The New York Times had a reporter in Abilene for at least a couple of days last week, writing a story about a couple of Abilene Christian University football players.
It was a terrific opportunity for the city to make the sort of impression envisioned by the Abilene Branding Partnership. But the opportunity went pffft. The reporter, Thayer Evans, came into town and left again, then wrote not one, but two stories, one of them very long, that appeared in last Saturday's Times. Nowhere in either story is there any evidence that Abilene, the kind of city it is, or that it might aspire to be, entered Evans' consciousness, though in both stories there was a natural opening, if the right brand had existed.
Of course there are no guarantees. Even an effective brand couldn't have done anything more than give Abilene its best chance to enter Evans' thinking, as he worked on his stories. As it stood, the city had no chance at all, and free publicity for Abilene in The New York Times, publicity with tangible value, was lost.
I am looking at this loss through a couple of lenses. One, I have been writing newspaper stories for almost four decades, and with every story I was always looking for a good angle, which is one that attracts readers because it provides more than information. If you want an example of the master of the good angle, look at the way Calvin Trillin wrote his story in The New Yorker about Snow's Barbecue, Texas Monthly's choice as the state's No. 1 barbecue joint. The story is one good angle after another, and to me, reading the story was almost as good as eating the barbecue.
The second lens is the brand that I think would be right for Abilene: "Abilene, Texas Style." I have been blogging about that for more than a year, most recently, coincidentally, in the last couple of weeks as the Branding Partnership went public with its brand choice, "Abilene Frontiering," which did not receive a warm response.
Then I opened up Saturday's Times and there were two stories with an Abilene dateline, complete with a photo of Shotwell Stadium, and neither story said a thing about Abilene, except to refer to Abilene Christian University as "an unlikely place on the rolling plains of West Texas," which doesn’t exactly set the imagination ringing like the bells of Notre Dame. There was good stuff Thayer Evans could have said about Abilene, which would have been applicable to the stories he was writing. He just didn't have a trigger. The brand is the trigger.
I was reading the stories a second time when I wondered if I – playing Evans now – might have found something useful to the story in discovering, in signage or in media or on restaurant book matches, that Abilene marketed itself as "Abilene, Texas Style." Even Evans would have heard of Texas Style, which is an old, familiar, even storied, brand: big, best, west, excess, strong, courage, honest, the Alamo, "Giant," oil, cattle, wide open spaces, lone stars, stars at night, friendly, warm, pious, tough, hard-working people as good as their word, deep in the heart of Texas.
Abilene, Texas Style, would be new to him, but he has seen western movies set in Texas towns like Abilene, with wide streets and stores and hotels and barber shops and cafes and saloons and churches and rodeos and stock shows and piety and power and characters and bankers and leaders and plain citizens always going about their business in the background and a sheriff and scalawags and renegades and all of them local representatives of their native Texas Style and proud of the local spin they put on it in a demanding country under a vast West Texas sky.
I don't see how Evans could use any of that in his stories, but the point is, the brand, "Abilene, Texas Style," engaged his thinking. And he keeps thinking. Is there something about Abilene, Texas Style, that gives me an angle? Then he remembers: giving people a second chance always happens in the westerns. And that's what Evans' stories were about: two football players getting a second chance, not in an unlikely place with rolling plains, but in a town that markets itself as doing things Abilene, Texas Style. And that is all he has to say, for the town and its brand to get the publicity. Not a bad angle.
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