The “Orlando. You Don’t Know the Half of It.” branding campaign was awarded Best Marketing Slogan (Overall Winner) and Specialism Award for Place Branding…
Best Slogan and Place Branding 2019
Orlando’s business branding campaign “Orlando. You Don’t Know the Half of It.” received top honors in the fDi Strategy Winners 2019, annual award designations selected by Foreign Direct Investment (fDi) magazine, a product of the Financial Times.
According to fDi, the “Orlando Economic Partnership’s regional branding initiative aims to increase investor awareness of the city’s strengths as a business location outside of tourism and hospitality. The organisation is seeing positive results from targeting out-of-area business decision-makers, highlighting regional strengths in a series of high-wage targeted industries and better positioning itself to increase job quality. The campaign is also focused on talent recruitment by utilising Orlando’s population growth. For many years now, the region has seen positive inward migration, adding 1000 people per week, and one in every nine residents has moved to the region since 2010, half of whom moved from an international location. Through this campaign, the organisation is actively targeting workers for its targeted industries.”
[Orlando] is seeing positive results from targeting out-of-area business decision-makers, highlighting regional strengths in a series of high-wage targeted industries and better positioning itself to increase job quality.
Foreign Direct Investment (fDi) magazine
The Orlando Economic Partnership is honored to receive this recognition for its branding efforts to attract top talent and companies to the region.
The Whole Story About the “Half Of It”
In 2014, with the help of a group of local volunteer marketing experts, Ken Potrock, president of Consumer Products at Disney, was charged with branding Orlando. The group firmly agreed on a direction, but just weren’t landing in the right spot. Ken Potrock remembers sitting around a table during an early committee meeting, not quite seeing what he wanted.
“We wanted something that was proprietary and really spoke specifically to what made Orlando unique,” said Potrock, explaining that if the names of random cities could be interchanged with Orlando in any tagline, it wouldn’t work.
The branding couldn’t be built on “Anywhere U.S.A.,” but on words that made sense only to Orlando, both rationally and emotionally. The creative director at local ad agency Anson-Stoner put one final option on the table. The tagline read, “Orlando. You don’t know the half of it.” Done deal.
Orlando, indeed, had long enjoyed an outstanding reputation as a place to vacation or come for a convention but not as much as a business location. Research revealed that Orlando didn’t have any negative connotations among target audiences. But, despite achievements including being named the number one market for both job and population growth, it wasn’t as strong as it should be.
“When we asked people what they knew about Orlando, it was typically always about tourism,” Potrock said. “If we wanted to be considered in the economic development business, we had to tell a better story.”
The “other half” became the platform for conversations about a plentiful, young and diverse workforce, thriving industries, outstanding infrastructure and a generous quality of life.
“We wanted to come up with something that was intriguing enough to say, ‘I’ll bite. Show me the other half.’”
Ken Potrock, president of Consumer Products, Disney
The campaign launched in early 2015 with the goal to get more companies to consider Orlando as a viable location to expand or locate their businesses.
The branding effort was and remains much more than an advertising campaign. With a targeted, deliberate and comprehensive campaign, it helped position Orlando in a new light, particularly with the target audience of c-suite executives and site location consultants.
The messaging platform serves as an empty vessel that is continually filled with news and notes about Orlando. There are so many different things to say to share the “other half” of Orlando that newsworthy stories become the legs of the campaign. The group knew that they had created something with staying power even 10 years into the future.
Orlando has a vibrant downtown core ripe with new community venues including the Amway Center, home of the Orlando Magic and Orlando Solar Bears hockey team; the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts; the newly renovated Camping World Stadium; and an upcoming soccer stadium for the Orlando City Lions and Orlando Pride. Orange County is home to the simulation procurement commands for the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard. Lake County’s National Training Center is where aspiring Olympic athletes go to train in track, swimming and gymnastics. Osceola County has the first industry-led consortium for manufacturing of smart sensors, BRIDG. Seminole County is a hub for information technology companies.
With so much going on, it’s clear that those who still think there’s only tourism in Orlando don’t know the half of it. With so much staying power, the brand seems to be a winner.
