Tag: Bend

  • What the hell was that?

    When I started writing this post, the video in question actually existed… but now the link they had goes to the Visitor and Convention Bureau site… hmmmmmm.

    The title of this post might as well be “How not to do viral marketing.” It concerns a new animated ad campaign, detailed in excruciating detail in this Bulletin article, launched by the Bend Visitor & Convention Bureau… I’m actually at a loss for words.

    Okay, I’m not really. Nor will I mince words: at best, this video makes me embarrassed for Bend.

    My wife sent me the link in the morning, without explanation. First of all, it took forever to load, which is not a good sign. Finally, it started, and I was immediately sorry it did; my first impulse was to turn it off. When I first glimpsed something that sort of resembled Pilot Butte in the background, I thought, Is this supposed to be about Bend? It couldn’t be, it doesn’t even make any sense. But lo and behold, it turned out to be about Bend after all.

    My next thought was that somebody had gone out of their way—poorly, I might add—to make fun of Bend. It’s certainly not something that would ever entice me to visit.

    Finally I saw the Bulletin article, and things started to make a perverse sense. Here’s a clip:

    The Bend Visitor & Convention Bureau has launched an edgy, animated online marketing campaign featuring a video the bureau hopes is so entertaining that viewers will e-mail it to friends, family and colleagues.

    The video is sort of like Bend meets The Simpsons.

    Locals will recognize scenes in the lighthearted production and presumably chuckle at the characters and lyrics.

    “The video is funny and entertaining,” Glover said. “But, there’s also a message that shows what we have here – the river, rafting, skiing, etc. We hope that people will be entertained, then watch it again or pass it along via e-mail.”

    Ultimately, the video’s goal is to interest more people in visiting Bend.

    According to Glover, the video is the first of its kind to market a destination such as Bend through an emerging form of advertising known as viral marketing.

    Glover already considers the campaign a winner, thanks to a marketing coup that will allow friendster.com, a video downloading site popular among iPod owners, to send links to the video with endorsements to more than 1.25 million of its subscribers.

    “Just through that, the campaign is a success,” Glover said.

    Are you kidding me?

    There’s nothing “edgy” or Simpsons-like anywhere in that video. In fact, it’s some seriously shoddy art and animation work happening there. (I know—well, I hope—the people behind it can do better.) And being a local, trust me when I say there’s no chuckling going on, and the “recognizable” scenes are barely even that.

    Here’s a hint about viral marketing: it tends to work best when it’s not directed. Don’t hold it out there and proclaim it a success; either it’ll happen on its own or it won’t. You have no real control over the matter.

    And they think hooking up with Friendster is a marketing coup? Really? Friendster is on the wane in a big way. They would have been far better off leveraging MySpace (with 86 million users) and YouTube. Then you’d see some real numbers.

    Oh and by the way, pick a better domain name next time… “where-the-hell-are-we.com” just lacks that, how would you say, convenience and ease of use in passing around a link.

    I will concede that this video is viral in an avian flu sense—it’s spreading around the local blogosphere and everybody I’ve shown it to hates it. But that’s not the kind of viral you’d hope for.

    Postscript: And it’s gone… I wonder if that was intentional, or there was too much backlash?

    Post-postscript: Yes, you’ll notice I didn’t actually link to the video directly… I debated it. But since it appears to be gone anyway, oh well.

  • My new blog launch: Hack Bend

    I had hinted a while back about a new project I was starting, and I think it’s time to launch and announce it. It’s a new blog called Hack Bend, and it’s purpose is to be an insider’s guide to Bend and Central Oregon. (In fact, the tagline I have on it right now is “Getting the most out of Bend and Central Oregon.” Original, no?)

    There’s always a bit of trepidation in announcing something like this, but I’m excited about it. I’ve got a bunch of ideas and things to write about already, but as I wrote on the About page, “obviously, I can’t claim to have all the answers or know everything there is to know about the area.” One of the things I’m considering is opening it up to multiple authors, making it a group blog—but that would be down the road sometime. In the meantime, anyone who has any hints, advice, stories, or hacks about the area, please let me know! I’d like to make this a definitive website about Bend, and the more contributions I get, the more likely that’ll happen.

    So pop on over and check things out, subscribe to the RSS feed, and become a regular contributor. And let me know what you think!

  • Growing Up in Central Oregon: Introduction

    This is a series I’ve been mulling over for a while now and even at one point promised Simone I would write. I’ve been wanting to write it partly because I think the perspective of growing up in rural Central Oregon is unique, and partly because I think there’s some good stories to tell. So bear with me.

    First off: an introduction. The background. I’m laying the groundwork and setting the stage…

    We moved to Central Oregon in 1976, when I was three years old. At that time Bend was still a tiny timber town and my dad had a job with then-Willamette Industries’ particle board plant. Rather than living in Bend, however, my parents purchased a house on five acres east of town, at the edge of the bump-in-the-road known as Alfalfa.

    Aerial view of Alfalfa OregonAlfalfa is located roughly 15 miles east of Bend and 25 miles southeast of Redmond, north of Highway 20 and near the Deschutes-Crook County border. It’s primarily an agricultural community, with acres of irrigated field crops and livestock dropped right down into the middle of the desert, a verdant oasis of farmland carved out of the sand, sagebrush, bunch grass, scrub juniper and outcroppings of lava rock. Aside from the fields and farms, there’s a small general store and gas station, a grange hall, a power substation and not much else. (The old Alfalfa School, which I attended through fourth grade, closed many years ago.)

    Oddly enough, even though closer geographically to Bend, Alfalfa resides within the Redmond school district. The Redmond school district, in fact, was a marvelous bit of Central Oregon gerrymandering: not only did it encompass Alfalfa, but also Sisters, Terrebonne, and, most puzzling of all Tumalo, which is situated at Bend’s back porch. Consequently, Redmond had the second largest school system in the entire state of Oregon, outside of Portland.

    Or so we were told. As kids faced with a one-way bus ride of 45 minutes to an hour, we were not impressed.

    While much of Alfalfa is a farming community, our five acres only had the minimum of what one could consider a farm: we raised chickens, we had one milk cow on an acre of pasture, and we had vegetable gardens. The majority of the acreage was natural High Desert. As a result I never really identified with the farming mindset one would expect from rural living; looking back, I can see a distinction between what I would dub “Desert Folk” (like ourselves) and Farmers.

    I don’t mean this in a derogatory way. But there’s definitely a different viewpoint from growing up on a farm or ranch—where you are literally living your livelihood—and growing up on one of these desert parcels. I’d venture to say living on the desert lent more of a freedom and immediacy to us as kids than to farming kids; don’t get me wrong, there were chores—chickens to feed, for instance—but none of the same general commitments to growing up on a farm.

    Okay, now that I’ve muddied up that issue…

    The only way to get to our house was to leave the highway and travel about a mile down a gravel road. Actually, calling it a “gravel road” is entirely too generous; it was actually a rocky road scratched out of the dirt, loosely scattered with red cinders. Of course, the mailboxes and the school bus stop were both situated at the highway; both activities (checking the mail and catching the bus) were thus not casual jaunts. If you missed the bus, there were good odds that you missed the bus, and if you couldn’t catch it a few miles down the road (drive like mad!), you were out of luck. More than a few nightmares involved running late for the bus stop and seeing the bus flash by without stopping…

    Rural living also imbued me with an appreciation for space; our nearest neighbor was about a quarter of a mile away, as the crow flied. You know the phrase, “Good fences make good neighbors”? I think a better version of that would be “A few acres make good neighbors.” Even though I can appreciate the convenience of living in town, I’d still be perfectly happy out on a few acres somewhere, with the nearest neighbors up over the hill.

    This should give you a pretty decent idea of where I’m coming from. Of course, I’ve barely scratched the surface, and there are plenty of tales to tell… all true, of course. :)

  • Bend, Oregon Monopoly

    The title refers to the board game, not a business monopoly. Sorry to anyone coming here looking for juicy Bend business gossip. :)

    According to CNNMoney, Monopoly is updating its look with modern places and landmarks and further, letting users vote on their board placement. That’s pretty cool, and it brings to mind the panoply of custom Monopoly games that are floating around out there on just about every conceivable topic.

    Which led me to wonder: Is there a custom Bend, Oregon Monopoly game anywhere? I tentatively want to say that I might remember seeing one at one time—perhaps in one of the shops downtown—but I’m pretty doubtful. A cursory web search revealed nothing.

    So maybe I’ll make one. It’d certainly be easy enough to print out new board spaces and glue them onto an old game; anyone have any suggestions as to what they’d like to see on Bend Monopoly?

    (And then, of course, we’ll have to play at the next blogger meetup.)

  • The Paperback Exchange is closing

    Heads-up, Bendites: The Paperback Exchange, which is one of the oldest used bookstores in Bend (if not the oldest), is closing! Right now they’re having a huge 75% off sale on everything. I stopped over there after lunch and bought four books (for only $4.50, which would have been regularly priced at $18) and talked with the owner a bit.

    They have to be out by April 30th, but will probably close a week or so before that to empty out the store. So, you’ve got about a month left to get there and get some great deals.

    It’s located at 184 NE Greenwood, on the corner of 2nd and Greenwood. Hours are Monday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

  • That’s a lot of realtors

    My mom mentioned this yesterday, though I didn’t see it online and I’m too lazy to do a deep search: there is now apparently one realtor for every 200 people in Bend, according to The Bulletin. Wow.

    I figure this should be good fodder for the newish Bend, Oregon Housing Bubble blog.

  • Bend tees

    This idea seems like a natural: a blog spotlighting funny Bend-related T-shirts. All locally designed and offered via CafePress.

    I wish I’d thought of it first.

  • Anagram map of Downtown Bend

    Inspired of late by Boing Boing’s pointers to subway maps that have been remixed to used anagrammed names, I thought it would be fun to do the same with Bend. Only, Bend doesn’t have a subway (or any mass transit, grrr), so I did the next best thing: remixed the map of downtown.

    The only constraints I followed were dropping the directional part of the street names (the NW in NW Franklin) and spelling out the type of roadway (“Avenue” vs. “Ave”).

    Enjoy! Oh, and the Internet Anagram Server came in amazingly handy for this.

    Map of Downtown Bend, remixed with anagrams
    Click to view full map

  • Population 70,238

    That’s the current population of Bend, Oregon. It’s up, what, 40% from the year 2000 census population of 52,029. My question is, have that many people moved into the city (18,209 of them) in that time, or have the powers that be mostly been creative with the city limits (which is what got us to the 50,000 milestone in the first place)?

  • Resonate

    I think Jennifer almost always has insightful things to say about Bend (and is a fine writer to boot), but last night’s post was really remarkable, I think. She points to the Bend 2030 website (the project of which I was only really tangentially aware of until the past few days), and drops the bomb on a couple of the hard questions:

    What’s the most significant issue facing Bend?

    Well, an increase in growth threatens two of the three things I value most about living here. So Bend’s biggest issue is limiting growth or, if that’s impossible, limiting the damage.

    Also: this town has a severe divide between rich and poor with almost no middle class. That gives my kids a wacky sense of how the world works. First, it’s not a reflection of most of the United States; and second, they don’t see a model for success — except, of course, in real estate. People grow up here and disappear for awhile, then come back as doctors and lawyers. Or they grow up wealthy and never work for keeps. Unless Bend changes, my kids won’t have much opportunity to watch someone start out on a low rung and work their way up.

    So, to answer question four:

    What is your personal vision for the future of Bend?

    I want growth in Bend to slow way, way down, so that we can get a psychic grasp on what’s happening here. And then I would like Bend to work toward becoming not a resort town or a retirement mecca but a normal city, where people work and go to school — and just happen to climb mountains or ski or run rivers whenever they get a chance.

    Dead on. I really couldn’t have said it better myself, and I find myself nodding in nearly perfect agreement with this.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about Bend and its growth and what it’s been turning into lately. In light of my rant yesterday, I think it’s safe to expect more rants and thoughts on this topic from me. In the meantime, keep watching Jennifer. She’s going to be a force to be reckoned with.