As a local company working on campaigns for high-profile clients, we’ve decided to boycott the awards this year and have been suggesting other companies do the same.

Our dignity is better than your awards.

In other words, I think it’s perfect.

And if gets our creative community attention and shake things up, all the better. Ryan, your post was spot-on. In fact, it inspired me to add my $.02 here:

http://joelgunz-adcreative.blogspot.com/2009/06/2009-roseys-brash-cheap-and-i-wouldnt.html

Joel

Idea for the Rosey Awards: Instead of the guy who told Burgerville war-stories for nearly an hour, this year we could get Jim Rome to help us all set up custom Angelfire pages.

Congratulations to the mouth-breathers that put the Portland advertising community in such good light. (Smile) I’m not normally grumpy.

I’m one of the relatively recent transplants from elsewhere (which, I suppose, means I should take issue with the “Two things come from Minneapolis”) and wholeheartedly agree that Portland is a place to be celebrated. That said, the particular way we’ve decided to frame our creative community to the outside world seems a bit questionable.

Not only would I cite the overarching message of the copywriter-clever campaign (and resulting website), but also feel the need to note that, outside our amazing community, the Roseys don’t hold much water.

Ask Minneapolis, or New York, or anywhere else for that matter.

Let’s all get together for our OTHER long-standing tradition of a friendly beer, ride our bikes home, and get down to creating amazing work.

Do we even need to say it? Award shows are presumptuous enough- I don’t think we really need to spell that out for people. Instead of bashing on other creative communities, we should be working to build one another up and if we are going to pick fights with other cities, we at least have to be able laugh at ourselves a little too.

I don’t think it is wrong to celebrate Portland, it’s amazing here. Anyone who has visited Portland knows what we’re talking about. This campaign just isn’t attractive to an outside audience and it certainly doesn’t represent the majority of the creative community. We aren’t going to make friends walking around saying, “we’re better than you.”

Jamie Sexton from the PAF did write me back and asked, “At this point what do you feel would be an appropriate follow up to what has been done so far?”

What does everyone think?

It’s weird, you can have all the creativity in the world – if that’s all you got… meh. … helps to have demand, no?

Portland needs better outreach to cities that need the hipster creative skills we got…. Pointing out we’re better than everywhere else (which of course we are) is probably not the brightest way to do that..

can you say echo chamber?

Again, I have NO problem with Portland being proud to be Portland, but lets talk about how awesome we are instead of trying to score cheap points tearing others down.

Ultimately, where this leaves us is having every city on that list saying: Huh, now that you bring it up, what HAS Portland done lately. And frankly I’m not sure that’s a fight we want to get into.

For the record, I know this isn’t your campaign, and hope my feedback isn’t seen as a dig on eROI. It’s nice of you to host this forum for conversation on the campaigns behalf though.

Regardless, the dialog is good. Keep it coming.