Um, I don't think any real creative people have any use for corporate suckup ad firms like that, much less the hideous Richard Florida "creative class" nonsense. I predict that people will be marking that piece of corporate a--wipe as a real indicator of Portland's self-love jumping the shark.

I understand and tend to agree with your irritation with some of the bad urban design / municipal management ideas that come from Gragg and friends.

I don't understand generalized resentment of an entire set of industries (i.e., the "creative industries"). Portland has at least one solid international advertising agency that brings wealth and jobs to the region. I would hope more such agencies grow and flourish in the city, as the biggest problem, in my view, that holds Portland back is the lack of solid professional jobs that will lure more professionally ambitious folks back to their home city or to the city for the first time.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, has the time to inventory all of the things that are wrong with that site. But at least let's just say that while they hope that their calculated hate-baiting functions as both inoculation to criticism and badge of punk rock street cred, it is in fact a shining beacon of lame. Black eye to all things Portland. It's advertrocious.

It sure looks like someone is trying to drum up some freelance Web design business. Sadly, as "Web Pages That Suck" creator Vincent Flanders likes to put it, this is a classic example of Flashturbation.

You know your marketing has a problem when your pitch is to denigrate competitors, as the website does to other good cities.

It is also funny to see them state that Portland has the largest city park in the country. We rank 19th, not first:

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0933260.html

Actually, the Rosey Award campaign has already been a target of derision by a number of people in the industry who found the concept kind of pathetic.

Somebody had too much time on their hands and somebody was afraid to say 'no' because it was a pro-bono job. The sad reality is that Portland isn't the advertising hotbed that it was 10 years ago. Other than Wieden & Kennedy, most of the hot little shops got absorbed by larger firms or just withered on the vine.

I think it also shows how smart they are -Madison, "Wisconson" - I don't think so. Use your spell check creative kid. Wisconsin. Sheesh

So this is what all those unemployed "creative" types have been up to.

Well, you know how it goes, Mp97303. Mom expects to hear of some progress on the job hunt if she's going to continue to mail out the check for rent and PBR, and telling her "I know Powell's and Buffalo Exchange are going to call me back today! I can feel it!" no longer works as well as it did two years ago.

as a Marketing major who used to work in Marketing - I can honestly say advertising is one of the most useless careers when considering the benefit to society - advertisers make nothing, make nothing better, add no value to society other than an occasional catch phrase that gets old and annoying quick...

the worst part is that ad executives don't see their lack of value and have an incredible superiority complex that is completely unfounded...

Exactly my reaction, BW. If Portland's product is superior there's no need to trash the opposition. But advertising has always been . . . adversarial. And extremely cutthroat. This site comes off as immature and childish.

And when I was designing websites, the cardinal rule was to design to the lowest common platform. When you slick a site up with tedious flash and other bells and whistles that take forever to download on slow systems and don't actually speak to your product (the wheel the trashes the competition, for instance, as the first thing one sees), you're shooting yourself in the foot. People get tired of waiting, get turned off, leave.

Methinks they doth protest too much.

Jack's tag as "fairly obnoxious" says it all for me. I art dittohead:

06.29.09 - The Truth, Wingnut Variety

Pat Boone at the 1997 American Music Awards promoting his heavy metal album,
"In a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy."

Proving again that right-wingers need to get a life – or accept that times are changing – 50's crooner Pat Boone has joined the so-called birthers, demanding "in the name of decency and equality" that President Obama produce a REAL U.S. birth certificate, not his "supposed copy" of one. In a surmise-ridden rant, he suggests history will blame the (illegitimate) Obama for taxing the middle class "into despondency," "throttling religious speech with phony 'hate crimes' legislation," enacting "crippling and fraudulent 'global warming' laws" and other crimes that, clearly, only someone foreign-born could commit.

Reason should reserve the right to refuse sales to some advertisers, even on the internets. Fairly gross, is what it is. Damn, that was stupid.

While I agree with the "protest too much" sentiment, I've got to say, that the use of Flash is pretty much a given in web design this century. And considering that the target audience for the Roseys is people in the advertising and graphics industry, complaining about its use there doesn't make much sense. Heck, even this site uses Flash on every page.

Sorry for the double-post. Lost the signal from my iPod touch and thought it hadn't gone through.

The browser on the iPhone/iPod, BTW doesn't do Flash.