New video showcases how ‘Amazing’ the Columbus area and its people truly are

A new video produced over several months this year aims to promote the Columbus brand of “We Do Amazing” not only to those from out of town, but also residents of the city and surrounding area who may not fully realize what they’ve got.

“It is meant to tell that story of Columbus having a vibe, being a city that has a lot of opportunities, a lot of fun things to see and do, and something to really pump some energy into the psyche of our citizens,” said Peter Bowden, president and chief executive officer of Visit Columbus GA, the city’s convention and visitors bureau.

About 6 minutes long, the polished video was produced for Columbus 2025 by Columbus advertising and marketing firm Image by Design and Allen Matthews Productions. It is loaded with scenes of people enjoying the city’s recreation and entertainment amenities, its food and festivals, while also featuring cameos of its major employers to include TSYS, Aflac, Pratt & Whitney and Fort Benning.

The fast-moving clip that serves up plenty of smiling faces, along with an emotional woman at a soldier graduation and a couple getting married at the Columbus Botanical Garden, is set to a soft pop song amid a strumming guitar, ala a ballad by country performer Dierks Bentley.

“Take me where your river flows. I wanna drive on your open road, like the wilderness where we are born, singing whoa-oh-oh,” the lyrics begin, eventually closing with, “You and me let’s fly away, somewhere past the Milky Way. Maybe we’ll return some day. Don’t wake me up, don’t wake me up ’til we are ho-o-o-me.”

Cyde McQuien, a partner in Image by Design, called it a very ambitious project and one that he believes will resonate with area residents. The Columbus company is a full-service ad agency that has worked on video productions and TV commercials over three-plus decades.

“It’s part of our effort to promote the new Columbus brand and focus on the fact that Columbus is an amazing place to live, work and play. Our objective was to capture the heart and soul of our community,” he said.

The effort required extensive arrangements for scenes, he said, which included getting cooperation from venues such as the Springer Opera House, Columbus Museum, Oxbow Meadows, the Coca-Cola Space Science Center and the National Infantry Museum and Soldier Center.

The video, naturally, includes a group whitewater rafting, as well as a couple taking a zip-line ride across the Chattahoochee River. There’s also a glimpse of Synovus employees volunteering to pack boxes of food at Feeding the Valley Food Bank, and crowds packing the downtown area during musical performances, with casual moments such as a young boy smiling with glee as he dances and plays his air guitar.

“Our objective was to represent a cross section of our community,” McQuien said. “This is a video targeting our community and our objective is to cultivate a sense of community pride and community ownership so that people who live here are proud of what we have here and are aware of the amazing things that Columbus offers.”

While some moments in the video were planned perfectly, others such as the boy dancing at the music show and the tears flowing at the military ceremony unfolded naturally, he said.

“There’s a scene in the video where a woman was getting emotional at the soldier graduation. That certainly wasn’t staged,” McQuien said. “We just happened to turn the camera to the crowd and there she was being overwhelmed by the moment and we were able to capture that.”

Bowden said the “Amazing Columbus” video stems from the Columbus 2025 effort in which local leaders want to improve the community in several areas. Those include improving economic growth, developing an enterprising culture, fostering new talent and education, residents connecting with each other, and creating a cohesive image and identity.

The video also will be used to promote the city to visitors and meeting planners in general, he said, while residents of the area will be asked to embrace the video and its slogan, “Columbus. We Do Amazing.” It will eventually be cut into 60- to 90-second segments as a full marketing plan is developed to roll it out to the masses.

“We met last week to talk about that, and that will be phase three of the branding process,” Bowden said. “Obviously, it’s social media right now mostly. But then we’ll also probably do the civic club circuit, get corporations and organizations to adopt it and put it on their website and share it, so they can basically own it as if it were part of their culture within their organization.”

McQuien said the video has a broad reach in the way it was produced. That includes giving area companies something to use as a recruiting tool, which will help them familiarize potential talent they are courting to the community by offering glimpses of the city’s people and extolling some the benefits of living here.

“It’s hard to watch the video and not feel good about Columbus, Georgia,” he said, pointing out it’s one of the most satisfying projects he has worked on given the amount of work it took and the goal of the finished product.

The city attracted about 1.9 million visitors in the last fiscal year ending last June, Bowden said. That translated to the creation of more than 4,000 hospitality jobs and an overall economic impact of $347 million.

This story was originally published November 15, 2018 at 1:20 PM.