City dumps bid for Amazon HQ by flying banner over Seattle
Oct 23, 2017, 11:21 AM
A small airplane towing a banner with a message saying no thanks to Amazon was seen flying over downtown Seattle Monday morning.
When you’re trying to woo Amazon to Little Rock you fly a banner over Seattle. pic.twitter.com/l76ONONHJB
— EJ (@BourbonAndBeer) October 23, 2017
The banner read, “Hey Amazon. It’s not you. It’s us.” The url lovelittlerock.org was at the bottom of the banner.
But what does that mean?
Amazon kicked off its hunt for a second headquarters in September, promising to bring 50,000 new jobs and spend up to $5 billion. Proposals from cities, states and regions were due last weeks to land.
Little Rock, Arkansas had been one of the cities that put its hat in the ring for the new HQ, but on Thursday, city leaders made it known in a big way that they had changed their minds with a full-page ad in the Washington Post.
RELATED: Amazon received 238 proposals for HQ2
The ad, which reads like a breakup letter, was headlined, “Hey Amazon, we need to talk.”
It started out saying that there were a lot of things that would make Little Rock and Amazon great together, but then the tide turned.
“But when we really started thinking about what our future would look like, we realized it would probably never work out between us,” the ad read in part.
Rantz: Calgary appreciates Amazon more than the Seattle
According to Fortune.com, Little Rock never had much of a chance. Amazon’s list of requirements included that there be on-site mass transit, a less than 45-minute drive from an international airport, and up to 8 million square feet of office space for expansion.
When the city recognized it might not be a good fit, it used its good-natured “dumping” of Amazon as a way to launch a new branding campaign, “Love, Little Rock,” as a vehicle to point out what the city could offer to other firms that might want to set up there, Fortune said.
The breakup letter to Amazon was the launching of that campaign.
And with that, it apparently seemed appropriate to say goodbye in a more personal way, with a plane flying over downtown Seattle.
