Right Time

There was a discussion on 508 this week about the origin of “Right Time, Right Place” (specifically, this song).

The origin of the slogan appears in the Telegram first in 1996.  (Note that this campaign cost $1.6 million.)  This inspired a Dianne Williamson column on slogans.

Four years later, in 2000, Susan J. Black, the city’s marketing director, built on this theme with a $510,000 marketing campaign that presumably included the song.  According to that article:

The jingle was the brainchild of Joseph Flynn, regional vice president and general manager of Citadel Communications, which owns four radio stations in the area, including WXLO-FM.

…

The jingle was put together by Brian Silva, president and owner of Sound Marketing [of Gloucester].

(That article also includes full lyrics.)

Jim Dempsey reimagined the jingle in a column (and resurrects another one — “Wake up to Worcester” — which reminds me why I like to sleep in).  This is why I miss seeing him in the Telegram:

The marketing plan from that same campaign addressed the problem of how to sell the city to its own residents. What was required, the plan concluded, was “a packaging and promotion program,” a “multi- faceted program of activities and communications” and a “consistent unified media advertising program.”

Now, isn’t that amazing? The folks whose business is promotion and advertising tell us that the answers to all our woes are promotion and advertising.

…

Maybe they have lived so long in their catchy, up-tempo, positive worlds that they simply cannot see that “Target Worcester” sounds as if people would want to shoot firearms at us.

(There’s more about “Wake up to Worcester” here and here, and a revisit of that same motto nearly fifteen years later; also, lyrics to a song called “Fair Worcester” via Jim Dempsey.)