Bruce Landis with the Providence (R.I.) Journal brings us an excellent example of a poorly-planned public relations campaign from the Rhode Island Department of Transportation, which attempted to hype their recently-completed Interstate 195 relocation project. Their well-intentioned efforts, which aimed to avoid the urban project being associated with the Boston "Big Dig" quagmire, were poorly planned and stumbled in execution, ruining a good opportunity to gain the RIDOT the kind of positive publicity most public agencies would kill for.
To help, we've highlighted the goofs in bold red italics:
DOT spends $500,000 to avoid a ‘Little Dig’
01:00 AM EST on Wednesday, November 14, 2007 by Bruce Landis
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE — Partly to avoid having its biggest construction project maligned, the state Department of Transportation is spending $500,000 on an energetic public-relations campaign to trumpet the $610-million relocation of part of Route 195 and brand it with the name “Iway.”
The DOT’s campaign had been largely successful, despite massive delays on the stretch’s first evening commute last week — a problem that got progressively better as the week went on.
The DOT called last month “Iway October” in hopes that the project would open then, but it missed by a few days. For the last two years, the agency has issued a multimedia stream of publicity ranging from an “Iway” logo, with arches like those of the new Providence River Bridge, to decks of cards, numerous media events, a slogan (“Yours. Mine. Ours.”), and even promotional podcasts in two languages.
The $500,000, most of it from the federal government, comes to almost $95 per foot of new road.
Why focus a four-year public-relations campaign on attaching a made-up name to a one-mile stretch of highway that’s only a short piece of another, much longer highway?
Fear that people would start calling it something else, in particular the “Little Dig,” a backhanded reference to the Boston highway project. The “Big Dig” capped a history of cost overruns and delays last year, when a woman died because a poorly built tunnel ceiling fell on her car.
“We wanted to name it, and not have somebody else name it something less fortunate,” said Dana Alexander Nolfe, the DOT’s chief public affairs officer. She said she had started hearing “Little Dig” before the DOT launched the Iway campaign almost exactly two years ago.
The contract has cost $186,000 so far, Nolfe said. That includes money spent on numerous efforts other than publicity and “branding” the project, including widely publicized safety information and arrangements for highway closures and detours forced by major construction around and over two interstate highways.
It’s not clear how vigorously or how skillfully the DOT checked the Internet for other Iways. Lately, Nolfe has been swamped with work getting ready for the road’s opening last Sunday, and the ensuing traffic jams.
There are some other “Iways” on the Web.
For instance, there’s the New Delhi, India-based www.iway.com, which claims it has more than 3,300 cyber cafes in more than 150 cities. “Be an iway surfer,” the iway company urges.
There’s also the book, I-Way Robbery: Crime on the Internet.
The DOT is proud of its use of podcasts, which are digital media files intended for download to computers and portable media players. The DOT’s include video, music and narration extolling the virtues of the new highway.
On YouTube, the sprawling video Web site, the DOT’s podcasts are jostling for attention with several using the same name.
For example, the year-old video “Iway Farm” opens with the message, “Die Iway Die.” That Iway is an ax-swinging warrior who battles in the multiplayer role-playing game Guild Wars. He can deflect arrows and has the peculiar habit of carrying pets into battle. The video that starts with “Die, Iway, Die” ends with the message, “This Has Been An Anti Iway Production.”
That’s OK, Nolfe said. “We didn’t expect to be the only ones on the planet with an Iway. It’s new to Rhode Island.”
Responding to the PR campaign, journalists regularly drove up an embankment off Allens Avenue to what must be the most attractive venue for a news conference in Rhode Island — the new Providence River Bridge, with a great view down Providence Harbor. There and in news releases, the DOT has announced things, re-announced them, and sometimes announced its own announcements.
Take the podcasts, for which the DOT says it has been billed $52,202 so far.
In mid-September, the DOT announced a “premiere showing” Oct. 1 of a dozen podcasts, which would be released in English and Spanish, promoting the new section of highway.
On Oct. 1, it announced that the podcasts would be released, four at a time, during the following three weeks. DOT Director Jerome F. Williams was quoted saying, “This is an exciting time for RIDOT.”
In an otherwise-undated October memo on its Web site, the DOT announced that “RIDOT Enters the Age of New Media,” and explained that podcasts are not “just for 20-somethings.”
In fact, it said, “Many of our parents and even grandparents own computers and media players.”
On Oct. 9, the DOT announced that it had “launched a series of 12 bilingual Iway podcasts last week,” and that podcasts numbers three and four were released that day. Williams was quoted saying the podcasts “break new ground for Rhode Island.”
On Oct. 15, the DOT announced that it had now issued all 12 podcasts, with the last four going out that day.
The campaign is part of a contract with Duffy & Shanley, the Providence advertising, marketing and public-relations firm whose founding partner, David A. Duffy, has been a political ally of Governor Carcieri. The governor made Duffy head of his transition team in 2002 and later appointed him to the state Convention Center Authority.
The contract runs through October 2008, with an option to renew for a fifth year. Included in the contract is what the DOT describes as “branding.” In a memo, the agency cast branding in advertising terms, saying it “creates a measure of consumer awareness for a product” and will “positively position the project with the public,” in the process creating a “valuable asset for the Rhode Island Department of Transportation.”
As for “Iway,” the memo said, “The name is simple, clear, and most importantly … memorable.”
The DOT’s original goal, avoiding the nickname “Little Dig,” has been a smashing success. There are tens of thousands of references to “little dig” on the Web, but most of them are about being snarky, and only a tiny number about construction in Providence.
The DOT has done even better in the pages of The Providence Journal, with just two references to “Little Dig,” one in February in a real estate section “neighborhood of the week” article about Fox Point, and another one-sentence reference in a column the same month.
“That’s great,” Nolfe said. “I’ve done my job.”
On the other hand, using the name “Iway” set the DOT up for something that could be worse. After a few of the miles-long backups triggered by the new highway’s opening, one commuter coined a play on words that fit easily in a newspaper headline: “Iwait.”
A really good op-ed in yesterday's Post and Courier 
