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Showcasing The City of Miami Gardens, the Host City of Super Bowl 2020

City of Miami Gardens

Services
  • Brand Identity
  • Signage
  • Web design and development

Collaborative Partner

The Mosaic Group

The Mission

As the host of the 2020 Super Bowl, the City of Miami Gardens sought to create a branding and advertising campaign that would raise the city’s profile, bolster positive media coverage and generate new economic development leads.

The Solution

In collaboration with the Mosaic Group (our go-to marketing firm partner), we helped create a campaign brand that would include messaging with a tagline theme, social media ad graphics, signage and print collateral, and a micro-website that showcases city attractions.

The Impact

The campaign run helped to enhance the image of the city as a great destination for dining, investing, community recreation, and shopping. Since the 2020 Super Bowl, Formula 1’s Miami Grand Prix has adopted Miami Gardens and Hard Rock Stadium as a home for their event. Despite the covid-19 pandemic, there have been several major commercial real estate purchases made and businesses are opening up new locations in the city.

Vist Discover Miami Gardens

The Story

The City of Miami Gardens is the third largest municipality in Miami-Dade County and the largest majority African-American community in the state of Florida. In it, lies Hard Rock Stadium: home of the Miami Dolphins, University of Miami football team, The Miami Open, Formula 1’s Miami Grand Prix, and Jazz in the Gardens Music Fest. These major events bring in billions of dollars every year to the county, municipality, and surrounding communities. The city’s biggest foe however, is the negative media attention it sometimes gets because of the crime rate. Former Mayor Oliver Gilbert wanted to change that with a positive image campaign leveraging the upcoming Super Bowl, which the city and stadium would be hosting for the 6th time, and the 11th time for all of Miami-Dade County, an NFL record.

Our collaborative partner, the Mosaic Group, ranked first out of three finalists and was the chosen marketing company to bring this campaign to life…but let’s rewind a bit. The final part of the City’s selection process required that each finalist create a mock campaign of what this brand and process might actually look like. Ordinarily, we wouldn’t create an entire brand or iteration without actually being booked, but we knew that this was a grand opportunity to get the public’s eye on our work, especially DURING THE SUPER BOWL! So we went to work!

We created a strong brand iteration that would give the City a glimpse at our capabilities and see what this campaign can possibly look like. We created several mockups of large signage, billboards, and photography that would span across several locations around the city. This would be a sub-brand in a sense because it wouldn’t replace the City’s seal or official brand identity, but it would just be used during the weeks leading up to and after the Super Bowl, so we wanted to keep it simple and let the messaging, photography and signage do most of the talking. The city’s official colors, orange and green, were used throughout the campaign brand. We chose these colors because it would bring familiarity to the community. These colors are on the same palette of the University of Miami and Florida A&M University. Two schools in which many alumni reside in Miami Gardens or surrounding communities.

Bold typography was used for the tagline of the campaign, “Where you want to be!”. A similar bold type was also used for the majority of the marketing materials’ direct messaging of: DINE, INVEST, PLAY, & SHOP in Miami Gardens. We printed all of this material on poster boards and created additional digital mockups to present to the Mayor and his executive board during the presentation. To our surprise, not only did they love the sample campaign brand…we were selected to take on the job AND they wanted to keep what we already created!! No other iterations or concepts were needed and what we thought would just be a sample would actually blossom into the official campaign brand and imagery. Now that’s how you knock it out of the park on your first swing.

One small hurdle that needed to be made during the middle of the process, was an adjustment in the brand’s logo. Originally, there was an emblem of the top part of a palm tree, a staple icon in South Florida. However, an executive member felt that the image looked similar to a cannabis leaf. At first we disagreed. We showed it to several of our colleagues and family members just to get an outside opinion and everyone said the same thing…”it looks like a palm tree to me”. However, we thought about the original mission of this campaign and why Miami Gardens needed to execute this: an improved and positive community profile that would help increase economic development. As a predominantly African-American community with poor media coverage at times, the last thing we wanted to do is create any type of branding that would cause negative publicity in the eyes of the public. Although medical cannabis was legal in Florida during this time, it just wouldn’t be a good look if that was the main icon of the city. This would for sure defeat the mission as a whole. So we agreed that it should be adjusted and changed. We decided to still include the palm tree but this time, with the entire tree’s stump included. We also coupled it with one of Miami Garden’s popular landmarks, the Sunshine State Arch. This was a hit with everyone and the remaining marketing collateral was finalized.

At the end of the process, twice as many signage was created and installed across the entire city. From flag pole banners to window screens, the message and imagery was placed in many city locations such as parks, gyms, shopping centers, and city hall. The brand was so well received that many of the installations remained for over a year. What we are most proud of, is that Miami Gardens has decided to create a new campaign project in 2022 that would piggy-back and continue the messaging of this project as many new developments and investments have been made into the city. This project was a big win for the community, for Miami Gardens, and for Miami-Dade County!