09:17 AM PST on Monday, December 1, 2003

Associated Press

It worked for Nike.

The advertising company that invented the phrase "Just Do It" for the shoe giant has coined a new tagline to sell Oregon's tourist and business potential in other parts of the country.

On Monday Gov. Ted Kulongoski is expected to unveil the new slogan: "Oregon. We Love Dreamers."

The Oregon Coast. (travelorg.com Web site)

The "dreamers" slogan and a series of sample ads, which will be presented at an Oregon business summit Monday in Portland, are designed for a wide variety of purposes, including tourism, business recruitment and state-product marketing.

Dan Wieden, one of the ad firm's founders, said the campaign is built around the "basic sense of idealism" that defines the Oregon culture. As a result, the advertising extols Oregon innovations such as publicly owned beaches as well as the notion that you can find a man in a suit and a man in dreadlocks side-by-side on a bus, chatting pleasantly.

The drive to intensify the state's marketing efforts followed lots of bad press about Oregon, a state with a slumping economy, the nation's highest unemployment rate, and schools and public services that were once held up as models now ridiculed as failures because of budget cuts.

Debby Kennedy, marketing director for the Port of Portland, is heading the "Brand Oregon" project out of the governor's office, and she said few, if any, states are trying to develop a marketing plan that is as far-reaching.

The idea, she said, is to create a buzz about Oregon by developing a consistent theme across a wide variety of advertising.

The campaign partly is designed to erase the image connected with what has seemed to be Oregon's unofficial slogan: former Gov. Tom McCall's famous visit-but-don't-stay remark from 1971.

One of the new sample ads, headlined "Come For a Week, Stay Forever," promotes the idea that tourists quickly realize what a great place the state is to live in.

Kennedy, who is not connected with Wieden+Kennedy said she envisions a software executive in the Bay Area someday seeing an Oregon business recruitment ad in a workplace publication, going home and reading a tourism ad in a consumer magazine, then spotting an Oregon agriculture display in a supermarket produce section.

Some money for the advertising campaign will come from a new tourism tax on lodging, and Kennedy said several Oregon companies also have agreed to contribute financially. It is not yet certain how much money will be spent. The ads are expected to start appearing by spring.