Last week, the Buckeye bloggers were invited, along with all the bloggers of Columbus, to an event at Experience Columbus, which is the visitor’s center downtown. They were announcing the new ad campaign for the city, and they wanted the blogging community to be the first to report it, which is an interesting concept. The idea is they’re starting with something negative that Columbus lacks, like a video showing someone struggling through a swim on the English Channel saying “You can’t swim through the English Channel in Columbus�, or a shirt with a picture of Sasquatch that reads “I didn’t catch Sasquatch in Columbus,� and each negative statement ends with something like “But you can do everything else�. The blogger community had some feedback, and many weren’t sure about starting with the negative and about what audience this was to be marketed to. I thought it would be good for the OSU student audience, because it includes a really strange website that hasn’t been launched yet, but when I brought that point up, no one seemed to care about that audience. Which is a mistake, by the way…although Experience Columbus has a presence on campus, people rarely use their current website. Yet students love spending money in Columbus, and every year a new group of first-time Columbus residents goes back to their families in Cincinnati or Cleveland (Columbus’s competition), and tells them about this great city in Ohio. The students are an untapped resource, and should be considered in this campaign. We’ll see in the coming months what effect this campaign will have on Columbus.