Rudman's city: Auckland A salute sure to spark other hand gestures

By BRIAN RUDMAN

Eternal Rome, Swinging London, The Big Apple, Absolutely Positively Wellington and Auckland A. Eh what?

Okay, so I admit I'm a bit of a stick in the mud when it comes to rebranding old wares. I confidently predicted Starship would never take off. I wasn't too fond of Te Papa either, though that might have had more than a little to do with the vast sums of public money involved. How wrong I was. As labels, both went on to become roaring successes.

Now we have adman Mike Hutcheson proposing a new slogan/logo for Auckland. It was unveiled as part of the Auckland Festival and involves a phonetic play on Eh and A. As in "It's choice, Eh?" Eh equals A as in Auckland, as in A1, as in the shape of our volcanic cones. Get it, Eh?

It also comes with a two-handed A-shaped greeting you make with crossed forefingers and thumbs. Apparently it's an adaptation of the Hawaiians' "hang loose" signal. When we tried it in the privacy of the hospitality lounge over a wine or two after the launch, it looked dangerously like we were trying to ward off evil spirits. Which is hardly the way I would want to be greeted if I was a tourist landing at Mangere after a long flight.

Still, if tourists can learn to live with rubbing noses with complete strangers, I guess they can also cope with locals making the sign of the cross every time they come close. They might find it quaint - if they don't put it down to religious mania.

I'm not certain why we need rebranding. We hardly push the existing "City of Sails" label in the way Wellington plugs its decade-old "Absolutely Positively" tag, but even with soft-sell, it now pops up in most travel writers' vocabulary. Should we risk confusing things with a competing brand when most other cities get by with none?

Saatchi and Saatchi boss Hutcheson says I'm taking it all too seriously. It's a joke, a play on a word that Aucklanders use all the time, despite the best endeavours of middle class parents to expunge it from their kids' vocabulary.

He says the campaign will be "more guerilla than formal warfare." He hopes "Eh/A" will get a life of its own, like absolutely positively Wellington.

"It's so much in the vernacular now we thought we'd adopt it so that everybody who uses it in a sentence would be making an involuntary plug for our city."

Whether his fellow Aucklanders are quite as enthused we'll have to wait and see. One thing that will appeal is the price tag. Saatchi's have done it for free.

To me, such artifice harks of small towns trying to deal with their inferiority complexes. You have the poor old Wellingtonians trying to reassure each other with the absolutely positively carry-on. Then there's Ohakune with its rampant carrot, Te Puke and its plastic kiwifruit, Gore and its plaster trout. Do we Aucklanders really need to join the ranks of these sad and desperate self-doubters?

Sure the odd great city does promote its nickname. None more so than New York with The Big Apple - which is not to be confused with the "The Big A," the title of Saatchi's Auckland video. But The Big Apple wasn't a contrived name, it first appeared in a 1909 book edited by Edward Martin, which portrayed the United States as a great tree, with New York, the big apple, getting a "disproportionate share of the national sap."

In the 1920s the expression was taken up by New York racing writer John Fitzgerald who called his column "Around the Big Apple." Jazz musicians subsequently adopted it, regarding playing "The Big Apple"as the ultimate. It wasn't until the 1970s that city authorities incorporated the well-known local nickname into a highly successful tourist campaign.

Then there's Rome, labelled by every tourist tout as The Eternal City. As far as I can discover, that goes back centuries.

Alongside these two, Auckland A/Eh, seems forced. Even as a joke. Still, I didn't think Starship would fly either.