• by Staff Report , August 15, 2013

In March Interpublic Group’s Campbell Ewald announced with great fanfare that it will move back to Detroit (from the suburbs) after a 35-year absence. The 102 year-old agency, which spent its first 65 years in the city, is currently renovating a 122,000 square-foot former auto storage facility to house the 600-plus employees that will work at the new company digs. In the meantime, the city has gone bankrupt and has received all sorts of negative attention for the decayed state of its finances. But C-E, since rebranded Lowe Campbell Ewald, saw an opportunity to both counter the negativity surrounding its once and future hometown and to develop and a really spiffy presentation for next year’s SXSW Conference. The result: a video, now on YouTube, titled “We’re Moving To Detroit And So Should You.” In it LCE creative director Iain Lanivich gives viewers a quick tour of some of the city’s prettier sites and interviews some young entrepreneurial types who have made a go of it there. The basic message: Don’t believe the conventional wisdom that Detroit is decayed, abandoned, corrupt and bankrupt. Okay, maybe bankrupt in the financial sense, but certainly not creatively speaking. “The talent is moving to Detroit,” Lanivch gushes. It’s a slick pitch—you almost want to move there after watching the video. The heck with SXSW, maybe LCE should go after the Detroit Tourism account. Hmmmm.

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