Personally, I’m not convinced by the campaign imagery/visual concept.

I do, however, think the general idea of a Birmingham arts calendar is a good one.

Strangely enough, I was pondering the concept of an all-of-Birmingham’s-arts-events-in-one-handy-place directory about a week before this campaign was launched. Honestly, I was! Must be something in the air …

Anyway, it makes perfect sense – it should help reduce that ‘When did that happen? I missed it!” thing, from which I tend to suffer, and also go some way to creating a wider awareness of quite what a varied and burgeoning creative community we have here in Birmingham.

I do wish the branding had been a bit more subtle (like a blank canvas for the events to be added to I suppose) – but I’m a designer and you know how much we like white space …!

On a communication level, making sense of the catalogue is nigh on impossible with poor layout and typography. The content is equally as bad with very little information on who the performers are.

The branding is equally bad. Call me a design geek but that font got overused in the mid 90’s and really does not communicate a sense of style or innovation. In fact it really does feel very early 1990’s. Maybe that’s the next big trend… we’ve just had the 80’s after all.

Overall I do not feel inspired to come to the events.

I dread to think how much must have been spent on this. Not one of McCan Erikson’s finest.

I love how great the arts is in this fair city.

All I ask for is a campaign that shows this…

Even if they are going to use crap thermal imagery – the least they could do is use great images like the ones Fierce or others use (although I guess they wouldn’t want their lovely images ruined)…

I don’t think anyone here has confused Marketing Birmingham and the council. I think they’ve slagged off the campaign itself and a couple of things the council themselves (artsfest programme, B1 CD) have done with it so far.

As for entirely separate : “A public-private partnership receiving financial support from Birmingham City Council” isn’t entirely separate at all – as the largest (and only named public) source of funding it’s a ‘partnership’.

Excuse me for going off topic here, but it’s this separation, quango-ism, outsourcing and consulting that’s modern capitalism’s masterstroke. Not only does it – on paper – “reduce risk” it has the charming side effect of reducing accountability and responsibility as almost every decision can be obstruficated and eventually put down as “a failure of communication”.

If a member of the public doesn’t like what Marketing Birmingham (for example, I could pick any number of NGOs) do (and very few know who they are) what’s the accountability structure?

“Its obviously notcieable” – we’ve only noticed it because it’s here where we read about Birmingham stuff, and we care about this kind of thing. We’re not the target market. In design there isn’t the catch all ‘any publicity is good publicity’ crap. Bad marketing and design will fail, and I’m sure the publicity team would rather there was unstinting praise and loads of Brum’s creative community clamouring to use it to promote their own works and events.

I also don’t think anyone here disagrees with the aims of the campaign, of course they “hope it works” – it’s just in their own (sometimes educated, sometimes professional, sometimes informed gut feeling) opinion don’t think it will do as well as it could or should.

As for Marketing Birmingham being “entirely separate” from the council I didnt realise this so thanks for clearing that up. Its very easy to conflate “the establishment” with “the council”. That said, from their about page it’s:

“A public-private partnership receiving financial support from Birmingham City Council and some 350 Member companies, Champions and private investors.”

I should also add that I was talking to Neil Rami, Chief Executive of Marketing Birmingham, at the launch and he was a very interesting, intelligent and insightful man. I have no personal beef with them.

Good God, something positive written on this site. Doubt it will be allowed.

PS worth noting Marketing Birmingham and the council are two entirely separate beings. If you’re going to slag someone at least get the name right.