(Warning: This is a long post, but it goes by quickly.)

In Michael Moore’s 1995 fictitious movie Canadian Bacon, the U.S. economy was in a rut and the president, whose low approval rating is not unlike that of our former president, decided that what was needed to boost both his popularity and the country’s morale was a good war.  Naturally, war was declared on a country that didn’t do anything to us — Canada. (This scenario sounds eerily familiar, doesn’t it?)

Well, imagine my surprise when it was brought to my attention last week that the exact opposite situation was actually happening — our economy is in the dumps, but our president has a high approval rating and somebody in Ottawa, Ontario, decided to (inadvertently?) pick on us. No, not “us” as in the United States of America, but “us” as in the running backdrop to many of Michael Moore’s films — Flint, Michigan.

(Disclaimer: This is a tad awkward for me to write, as Flint is where I was born and grew up. However, I’m taking as objective as an approach to this as I can, analyzing from a campaign standpoint, not as a Flintstone but as a professional.)

Here’s the deal:

For about a week, citizens all over Ottawa were seeing outdoor advertising of a fuchsia square with a creepy doll  in the foreground, with the words simply “THIS AIN’T FLINT .CA” displayed prominently in white. However, people were being directed to a website that wasn’t even ready to be launched.

Finally, when it was launched on April 5th, people whose curiosity from the outdoor campaign turned into conversion went to thisaintflint.ca, where they were greeted with a gaudy site with a video in the middle. Said video is a 3 minute, 19 second poor attempt at  . . . well, that’s just it. You as a viewer aren’t really sure what the video is trying to accomplish, other than to compare footage of Michael Moore’s first film, Roger & Me (1989), to modern-day stock footage of Ottawa, while telling you that Ottawa “ain’t Flint,” it’s immune to the recession, it’s the best on earth to live, and blah blah blah you get the picture.

Here’s the video if you don’t really want to go to the site:

There are so many things wrong with this campaign that I don’t even know where to begin. First, let’s clear this up right now:

Said campaign was NOT issued by the Canadian government. Under the “Who” section on the site, it says:

The “THIS AINT FLINT” campaign has been executed exclusively by Newcap Radio – using the creative inspiration of the team at Alphabet Creative.

This same combination of resources is largely responsible for the dramatic, yet consistent growth of LiVE 88.5 and HOT 89.9 in the very competitive Ottawa-Gatineau radio marketplace (see chart – up to 400%* increase in market share over the past six years!)

Needless to say, word has spread around, from the Flint Expats to MLive.com (home of The Flint Journal), which has 46 comments on the article as I type this (unfortunately, most commenters there are trolls).

In an article from the Ottawa Citizen, Ottawa Tourism has come to Flint’s defense, as well as issuing a joint statement with the Flint Area Convention and Visitors Bureau (said joint statement is not on FACVB’s site at the time I write this, however).

Ottawa blogger Audra Williams did a pretty good job of dissecting this horrible campaign on her blog, pointing out the bad copy, typos, and (my favorite) misuse of the word “obtuse” (they meant obscure), but I’d like to emphasize a few things she beat me to but should be worth reiterating nonetheless.

I am not going to incorporate the actual politics of Flint involved in my analysis. Most of those who are jumping to Flint’s defense on this are talking about how wrong the “This Ain’t Flint” campaign has it, how great Flint actually is, how far we’ve come, “why does everybody pick on us?”, “stop kicking our dead horse,” and I’m not going to go there. I will, however, say this:

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