Tomorrow the El Paso Convention and Visitors Bureau Strategic Communication Task Force will meet at the Convention Center to discuss further implementation of the City’s slogan, El Paso: It’s All Good.
The biggest problem with the slogan isn’t just that it’s trite, vapid, overused, or unintentionally ironic. The biggest problem is that it’s a lie. It’s not all good in El Paso. Oh, El Paso has some great things going for it. Beautiful sunsets and great food and wonderful people. But El Paso also has some serious problems that need to be addressed. Claiming it’s all good is abject denial. It makes us look like we’re either chumps or liars.
Hopefully, they’ll come to their senses and abandon this stillborn slogan. More likely though they’ll just ramp up the execution in an attempt to counterfeit a viral campaign.
A slogan should represent a marketing campaign, complete with a Value Proposition, or Unique Sales Proposition. I suspect that the advertising agency skipped these critical phases and went right with It’s All Good. Here, the slogan is the marketing campaign.
In the private sector, the advertising agency that came up with this pitch would have been fired, or, more realistically, never hired in the first place. But El Paso continues to settle for mediocrity. Maybe the City can stop payment on the check. More likely, they’ll just shrug their shoulders and say “It’s all good.”