The riot one year later: Taking back Vancouver’s good name
Posted June 16, 2012 3:52 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS1130) – While the Boston Bruins were sipping from Lord Stanley’s mug one year ago, images of our riot flashed around the globe, painting us as a bunch of spoiled, sore losers.
Continuing our special series, News1130 is looking at the legacy of the riot with a look at how Tourism Vancouver used it to take back our city’s good name.
“June 15th, it was a big gulp for everyone. People were ashamed and embarrassed and certainly in the industry it was no different. We were horrified.” says Candice Gibson, Tourism Vancouver‘s manager of consumer marketing and the brains behind “This Is Our Vancouver,” a campaign designed to reclaim the city’s brand.
“And that was basically a reaction not just to the riots but what happened immediately after the riots, when we started to see all the Good Samaritanism, all the folks coming out, cleaning up, writing love letters to the city. We wanted to aggregate that information.”
A Tumblr site was set up and received 10,000 hits in two days, and full page ad space was donated in major print publications, centered around the famous plywood apology boards.
The campaign, and a similar one months later, did much to repair an image, that it turns out, didn’t need all that much repairing.
“I think it was a much bigger story for us locally. I think it was really impacting how we felt about ourselves as a town, whether it impacted on tourism at all, maybe in the couple of days after the event, after that I would say no.”
“I think it was just our way of turning a negative into a positive.”
