KEY POINTS:
The best thing Auckland City bureaucrats could do with their loopy new logo is to wrap it in fireworks and blast it into oblivion.
What a fiasco. After brain-storming in secret most of the year, all the collective grey matter of the council's 49 spin-doctors and their outside communications gurus, OgilvyMetro, could come up with was a near facsimile of Triangle Television's 10-year-old logo.
And when Triangle squealed, the city said "woops" and tried to repair the damage with liberal coatings of stardust and monetary compensation.
No wonder Mark Fenwick, the city's manager, communications and marketing, felt the need on Monday to exercise all his purple prose in an internal memo to Mayor John Banks and councillors, trying to justify "the work that this group does and the staff numbers to support it".
Just how drawing attention to the fact that he leads an army of 49 staffers, to say nothing of extra outside contractors, will solicit sympathy from a grumpy mayor and councillors, I know not. But then, I'm not in the PR game. Nor in a desperate bind.
And it was all in the pursuit of the impossible. Artificially creating a pheromonic logo for Auckland City that will have tourists and business organisations alike panting at the city gates is never going to happen. Just how far-fetched this exercise is was highlighted by two contrasting stories in yesterday's Herald.
On the front page was the star-burst version of Auckland City's new deflated-triangle logo. Further back came a story about Italian archaeologists opening up the underground grotto where ancient Romans believed a wolf had nursed the city's legendary founder Romulus and his twin brother Remus.
This is all supposed to have happened 2780 years ago, and for longer than anyone can recall, the wolf has been a universal symbol of Rome. Now that's a logo.
Somehow, I don't think a squashed triangle - with or without the charms of a decorative burst of double-happies - is ever going to make that league. Or any league. On the other hand, a symbol of a volcanic landform would easily trump the wolf, time-wise at least.
And where did I see one of those? Ah yes, on the existing logo, with two sails on a rippling sea.
Getting back to Mr Fenwick's memo, he tells how busy he and his nose-to-the-grindstone troops - plus contractors - are, preparing the weekly CityScene publicity sheet, issuing 500 press releases and 300 brochures a year, and dealing with the likes of me, 1500 times a year.
We learn there are 18.5 staffers interceding between the media and ratepayers on the one hand, and committee chairs and the bureaucracy on the other. There are another eight fulltimers developing "marketing strategy," advising "on branding, sponsorship and promotion" and dealing with OgilvyMetro. They also write the annual report and other publications.
Given the horror story that the CBD streetscape upgrade has been, no surprise, perhaps, that there are four spinmeisters working fulltime on this project. Parking qualifies, for one, as do issues like waterfront strategy, growth and development, events and something called "sustainability". If I was the sustainability adviser, top of my list of chores would be checking for fireworks in the internal mail from the mayor's office.
Talking spin-doctors, PeadPR must win the prize for the most bitchy and inaccurate Christmas message of the year. Acting on behalf of Michael Barnett, head of the Santa Parade Trust, they pushed out a press release yesterday trying to defend Mr Barnett's political ban on letting Falun Gong join next Sunday's CBD parade. "Falun Gong know full well it did not meet the participation criteria because it refused to assure parade organisers that it would not ambush the fun family Christmas occasion to promote its own political agenda."
This is not true, as the press statement subsequently admits. Mr Barnett tells them to try again next year. Falun Gong says he's been saying that since 2001. Mr Barnett says organisers are unable to manage last-minute entries. Yet last week the same organisers, Crackerjack Promotions, managed to do just that and let the Chinese marching band into the Wellington parade. No propaganda was distributed and all had a great time. It's Mr Barnett's political petticoat that's showing, not Falun Gong's.
