GATEWAY TO THE EAST (AND ALSO NORTH)

As Gateway FIber pushed beyond the Toasted Ravioli city and into new territory, the brand looked to Darling for some market-specific messaging that would play well in Minnesota, Fargo and Western Mass.

This presented a unique challenge. Specifically, none of us hail from these locations, and nothing is worse than lazy headlines like Arch you glad you didn’t go with someone else, St. Louis? Or, Our jewelry is as golden as your favorite bridge, San Francisco. 

So how do you avoid these hamfisted overtures to the locals? The answer: research. Weird, weird research.

We dug deep into the not-so-seedy-actually-kinda-savory underbelly of Fargo’s Reddit. We learned all we could about grinders (Western Mass’ sub sandwich) and poured over myriad webpages concerning Minnesota’s favorite artist formerly known as 🤴.  

All of this sent us down some towny tangents that we hope wink to the local market without coming off like a total interloper. 

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Take for instance the Minnesota Goodbye. It’s a lovably nasty habit up north where people tend to say sayonara but then painstakingly stick-around-ya. We played this up everywhere we could with long stretchy waving hands and a direct mail sign-off that trailed in opacity. 

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As we also learned, Western Mass' greatest distinction is that it isn’t somewhere else. You don’t PAHK the CAH (sorry, my Boston accent is terrible), and their biggest city is Springfield (which is in all the other states too). Luckily, we stumbled upon their historic homes that traditionally don't play well with modern updates (except, of course, Gateway Fiber’s internet).  

Hopefully, we crossed the balance beam of insight and intrigue without dipping our toes into over-trodden territory. Please, take a look for yourself. And if you’re in one of these areas, we’d certainly welcome your feedback (so long as you sign up for Gateway Fiber first).