1977–1981. Based on the assumption that New York’s grim image had to be turned upside down to appeal to the international business community, the report dictated a revamping of the Office of Economic Development (today’s New York City Economic Development Corporation [NYCEDC]) and called for a comprehensive marketing program funded by the city, the state, and private companies to “convey New York’s advantages as a place to do business and to stress the City’s positive attitude toward business.”41 The concerted application of branding strategies borrowed from the corporate industry was a crucial step in the transition to an “entrepreneurial” system of urban governance.42
Soon, a powerful marketing machine was set in motion, which brought together the crème de la crème of New York’s city producers: elected officials, real estate players, and a bundle of business-led associations such as the New York City Partnership43 (NYCP), the Convention and Visitors’ Bureau44 (CVB), and the Association for a Better New York45 (ABNY). In 1971, they launched the first attempt at a citywide promotional campaign called “The Big Apple,” which was popularized through TV news and magazine ads. Fully funded by New York’s elite of realtors and hoteliers, “The Big Apple” campaign proved successfully that New York could again be a magnet for visitors. But the onset of the fiscal crisis in 1975 and the terrible events of 1977 (the “summer of Sam” murders and the citywide blackout) demonstrated that the real city was still shouting its anger, and no upbeat marketing campaigns could keep the mainstream media away from depicting New York as an unmanageable urban jungle.46
In 1977, at the height of the city’s fiscal crisis, the New York State Department of Commerce (DOC) under Commissioner William Doyle (a former marketing manager at Chase Manhattan Bank and member of the ABNY) decided to commit the largest amount of its annual budget to hire a professional marketing firm. Its role was to craft effective image communication campaigns depicting the city’s advantages and strengths to visitors and business managers. With the passage of the Omnibus Tourism Bill in June 1977, the DOC committed $4.3 million to finance the state’s first sweeping branding campaign. The iconic, pop-style “I ♥ NY” logo was the product of advertising agency Wells Rich and Greene and New York Magazine artistic director Milton Glaser, and became immediately the most commonly recognized symbol of New York City.47 Besides placing the logo on TV ads, posters, and the now-legendary white T-shirts, the “I ♥ NY” campaign also included other promotional measures, from tourist package deals like Broadway show tours or family-friendly TV and radio ads featuring the “I Love New York” theme song, to outdoor events at major city landmarks. The campaign proved incredibly successful, and revenues in the tourist industry skyrocketed.48
Gradually, in the late 1970s, “the mainstream media began to cover New York City’s apparent recovery, and to do so as dramatically as they had the city’s recent demise.”49 To press reporters and media producers, New York City appeared to be finally on the rebound. In 1973, after long delays, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were finally completed: although the whole operation turned out to be a huge drag on the city’s finances,50 it had an immense symbolic significance, as the brand-new towers, still largely vacant, were promptly marketed as the symbols of the revitalization of downtown Manhattan and the icons of a reborn city (Figure 6.3). Their sparkling silhouettes appeared so often in marketing brochures and tourist guides that visitors came to identify them with the city itself: the 1981 cover of Time magazine portraying an exultant Edward Koch with the Twin Towers in the background symbolized to American readers the resurgence of New York City.51
Figure 6.3 World Trade Center Towers and the New York City skyline.
According to Miriam Greenberg, the “I ♥ NY” campaign was “the publicly visible, populist face of a more controversial process of pro-business economic restructuring,”52 which became the hallmark of the mayoral administration of Edward Koch (1977–1989), and which entailed cuts across the board on social services, public housing, schools, hospitals, sanitation, and public infrastructure, coupled with generous subsidies to private ventures and to privately led programs of office and market-rate housing construction.
The result was an increasingly polarized city: while the Wall Street boom fueled an unprecedented wave of speculation in office building construction, the percentage of New Yorkers living under the federal poverty line rose consistently along with homelessness rates.53 Crime and decay, although gradually fading from the glossy pages of lifestyle magazines and marketing brochures, were still a big part of New Yorkers’ daily experience, and became particularly severe in the last two of Ed Koch’s three terms as mayor. The administration’s response was a hard line on “quality of life” issues. By the mid-1980s, the term “quality of life”54 had turned from a government agenda to reduce inequality (as part of Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 war on poverty program) to a slogan to justify increased police enforcement against petty crime: instead of attempting to eradicate the causes of poverty, the focus was shifted toward what some pundits have called the “criminalization of poverty”—a philosophy that the mayoral administration of Rudolph Giuliani would fully endorse in the 1990s.
In 1989, David Dinkins became the city’s first-ever black mayor. The tourist industry had been hit hard by the stock market crash and the recession of 1989–1992, and the city government was left with a very tight budget for tourism and business promotion. In 1992, Dinkins organized a European road show to promote the city to foreign investors, but the tour was deemed a publicity failure.55 Dinkins’s half-hearted campaign to reframe the “quality of life” focus to benefit disadvantaged New Yorkers and minority groups56 was short-lived: in late 1993, he was defeated by Giuliani in his bid for re-election. Giuliani immediately resurrected Koch’s “quality of life” policing campaign and used it as a tool to promote a cleaned-up city that would reattract visitors and businesses: the campaign, based on a “zero tolerance” approach on minor crimes such as begging, panhandling, or graffiti writing, translated into an aggressive crackdown on poor and homeless people.57 According to author and activist Randy Shaw, “Giuliani’s platform defined ‘quality of life’ as protecting the middle-class and business community from the homeless and poor people that the War on Poverty’s ‘quality of life’ terminology was designed to assist.”58 During Giuliani’s first term, the New York City Police Department headed by Commissioner William Bratton adopted aggressive policing strategies based on James Q. Wilson’s “broken windows” approach. This was based on the harsh repression of minor offenses, on the theory that maintaining an orderly urban environment acts as a deterrent for petty crime and antisocial behavior, preventing escalation into more serious crimes. And indeed, crime declined precipitously under Giuliani’s tenure, with violent crimes dropping 56% and robberies going down 67% in eight years.59 The extent to which his administration deserves all the credit, however, is disputed, as crime had started declining before Giuliani’s election, reflecting a national trend already in progress since the Dinkins years.60 But what escalated dramatically instead were the many outrageous cases of police brutality and civil rights abuse, mostly directed toward young men of color.61
Under Giuliani, “zero tolerance” was an integral part of a citywide campaign to maintain order in an era of unprecedented social inequalities, many of which were the product of the very reforms that the mayor’s administration had enforced:62 Giuliani’s welfare-to-work63 initiative and the dismantling of social services for the neediest New Yorkers were the trailblazers for the major neoliberal shifts in federal policy that would come in the Clinton years. While conservative media celebrated Giuliani for “turning the city around,” progressive pundits dismissed his “quality of life” campaign as an operation to protect the welfare of wealthy New Yorkers and the safety of tourists in the midst of an increasingly unequal and polarized city.64
By the late 1990s, the image of New York City had become that of a shiny, business-friendly global city. But New York’s renaissance as a place to visit and to do business may have been less the result of the mayor’s “quality of life” campaigns and more the consequence of major shifts in the administration’s economic priorities. The hotel occupancy tax was reduced, while an unprecedented platform of corporate tax breaks and incentives was enacted to attract or retain major corporations, hotels, and financial institutions in the city. Investors took advantage of public/private financing to embark on new residential and office development ventures in downtown Manhattan, including Battery Park City, the World Financial Center, and the refurbishment of South Street Seaport. Meanwhile, Times Square, which throughout the 1960s and 1970s had become an infamous symbol of the city’s decline, was turned around to symbolize yet another success of the Giuliani administration. In 1990, New York State had taken possession of six of the nine historic theaters on 42nd Street, some of which were renovated for Broadway shows, some demolished, and some converted into multiplex movie theaters or megastores. In 1992, the Times Square Alliance started a program of “clean-up” for the area by increasing security, evicting porn theaters and sex shops, and attracting tourist- and family-friendly attractions like Planet Hollywood and other global franchises. The renewed Times Square attracted a number of large financial, publishing, and media firms, whose headquarters were also “branded” thanks to zoning ordinances requiring building owners to display huge illuminated LED billboards—the Times Square of today. Under Giuliani, more attempts at revamping the New York brand were set in motion: the obsolete Convention and Visitors Bureau was revamped, its operation and budget expanded, and its name changed to NYC & Company to become the city’s official tourism marketing organization. The new body, composed of 13,000 members including hotels, restaurants, attractions, and convention centers, was geared especially toward attracting tourists to the new sparkling downtown in Lower Manhattan, symbolized by the towers of the World Trade Center. By 2000, the city had managed to attract 37.4 million yearly visitors, up from 28.5 million in 1995. According to data released by NYC & Company, by the year 2000, business travel increased to 11.7 million travelers, while the city also gained ground as a family-friendly travel destination, with an overall 45% increase in family travel (up to 10.5 million) since 1996. Visitor spending in New York City rose to $17 billion, accounting for a total economic impact calculated at $24.9 billion.65 In the summer of 2001, Giuliani announced the results of these extraordinary efforts:
Tourism continues to be one of the engines powering New York City’s economy. Last year’s record number of visitors is a testament to New York City’s broad appeal to people from all over the world. In addition to our historic reductions in crime, we have made significant improvements in quality of life, and great advances in both economic vitality and cultural achievement. There is great energy in New York City now—and tourists come here to be a part of it.66
If Koch had been no man to eschew public exposure, having appeared in more than 70 movies and TV shows as himself, Giuliani was an even bolder marketer of himself. During his time in office, through his tightly controlled press office and his commissioners, Giuliani managed to consistently saturate the media, advertising the results of his “quality of life” campaigns and celebrating the successes of his administration.67 He succeeded in selling the narrative that a city as unmanageable as New York could be indeed “turned around”: if Giuliani had turned New York City into a profitable, tourist- and business-friendly brand, there was hope for all cities in distress. In so doing, Giuliani became probably the first of a future generation of “branded” city mayors68—a practice that the Bloomberg administration would heavily borrow from in the following years. The branding of Giuliani swelled after the tragedy of September 11, once again a time of crisis for New York City, whose image was now tied to the horrors of devastation, terrorism, danger, and mourning. As mayor of a wounded city, Giuliani gained the attention of the international community and was praised for his engagement in the rescue and recovery operations during the crisis. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, the controversies surrounding his figure quickly disappeared from the media, as Giuliani became, in the words of Oprah Winfrey, “America’s Mayor,”69 a man whose courage and prowess were celebrated worldwide. Time magazine named him “Person of the Year” for 2001, while Queen Elizabeth II made him an honorary knight of the British Empire in 2002. After 9/11, Giuliani thus came to symbolize to the world the endurance and resilience of the entire city. But despite Giuliani’s international recognition, New York was again in the midst of a terrible emergency, and had to deal not only with a devastating loss of jobs and tax revenues but also with the flight of hundreds of companies in the aftermath of the attacks. Before 9/11, there was a projected $545 million surplus in the city budget; after the attack, the city had a $1.3 billion shortfall. Almost 15,000 businesses in the area close to the World Trade Center were destroyed, damaged, or disrupted.70 The New York City Partnership estimated that the economic impact of the attack would likely total $83 billion in damage to New York City’s economy. As an article in the Wall Street Journal announced, it was time to “turn around” once again the public perception of the city to reinject confidence in visitors, consumers, and businesses:
For the city’s official marketers New York isn’t just a wounded city, but a challenged brand … [and] like all challenged brands, it needs … an overarching scheme to reposition itself in the American popular consciousness.71
Businesses and tourists had to be persuaded once again that the city, despite the tragedy, was a safe and profitable destination. Thus, while federal aid was channeled into a new wave of tax breaks and incentives for the corporate sector, new marketing campaigns were launched to emphasize the “resilience” of the city in the aftermath of the tragedy.
On the one side, a massive corporate retention strategy was pursued that consisted of million-dollar tax breaks and other subsidies to companies that were threatening to leave the city after the attacks, “regardless of whether companies actually stay in the city, or ever intended to leave in the first place.”72 This strategy would continue under Giuliani’s successor Michael Bloomberg, who would allow a large chunk of federal aid for reconstruction to be funneled into subsidies for corporate and banking giants.73 On the other side, the New York City Partnership and the ABNY, in concert with city and state agencies such as NYC & Company, the NYCEDC, the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), and the newly created Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC),74 and assisted by professional marketing firms, mobilized to craft a new citywide branding campaign. As recommended by marketing consultants, a campaign would be successful only if it managed to push aside the memory of the tragedy and focus on New York’s ability to rebound.75 Two campaigns were thus launched in 2001: the “New York Stronger Than Ever” campaign was targeted at patriotic tourists from the United States and international sympathizers from across the world and aimed to attract national and international events like the 2004 Republican National Convention and the 2012 Olympics. The campaign featured TV commercials and giant billboards advertising the resilient city and its generous sponsors (American Express, Mercedes Benz, and AOL Time Warner, among others). Simultaneously, a new $40 million marketing operation was launched to mark the 25th anniversary of the 1977 “I ♥ NY” campaign: it featured advertisements on the radio, on the Internet, and in newspapers and magazines, as well as an energetic TV ad that emphasized the vibrancy of the city and highlighted its “businesses, theaters, restaurants, and stadiums”; it also featured Mayor Giuliani, Governor Pataki, celebrities, and people from the streets sporting T-shirts with the “I ♥ NY” logo and proudly repeating, “I love New York.” The message was that New York was back and thriving, as Pataki announced in October 2001.76
For the occasion, Milton Glaser had crafted pro bono a new logo—a reiteration of the “I ♥ NY” logo, but with a black stain over the heart, as a symbol of New York’s wounded heart. But the ESDC, which was the copyright holder, urged Glaser to either take the black mark off of the heart or discontinue using the logo.77 City marketing could well capitalize on the tragedy, but only up to a certain extent: vulnerability was no suitable brand to attract visitors and businesses, as alarming reports from marketing consultancy firms had convinced the city that the memory of the tragedy, although still popular among patriotic US visitors, was no good sale to wealthy business travelers and corporations considering relocation.78
Figure 6.4 Ground Zero Memorial, public viewing platform. Adorned with flowers, letters, and patches of deceased officers, the first Ground Zero Memorial installation was removed in 2002.
This shift became clear by the opening of what would become New York’s top tourist attraction for many years, the viewing platform at Ground Zero, when the city cleared the fences of the thousands of memorabilia, floral wreaths, US flags, and photos that honored the missing and the deceased in the terrorist attack (Figure 6.4). City officials had realized it was time to adopt a completely different strategy.
In 2001, Michael R. Bloomberg succeeded Giuliani with a staggering $73 million privately funded campaign. He inherited a city with a sinking economy, a huge budget deficit, and a bleak image tied to the horrors of 9/11. As he took office, Bloomberg addressed the city’s image crisis by bringing the branding machine to a whole new level. The branding efforts led by Bloomberg throughout his three mandates have constituted probably the most literal translation of the principles of “corporate identity” and “corporate branding” into the realm of urban management. He channeled unprecedented investments from both the private and the public sector and worked on an extensive restructuring of the municipal city marketing agencies to create a hierarchically integrated marketing apparatus modeled on the structure of a business corporation.79 Soon after taking office, the mayor clarified his intentions of manufacturing a unified city brand to be sold in the global marketplace:
New York is in a fierce, worldwide competition; our strategy must be to hone our competitive advantages. We must offer the best product—and sell it, forcefully…. We’ll take advantage of our brand. New York is the best-known City on the planet…. Yet, as a City, we’ve never taken direct, coordinated custody of our image. By changing that, we can realize additional City revenues immediately. Many companies are interested in sponsorship agreements, similar to their sponsorship of major sporting and charitable events. We’ll do this in a way that protects the integrity of our services and that creates financial returns benefiting all New Yorkers.80
In 2002, Bloomberg created two new city marketing agencies, NYC Big Events and a “Permanent Host Committee,” to secure high-profile events that could provide a platform to showcase the city both nationally and internationally. In 2003, the NYCEDC organized a series of “road shows” to market the city around the world, from London to Beijing. The host committee was successful in hosting high-profile events such as the 2003 WNBA All-Star game, the Grammys, and the 2004 Republican National Convention. With the pursuit of the contested bid for the 2012 Olympic Games as the keystone for an unprecedented branding campaign,81 Bloomberg started marketing the city as “the world’s second home” at public speeches and conventions.82 Television ads were broadcasted with the tagline: “The Olympic Games in New York. We’ve been training for this forever.” Meanwhile, a 2002 report was produced by corporate consulting firm McKinsey and Co. that would have a crucial influence on the future moves of Bloomberg’s branding machine.83 If the city wanted to compete in the global marketplace, according to the report, it had to diversify its economy beyond Wall Street and attract new industries, especially high-end global companies in the fields of information, media, and technology. The report advised against the use of traditional corporate retention strategies (a standard practice that had reached its climax during the administration of Giuliani and continued during the first years of Bloomberg) and suggested focusing instead on specific branding strategies targeting the industries’ top executives: these had to emphasize the city’s highly skilled talent pool, its high-end residential space, its first-class amenities, and its cultural vibrancy and quality of life—elements that the report deemed crucial to the locational decisions of wealthy managers and professionals.84 In January 2003, Bloomberg finally unveiled to reporters what seemed to summarize the city’s new strategy:
The more I learn about this institution of New York City, the more I see the ways in which it needs to think like a private company…. If New York City is a business, it isn’t Wal-Mart—it isn’t trying to be the lowest-priced product in the market. It’s a high-end product, maybe even a luxury product. New York offers tremendous value, but only for those companies able to capitalize on it.85
Bloomberg’s “luxury city” message was targeted at an elite market made up of the wealthiest global companies—companies whose dominant concern in locational decision making was not about costs but rather about enhancing their brand image by associating it with that of a winning global city. Bloomberg’s message to the business world was pretty clear-cut: not all companies are invited to move here, only those that can afford to pay for the unique advantages that New York has to offer—the upper crust of the global corporate market.86
In 2002, while overseas the city was sold to the Olympic Committee and international tourists as a beacon of inclusion and cultural diversity, NYC & Company filled the city with over 1,000 banners on city streets with taglines such as “NYC—Banking Capital of the World,” “NYC—Real Estate Capital of the World,” and “NYC—Financial Capital of the World.” The huge gap between two marketing messages as divergent as “the world’s second home” and “the luxury city” epitomizes the bipolar, double-faced approach of the branding campaigns led during Bloomberg’s first term, based on distinct marketing messages for each different target group. While the Olympic campaign celebrated the color and diversity of “the world’s second home,” and following campaigns such as “This Is New York City” presented New York as a welcoming city of openness and creativity, in VIP business meetings the city was marketed as a luxury brand to an elite of powerful companies and investors.87
The use of such a two-faced approach not only testifies to the ambiguity of the representational universe of marketing messages in the broadest sense but also poses the question of how could two such conflicting representational universes translate into a consistent policy agenda? The answer, as will be clarified in the following sections, is quite simple: the city would be re-engineered as a luxury enclave for the wealthy, while public campaigns would advertise it to middle-class locals and visitors as an inclusive, diverse, and open city. Marketing slogans and factual policy had split their paths, never to join again.
There was a day when everybody said NYC does not need to advertise, it’s the Big Apple, everyone is going to come here…. Those days are long over…. We are in the days of good communications and great transportation and a media that shows people that there are other cities around the world. We are in a very competitive battle…. You have to have a coordinated strategy; you can’t just say … they’re going to come to us.88
Bloomberg understood that the establishment of a supervising body capable of coordinating a broad array of marketing efforts was paramount for a consistent and effective branding of the city, and in 2003 he instituted a new entity called New York City Marketing (NYCM), designed to manage the city brand, articulate marketing campaigns, and craft sponsorships with private companies. Bloomberg appointed marketing executive Joseph Perello, a former advertising agency director and business consultant for the New York Yankees, as its president and chief marketing officer (CMO). The CMO’s task was to oversee all marketing efforts in cooperation with other city agencies, and to partner with corporations interested in cosponsorship agreements. NYCM’s activities were also closely tied to the development agendas of three other city-affiliated quasi-governmental agencies: the NYCEDC, responsible for promoting urban development across the five boroughs; NYC & Company, the official city agency for tourism; and NYC Big Events, the marketing division the mayor had established with the task of attracting events in the aftermath of 9/11. NYCM, the NYCEDC, NYC Big Events, and NYC & Company well represented the interests of the city’s most powerful city producers, including members of the real estate, financial, media, and banking elites, and their operations were strictly overseen by growth advocate and Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff. NYCM, which in June 2003 was transformed into a local development corporation, became Bloomberg’s and Doctoroff’s centralized marketing authority. Its new status meant that the agency, although largely funded with public money, could act unrestrained by public scrutiny. Over the following years, CMO Perello assembled a team of business leaders and marketing firms to guide the agency’s first marketing operations: in its early years, NYCM forged corporate partnerships, surveyed all of the city’s brands, secured copyrights, contracted licensing royalties, and negotiated advertising and promotion space on the city’s street furniture. As Daniel Doctoroff anticipated in 2003, almost every aspect of city life was now up for grabs for corporate sponsors:
Similar to sports franchises and cultural institutions that use stadiums and exhibits as their canvas for corporate support, New York City can do the same. The difference here is that the entire City will be our canvas.89
Thanks to the centralized management of the city’s trademarks, NYCM could sell the New York City brand to corporations interested in partnership deals. Several requests for proposals were issued to offer licensing rights for a range of products including apparel, souvenirs, and gadgets. The office was also charged with licensing the New York City brands and logos in films and television productions.
Starting in 2003, a number of corporate sponsorships were set in motion. The same year, the city entered into a contract with Snapple, a five-year, $166 million deal that gave the New York–born beverage company exclusive rights to sell its beverages through vending machines placed in various city agencies, police stations, and even sanitation depots, as well as in 1,200 New York City public schools. In return, Snapple guaranteed at least $8 million a year to New York City schools for five years, and about $13 million a year to the city, based on sales. Snapple would also spend $12 million a year on cross-advertising that also promoted the city.90 Soon after, several other citywide sponsorship deals were set in motion. In December 2004, NYCM announced a $19.5 million contract with The History Channel: under the 3.5-year agreement, the network was allowed self-promotion on several city properties and street furniture; in return, the city would get $19.5 million, of which $3.5 million would be spent to restore historical sites and to create the NYC Heritage Tourism Center in Lower Manhattan, $15 million would be directed to promote the city on the channel, and another $1 million would be spent on educational programs for city schools sponsored by the network.91 Later in 2005, a new partnership was developed with Universal Studios for the premiere of the King Kong movie: the deal allowed Universal free use of Military Island, one of the plazas created by the DOT at Times Square, where a 20-foot sculpture of King Kong was erected for the event. In the following years, other sponsorship agreements were developed with American Express, OpenTable, Sony Pictures, Travelocity, Time Out New York, and Spanish street furniture design firm Cemusa, among others.
In less than one year, Bloomberg’s branding machine started to bear fruit. A Young & Rubicam study ranked New York City as the 13th most powerful global brand of 2,400 brands analyzed in 2004: according to the report, brand attributes for New York City were “unique,” “authentic,” and “dynamic.”92 By 2005, New York City tourism represented a $24 billion industry with more than $5 billion in city, state, and federal tax revenues.93
But it wasn’t until 2006 that Bloomberg laid the groundwork for the creation of what Greenberg calls his “massive new branding apparatus,”94 when he merged the three existing city marketing agencies and put them under his control, creating a single, vertically organized municipal marketing agency. Both NYCM and NYC Big Events were merged with the city’s tourism and convention agency NYC & Company, creating a new, unified governing body. A private nonprofit corporation, NYC & Company until 2006 was a membership-based organization financed by dues collected from its members, but when the mayor took direct control of its operations, he supplemented the newly created entity with an annual budget that rose to $103 million over five years. In so doing, Bloomberg applied the business model of a corporation to a governmental body that eluded public scrutiny:95 according to New York Magazine reporter Michael Idov, “on paper, Bloomberg got rid of two agencies; in reality, he created a kind of superagency free from the bureaucratic confines of City Hall.”96 Finally, top marketing professionals from the world of advertising were appointed as managers of the revamped agency: power brander George A. Fertitta, a former Madison Avenue veteran whose ad agency specialized in marketing luxury goods,97 was appointed as its CEO and brought in his own team of advertising executives and creative professionals. NYC & Company’s public funding escalated to $22.5 million yearly. But NYC & Company’s direct revenues from sponsorships and deals far outweighed its public funding, with a budget estimated at $60 million in 2010.98
To further promote and enhance the image of New York around the world, NYC & Company also worked to create the first ever unified brand identity for the city. In 2006, the agency hired branding firm Wolff Olins to manufacture the city’s first official “corporate identity” through the design of a new logo for New York City and the revamping of the official city website. Today, the new logo has been integrated across city and government services, from taxi cabs to municipal services, from travel brochures to TV ads, providing a ubiquitous, consistent, and instantly recognizable symbol to both residents and visitors, while the renewed website was expanded with new interactive features, so that it could compete with the most established online guides.99 The revenues from advertising on the website (which became www.nycgo.com in 2009) amounted to $2 million in 2009 and reached $3 million by 2011.100
In his 2006 State of the City address, Bloomberg boldly announced that he would bring a staggering 50 million tourists to New York City by 2015, up from the 32.5 million he inherited in 2002 and from an estimated 43 million in 2006.101 Bloomberg’s ambitious goal would be fulfilled four years ahead of schedule, in 2011.
In 2007, the marketing division of NYC & Company unveiled its first global branding campaign: the $30 million “This Is New York City” campaign, designed by global advertising agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty, boasted dreamy images of a colorful urban paradise, and included television, print, online, and outdoor ads. The campaign’s centerpiece was a TV ad that combined film and animation and featured iconic images from the five boroughs, including the Statue of Liberty, Times Square, the Empire State Building, the Wonder Wheel in Coney Island, the Lenox Lounge in Harlem, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Unisphere in Queens, and the Staten Island Ferry. The family-friendly commercial showed a psychedelic New York City, almost remindful of the Beatles’ classic 1968 animated feature film Yellow Submarine. The ad aired on television in Spain, Ireland, France, and the United Kingdom, and on domestic networks through the partnership with The History Channel and other cable partners (Figure 6.5). The outdoor and print advertisements highlighted different segments of the New York City experience—from shopping and fashion to entertainment and food—and were placed on bus shelters in Brazil, Portugal, Italy, and Spain, and domestically in cities such as Boston, Philadelphia, Miami, and San Antonio, through the city’s street furniture contract with advertising company Cemusa, which managed 3,000 bus shelters, 7,000 street poles, and 1,000 telephone kiosks in the city.102
Figure 6.5 Stills from the “This Is New York City” TV ad, 2007, designed by Bartle Bogle Hegarty.
“This Is New York City” presented New York as a magical wonderland of experiences unmatchable by any other destination in the world, a place of “unparalleled diversity, excitement, culture, shopping and entertainment.”103 But most important, the campaign constituted the first attempt to promote all of the five New York City boroughs as tourist destinations, each with its own distinct flavor.
The idea of a campaign to officially promote all of the five boroughs as tourist destinations, something that would have been unimaginable just a decade earlier, had become a sure bet by 2007, when an unprecedented boom in the housing market had profoundly transformed the face of once-deprived neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens, and Harlem. By 2007, all of the outer boroughs had seen a sustained drop in crime rates, all of them had witnessed soaring housing values due to their proximity to the booming housing market in Manhattan, all of them had been penetrated by big corporate retailers and banks, and many sported their own hip artistic scene and vibrant nightlife: in sum, by the late 2000s, most of the outer boroughs fulfilled the necessary prerequisites to be marketed as tourist-friendly destinations, and some had even started their own local branding campaigns. As a case in point, in 2007, Brooklyn was experiencing an unprecedented wave of luxury hotel construction spurred by the city’s rezoning plans for Williamsburg and downtown Brooklyn; this boom prompted the Brooklyn Tourism and Visitors Center to create its own interactive tourism website (visitbrooklyn.org) and Borough President Markowitz to brand Brooklyn as “the perfect destination for business, conference and leisure travelers from around the globe,”104 while lifestyle magazines labeled it as “America’s coolest restaurant neighborhood.”105
Similar transformations were occurring in other boroughs as well: while luxury waterfront developments were transforming Queens’ once-industrialized Long Island City into a hip residential destination, large parts of the Bronx and Staten Island were being rezoned for luxury residential units and hotels. By the early 2010s, the hotel industry experienced for the first time a staggering expansion in the outer boroughs: in the 2008–2011 period, 42% of new hotel developments built in New York City were located out of Manhattan, with the majority in Queens (22%) and Brooklyn (15%).106 In 2007, despite the global financial crisis, the city managed to attract a record 46 million visitors, 1.5 million more than in 2006:107 the combination of Bloomberg’s bold marketing campaigns and a weak dollar had contributed to make New York one of the few large cities in the United States that had seen a constant increase in tourism since 9/11.
Yet Bloomberg and Fertitta were confident that more could be done. As internal reports were showing that one of the most common negative perceptions about the city was that it was prohibitively expensive, outdoor ads were placed across European cities declaring that, with the weakness of the dollar, New York had become a relative bargain for European visitors.108 Meanwhile, according to the heads of NYC & Company, other common negative perceptions about the city, such as its crime and the rudeness of New Yorkers, had to be overcome with a new marketing overdose of urbanity and glamour:
Mr. Fertitta said he would rather foreigners picture “Sex and the City” than “Law & Order.” … To change people’s negative views of New York’s grime, crime and prices, he said, the city can piggyback on the invaluable boost it gets from pop-culture cynosures like Carrie Bradshaw…. “To some people, New York City is ‘Sex and the City’ and the best shoes in the world,” Mr. Fertitta said. “They want to see where Carrie Bradshaw sat on the stoop.”109
Consequently, in 2007, a smaller campaign was crafted with the goal of highlighting New Yorkers’ friendliness toward visitors—or at least to reverse a common perception of New Yorkers as jaded and unfriendly: the campaign “Just Ask the Locals” consisted of posters of New York celebrities giving local shopping and dining tips that were disseminated in bus shelters across the city. New York celebrities like Robert de Niro, Julianne Moore, Jimmy Fallon, and Puff Daddy contributed to the campaign pro bono. In early 2008, hotel occupancy rates kept growing, to above 80%, compared to about 60% across the rest of the country, prompting Bloomberg to announce he was confident that the city would reach his goal of attracting 50 million annual visitors by 2012.
Wrong would be to have a luxury campaign at this time. Right would be to have a family friendly, offer-driven program.110
At the end of 2007, the economy was changing for the worse, and the unfolding of a global recession challenged the mayor and the heads of NYC & Company to re-examine their marketing strategies. The programs adopted since 2008 thus focused on a dual strategy: on one hand, because the United States was suffering the consequences of the subprime mortgage crisis and a devastating recession, the image of New York as a prohibitively expensive enclave for the super-wealthy had to be replaced with that of a more approachable and affordable destination, and domestic campaigns had to be made more appealing to average middle-class American families, rather than wealthy business executives; on the other hand, the NYC brand had to be sold more aggressively than ever before overseas, where money was still flowing. As the number of domestic visitors plunged, the city started investing massively in promotion across the Atlantic: NYC & Company opened a slate of international offices in 17 countries worldwide, including Moscow, Shanghai, Seoul, Tokyo, and Mumbai, and started launching separate marketing campaigns in each country:
While the efforts all share the upscale New York brand identity, they are tailored in unique ways. Asian ads focus on our main icons to entice first-time visitors. European markets get bombarded with messages meant to encourage repeat visits and a “live like a local” experience. In Italy and Germany, NYC & Company has been selling the notion of the city’s “energy” and “vibrancy,” as opposed to any specific sites. It’s less Broadway and more Bedford Avenue—a place where you go to be cool.111
Meanwhile, to a domestic tourist market impoverished by the recession, the chic imagery of a “Sex and the City”–inspired urbanity was no longer considered an easy sale: the brand of New York City had to be purged of any remaining “luxury” pedigree to be made appealing to a more disenchanted and less wealthy US consumer market.
As reports were showing that family trips to favored destinations like Disney World were dropping, NYC & Company experts responded by strenuously promoting the city as a family-friendly destination with a series of low-budget packages for family trips to the city called “New York: The Real Deal,” and later “Get More NYC,” which offered deals and savings on dining, hotels, and shopping and featured characters from Sesame Street as “NYC family ambassadors.”112
In line with the core idea of developing different niche marketing messages directed at different consumer targets, these family-friendly campaigns were conducted side by side with the first global marketing efforts aimed at bringing visitors from the LGBT community to the city. To highlight the gay-friendliness of New York, the “Rainbow Pilgrimage” campaign was launched in 2009, marking the 40th anniversary of the gay rights movement started by the Stonewall Riots in 1969. Later in 2011, after New York State passed the same-sex marriage law, NYC & Company jumped in with the “NYC I Do” marketing campaign, opening the city to the juicy market of wedding and honeymoon destinations for gay couples, and reaping a staggering $259 million from same-sex marriages in the first year of the law allowing the practice, with at least 8,200 gay-marriage licenses issued in 2011.113
The new efforts were again successful, as 2009, despite the global economic slump, marked New York City as the most popular US destination for the first time in over two decades, with over 45.6 million visitors, ahead of traditional top destinations like Orlando or Las Vegas.114 Despite a slight reduction in public funding since the recession (city contributions had dropped to $17 million compared to $22.5 in 2006) and a total budget of $37 million (down from $44 million in 2006), NYC & Company was able to maintain record revenues thanks to sponsorships, advertising, and licensing agreements, and through the popular nycgo.com website, which in 2009 alone generated $2 million worth of advertising.
In 2010, to encourage more Americans and foreigners to keep coming to the city, NYC & Company unveiled another iteration of the “This Is New York City” campaign, which emphasized the energy, excitement, and diversity of the city: a colorful, frantic TV ad featured MTV-like images of a dynamic, edgy, young city of music, funky nightlife, concerts, fashion shows, sports events, and crowded streets. The ad was targeted especially at young tourists, and it was one of the most explicit in promoting all five boroughs as tourist destinations—“five cities in one,” as the ad put it:
This is five cities in one: the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island, home to every color, culture, fashion and flavor you can think of. This is knishes, kebabs, pizza, pâté, satay and all the best the rest of the world has to offer. This is where the ball drops and curtains rise. This is Broadway, Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, beyond Broadway. This is people watching, celebrity sightings, and sample sale prices on the cutting edge of style. This is raw, sophisticated, beautiful, avant-garde. This is energy so exhilarating you can feel it in your soul. This is all of the above, all at the same time. This is New York City.115
The outdoor campaign ran across the United States, as well as in international markets in Australia, Brazil, Canada, and Europe, and included promotional packages from leading corporate partners such as American Airlines, American Express, AT&T, Travelocity, and the Nickelodeon cable channel, which in return promoted travel to the city. The online campaign featured the addition of a micro-site at nycgo.com/getmorenyc with personalized travel itineraries (Family, Gay, One Day, Two Day, and Shopping) and the possibility for visitors to engage with social media features via Twitter and Facebook. In 2010, tourism to New York City reached record numbers, with 48.7 million visitors and $31 billion in visitor spending.
Meanwhile, many Manhattan neighborhoods that had been traditionally more reluctant to embrace tourism—like Harlem and Lower Manhattan—saw a massive influx of new hotel openings, including the Aloft Harlem, Mondrian SoHo, James New York, Sheraton Tribeca New York Hotel, W New York Downtown, and Doubletree New York City in the Financial District.
Visitors to New York City should know that in every borough of our great city, there are neighborhoods with great restaurants, shops and cultural institutions…. We’ve focused on bringing more tourists to neighborhoods outside of Manhattan, and it’s paid off with more hotels being built and tourism-related economic activity happening in those boroughs.116
Increasing tourism opportunities in Lower Manhattan, a neighborhood that had been for long disconnected from major tourist routes, was a top priority in anticipation of the 10th anniversary of 9/11. For the opening of the World Trade Center Memorial in September 2011, the city launched the campaign “Get More NYC: Lower Manhattan,” designed to showcase to global visitors the recovery of Lower Manhattan and to promote hotels, dining, and shopping venues in a heavily transformed neighborhood. The campaign, which featured outdoor media ads throughout the city’s five boroughs, on taxicab monitors, and on social media, included special travel itineraries, coupons, and special offers at Lower Manhattan shops, restaurants, hotels, galleries, and museums. These promotional efforts were, as usual, coupled with a range of fiscal strategies to stimulate commercial development in the district. The NYCEDC’s creation of a Lower Manhattan Business Expansion Program granted property tax abatements to medium-sized and small businesses with plans to locate to or expand their operations downtown through the Lower Manhattan Relocation and Employment Assistance Program and the Lower Manhattan Sales and Use Tax Exemption. Such efforts capitalized on a decade-long revitalization program that had started in 2002 with the Job Creation and Worker Assistance Act, which eliminated the commercial rent taxation on all leases at the World Trade Center site and included special sales and use tax exemptions to assist in the recovery from the impact of 9/11. Marketing efforts and tax incentives to businesses were also coupled with massive investments in new cultural events for the opening of the 9/11 Memorial, including the Sol LeWitt outdoor exhibition at City Hall Park and the 10th anniversary of the River to River Festival, Lower Manhattan’s largest free summer arts festival. Meanwhile, the private property market downtown had prepared for the opening of the 9/11 Memorial with a remarkable growth in the hotel industry: by 2011, almost 800 new hotel rooms had been created, adding to a total 5,000 hotel rooms in the downtown area,117 and joining the growing number of upscale restaurants and fashion boutiques. New hotels included the World Center Hotel, which overlooks the September 11 Memorial and the Freedom Tower with a “View of the World Terrace Club” located on the 20th floor; the 42-story-high Andaz Wall Street; the 58-story-high W New York Downtown; and Hilton’s Doubletree Financial District—all featuring luxury amenities for business visitors like private meeting rooms, working spaces, private clubs, and spas.
Uptown, the “Destination Harlem” campaign was launched in 2012 for the opening of the Aloft Harlem Hotel near Columbia University, the first new hotel to open in the neighborhood since 1967. But more swaths of the city were yet to be absorbed under the marketing umbrella of NYC & Company. Countless other initiatives were launched in the following years to capitalize on each neighborhood’s potential as a tourist destination. The “Neighborhood x Neighborhood” initiative was launched in 2013 to bring more visitors to neighborhoods far beyond traditional tourist routes, including Bushwick, Coney Island, and Washington Heights.118
As a result of the combination of such rampant marketing efforts, in 2011 the city managed to attract a record 50.5 million visitors, way ahead of Bloomberg’s own predictions. The success prompted the mayor to announce the even more ambitious goal to draw 55 million visitors to the city by 2015119—a goal that would be achieved one year in advance under the new administration of Bill de Blasio. As NYC & Company’s original five-year contract with the city expired in the summer of 2011, city hall swiftly reinvested in it $66 million over five years.120 In December 2012, Mayor Bloomberg announced that, despite the disruption caused by Hurricane Sandy, New York had again broken records with 52 million visitors, a new all-time high.121 In 2013, the city drew a new record 54.3 million visitors—a whopping 54% increase since Bloomberg had taken office 12 years before.
Contrary to Bloomberg’s “luxury city” manifesto (according to which a successful city like New York doesn’t need to use any discounts to lure high-profile businesses) and his early promises to end the practice of “bribing companies” to stay in the city, his administration did not fully discontinue Giuliani’s tradition of granting generous tax breaks and other subsidy packages to large businesses.
Initially, Bloomberg had made headlines for killing an unprecedented subsidy package that Giuliani had agreed on with the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in 1998, which included a staggering $1.4 billion in enticements to retain the NYSE in Manhattan after its officials had started quite unrealistic rumors of moving to New Jersey.122 Soon after 9/11, however, taxpayers’ money was again funneled into a large program of incentives to large businesses, for example, in the form of community development grants administered by the LMDC to retain businesses in Lower Manhattan after the World Trade Center attacks. The largest part of these funds went to financial and banking giants, including Bank of America and Metlife, among others. Public money was also allocated to large “sport entertainment corporations” to finance new baseball stadiums for the Yankees ($1.2 billion) and the Mets ($600 million), and further subsidies were provided for the recently completed arena for the Nets (Barclays Center) at the Atlantic Yards development site in Brooklyn. Bloomberg’s and Doctoroff’s vision of a new football stadium for the Jets on Manhattan’s Far West Side did not become a reality, but hundreds of millions of dollars in city subsidies have been chaneled to finance the transformation of the rezoned area into a brand-new mixed-use extension of Midtown.123
Meanwhile, major incentives were given specifically to the hospitality business, in line with the goal to make the city a top tourist destination. In the early 2000s, major donations were assigned by the ESDC and the LMDC to luxury hotel chains in Lower Manhattan, including the Ritz Carlton ($325,000) and Tribeca Grand Hotel ($150,000) in 2002 and the Millennium Hilton ($300,000) and Embassy Suites Hotel ($267,000) in 2003.124 In 2010, a staggering $15 million in Federal Recovery Zone bonds was allocated to finance the revamping of an industrial building into a 73-room boutique luxury Wythe Hotel in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in an effort to advance the transformation of the neighborhood into a viable alternative to Manhattan for upscale tourism.125
Taylor Swift [as New York Ambassador] is perfect: Doesn’t the Statue of Liberty say, “Give me your bland, your wealthy, your gentrifying elites yearning to live in a condo in a giant, open-air mall?”126
By the time Bill de Blasio succeeded Bloomberg as mayor, tourism had become New York’s fastest-growing economic sector and one of the city’s top industries, sustaining an estimated 350,000 jobs and generating nearly $39 billion in direct spending across all five boroughs.127 De Blasio also inherited Bloomberg’s ultra-efficient branding machine, which had been set in motion since NYC & Company had taken charge of branding in 2006.
After eight consecutive record-breaking years, by 2014 the economy of tourism in New York City was so rosy that de Blasio could proudly announce that New York City wouldn’t even consider running for the 2024 Olympics bid, because, quite simply, it didn’t need to: “Our tourism industry couldn’t be stronger. Our international reputation couldn’t be better, our brand couldn’t be more well respected all over the world,” he said. “And so we thought, in a classic New York phrase, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ ”128 De Blasio insisted instead on the necessity of bringing more visitors to the outer boroughs, by channeling more efforts for the promotion of Staten Island, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens as spectacular tourist destinations in their own right:
So we know and love the fact that millions and millions of people go to the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty. But we want them also to go out into neighborhoods all over the five boroughs, experience the most wonderful cuisine from all over the world, experience folklore and culture from all over the world, experience wonders like Coney Island that are irreplaceable…. If you talk about this five borough phenomenon, some of the statistics are amazing. Since 2008, 48 percent of hotel development in the city of New York has occurred outside of Manhattan. That is an amazing vote of confidence in the city and in the outer boroughs.129
In 2015, NYC & Company announced that pop singer Taylor Swift would be the city’s global welcome ambassador for its “Welcome to New York” campaign (Figure 6.6): “We could not identify a more fitting representative of the ‘new New York City’ to tell our story to a new generation of travellers, especially millennials,” said power brander and new CEO of NYC & Company Fred Dixon at a press conference of the US Travel Association’s annual trade convention. Sure enough, this sanitized, young, and rather hipsterish brand of “new New York” sells well: another record was set in 2014, with 56.4 million visitors and an all-time-high $61.3 billion in overall economic impact,130 prompting the mayor to announce that the city was on the “Road to 10 Million More Visitors” by 2021.131 If six consecutive years of relentless increases in tourist numbers—and the record 60 million tourists who visited the city in 2016132—are any indication, 67 million tourists in 2021 is an easy bet.
Figure 6.6 Stills from the “Welcome to New York” video featuring Taylor Swift’s “Welcome to New York” hit from her “1989” album.
NYC & Company’s efforts to capitalize on almost any exploitable aspect of city life to market New York to its citizens and to the outside world have been unprecedented in terms of management, performance, and success. By expanding the scope of branding initiatives across all five neighborhoods; by incorporating elements of underground and off-culture into the compass of the tourist market, and locking them into partnerships with private companies (the absorption of underground or even once-illegal events such as rooftop films133 into its official programs is a case in point); by granting large corporations temporary use of public space for promotional events like movie premieres; and even by assigning official sponsorship of traditional festivities to big media conglomerates (such as “Syfy’s 31 Days of Halloween” in 2011134), branding strategies under the direction of NYC & Company have hastened a process of commodification of the urban experience that is unprecedented in its pervasiveness, and that is likely to become a prototype for the branding of big cities worldwide in the coming years. In the New York City of today, branding has become a structuring element of everyday life, and the presence of NYC & Company is to be felt just about everywhere: the NYC logo is displayed on all city vehicles, brochures, and online platforms; the company controls all advertising on street furniture, taxicab monitors, street poles, city facades, online platforms, and TV channels; it centrally manages hundreds of city events (including Broadway week, Off-Broadway week, restaurant week, comedy week); and it routinely allows the use of central public spaces to private entertainment companies to promote their products. In New York, so it seems, all facets of city life are now branded, from its historical landmarks to its ethnic neighborhoods, from its underground art scene to its sleazy nightlife. There’s no escape from branding’s intrusive gaze.
But the branding process goes beyond strategies to attract tourism and moves into the realm of governance. Starting with the Bloomberg administration, the marketing models of promotional culture have permeated the very idea of public management and political communication. In the branded city, citizens and visitors alike are becoming a valued customer base, whose feedback is needed to fine-tune the product’s efficiency: the establishment in March 2003 of a 311 “customer service line,” which allows New Yorkers to report common nuisances (from noise complaints to pest reports), has been a major success: it gives city officials a clear idea of what is going on in the minds of their constituents while making residents feel in touch with a transparent and friendly administration.
NYC & Company also acts as a public relations department that supervises almost every interaction between New York and the rest of the world, and between the mayor and his constituents.135 In so doing, NYC & Company has contributed to forging new social and power relations, and this is one of the most remarkable and enduring legacies of the Bloomberg administration, one that survives even during the years of de Blasio. As Bloomberg Business journalist Tom Lowry wrote in 2007 about the former mayor, “Bloomberg sees New York City as a corporation, its citizens as customers, its sanitation workers, police officers, clerks, and deputy commissioners as talent. He is the chief executive.”136 Under this model of governance, the city is equaled to a product or service that can be sold to the citizen-customers, while Bloomberg has become, as Miriam Greenberg argues, the most notable of a “new generation of CEO politicians.”137 Just as much as the CEO is the face of a company to its employees and customers, the CEO-mayor represents the values and missions of the city brand. All of the mayor’s bold initiatives, from PlaNYC 2030’s “For a Greener, Greater New York,” through the New Housing Marketplace (“Creating Housing for the Next Generation”), have been heavily branded with catchy slogans and public presentations to galvanize New Yorkers and arouse public interest and support. Bloomberg’s constant TV appearances, his weekly radio shows on CBS New York, and his numerous public talks have given him a global stature that has allowed him to move way beyond the realm of New York City politics after leaving office.
And things certainly haven’t changed under de Blasio, another branded mayor who chose to brand himself as the anti-Bloomberg in 2013. His “progressive” brand and approachable character attracted those New Yorkers who resented the cold, technocratic, self-referential, data-driven Bloomberg way. Although some say the new mayor hasn’t been as savvy in administering his brand as Bloomberg was, de Blasio has managed to sell rezoning and development plans that are just as intimidating and monumental as his predecessor’s, yet insisting these projects are somehow inspired by “progressive” goals of community building and housing affordability. When faced with low approval ratings in 2015, de Blasio repeatedly blamed the perceived failures of his administration on nothing else than communication mishaps. “I need to communicate better,” he kept on declaring when discussing his midterm accomplishments138—a sign that the new mayor knows all too well the importance of packaging over substance in politics, as we will see in the next chapter.