Coming up with a Tagline, Creative Art Campaign and More

I am running for City Council Member in Redwood City, a town of 81,000 residents of which maybe 9000 vote in off-year elections. Yes, some people know me and love me. Yes, some people know me and hate me. But most people, they simply don’t know me.

Pretty soon after the City Clerk published the fact that I was running the emails from the various local publications looking to do features on the candidates and inviting us to buy advertising in their publications starting arriving. A couple of my opponents either because they are incumbents, have run before or simply made their decisions much earlier then I did are already running aggressive advertising campaigns. So I needed to get cracking. I talked to an award winning artist neighbor friend, Paula Pangaro, and asked her to help me put together a campaign.

We met and talked about the message. First she considered my name: Tania Solé. Solé with the accent aigu is Catalan. My father’s family was originally from a small town outside Barcelona in Catalonia. Soleil is sun in French. Sol is sun in Spanish. Solé is sun in Catalan. So if you go to Barcelona and look up Solés in the phone book be prepared to see pages and pages of Solés. Imagine Smith, Garcia or any other well known last name here in the United States.

Paula wanted to play with the idea of a campaign centered upon a sun rising (I certainly didn’t want a sun set.) How about “Wake Up Redwood City” with the sun coming up from behind and maybe using the iconic Redwood City arc on it. I ran the idea by some friends and they didn’t think it was the best idea. Some residents might consider it condescending especially if they were well informed and didn’t feel they needed any “waking up.” I called Paula back. Paula we have a problem. Not to worry she already had had a better idea.

I met with her again. Paula was all excited she had thought of another play on my name: “Olé, olé, olé, vote for Tania Solé.” I was horrified. I just stood there. As a child I was taunted with that play on my name. I knew all about olé, olé, olé. But I do know it is as advertisers say “sticky.” It works and it helps people pronounce my name properly. Do you know how many times I have heard my name being pronounced as ”soul.” I had to stop and think. Let my head grasp this. Could I own the taunt?

I decided that we should look it up. Let’s see what Google and Wikipedia would tell us about olé, olé, olé. Regardless of how I felt. The Wikipedia entry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ol%C3%A9,_Ol%C3%A9,_Ol%C3%A9) included “ It was chanted when individuals seemed to rise above themselves in performance.” Hard to dislike that association. We had a tagline and an idea.

Now we needed an artist that could produce electronic art. Paula works on real objects with real paints. Cue my cousin, Jacqueline Tuteur, an award winning graphic artist and voila we had our campaign.