Missoula Cultural Council Art Organization Meeting (2/23/2007)

Yesterday the Missoula Cultural Council (MCC) conducted its third arts organization meeting, which was hosted at the Missoula Art Museum.

Though the meeting was short, a lot of ground was covered, and 5 main areas of interest were emphasized: Visual Arts, Performing Arts, Bed Tax Efforts, CVB Efforts and Branding. Each area of interest was then made up of volunteers to spearhead progress in that specific area.

Visual Arts

The visual arts "sub-committee" for lack of an official term will include artists, galleries, marketing professionals, members of MCC, the Missoula CVB, and others. The goals of the group are to foster ideas, outreach into the community to find people not represented at the main meeting, coordination of First Friday events, and determining the best way to market the visual arts in Missoula.

Performing Arts

The performing arts "sub-committee" will include performing artists, venues, marketing professionals, members of MCC, the Missoula CVB, and others. Similar to the visual arts, their goals are to foster ideas, outreach into the community to find people not represented at the main meeting, coordination of performing arts events, and determining the best way to market the performing arts in Missoula.

Bed Tax Efforts

Though the name is vague this "sub-committee" is more focused on assembling and organizing all of the current marketing materials distributed via Travel Montana, the Missoula CVB, and others. The idea is that they will go through all this material to determine what is available, and how it might be adapted or added to in order to include emphasis on the arts and cultural attractions in Missoula.

Missoula Convention & Visitor Bureau Efforts

This "sub-committee" will explore the varied marketing materials and options available through the Missoula CVB. This group, similar to the Bed Tax Efforts, will focus on determining what is available from the CVB in the way of marketing publications.

Branding

This area of focus wasn't assigned to a "sub-committee" as its goal is communal with all the organizations and individuals represented at the meeting. In theory, the goal is to come up with a slogan and branding initiatives to differentiate Missoula from other art and culture destinations. We looked at branding initiatives that other communities have developed, and discussed the goals of this endeavor.

This may be the single biggest concern for this group of individuals, as it will define Missoula to our target audience. Several cities, and even some states have worked on this problem.

Seattle recently spent $200,000 dollars to develop a new city/area slogan, and has committed another $300,000 to promote it. The winner was "metronatural", which can be used as a noun or adjective, is supposedly fitting to describe Seattle's emergence as a global city because it has Latin roots and is easily translated into other languages. The slogan became an immediate failure, with severe media backlash.

When searching for "metronatural" on Google, the second search result is to a news article by the Seattle Post Intelligencer, that describes the process the city went through to create the new slogan. More telling are the comments at the bottom of the article from Seattle area residents, who apparently find the slogan quite distasteful. One writer even called it "econostupid".

With this in mind, Missoula art organizations have their hands full. Branding will probably be the most time consuming hurdle the group has to leap.

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