The Columbus Region

Defining a City

Fahlgren Mortine was tasked with helping update the Columbus area's image. This was the business initiative to bring new and exciting companies to Central Ohio by 2020.

For years, Columbus, Ohio, was thought of as a sort of cow town. But, this couldn't be further from the truth. It's a progressive, university city that has found itself as the 14th largest in the nation. We were tasked with destroying stereotypes in order to project a message to companies around the world that Columbus was the place to be for business.

But where do you start?

You start by showing the rest of the world what you already have to offer. This Business Week print ad was developed to show off the city's incredible health science and technology capabilities. Giving a "foundation" to any company that might be interested in making a change.

We continued by creating brochures for each targeted industry. This one’s for logistics.

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From there, letters were sent out to CEOs, leveraging some of Columbus' biggest brands--above, we used Jeni's Ice Cream. In that piece, I was tasked with capturing the head of the initiative's voice. And in the end, we knew we had to do more. We had to get Columbus' population onboard.

At the time, Ted Talks were all the rage and we wanted in on the action. The talks were seen as hip, progressive and, above all else, innovative. This was how idUS was born. The program was designed to be Columbus' own showcase of innovation. It would last a couple years and get Columbus residents in on the intelligent thinking we were trying to promote. I was tasked with the initial website's copy, which can be found HERE.

And finally, we decided to see what kind of partnerships we could create with our other agency clients to show our own value in the region.

The results?

Columbus has not stopped growing since the initiative was launched. So much so that the city even passed Indianapolis in population. And business-wise? International companies like Facebook and Amazon have all set up shop in the heart of Ohio.