New York sometimes feels like an archipelago of multiple cities—cities which, unless you have a damn good reason like work or your friend's band, you rarely visit. So for its latest ad campaign, NYC isn't going after out-of-staters. It's going after the lazy ass locals who never visit any neighborhoods but their own.
The campaign is called See Your City, and it kicks off by goading New Yorkers: "Hey, New Yorker, you need to get out more." True! Almost always true. "But we get it, sometimes just going beyond your own block feels like a journey." Then it shows of ten lesser-known neighborhoods, including restaurant recs and architectural gems, detailing why you should pull yourself up off the couch and jump on the train to visit.
While it's interesting that NYC's tourism board is targeting its own citizens, the real highlight is the art. Done up in a perfect parroting of 1940s-style illustration work for travel agencies and bus companies, each poster is a perfect amalgam of geometric abstraction and bursts of pitch-perfect color. Will it get us out of our local corner bars and bodegas and onto the distant avenues of Van Cortland and St. George? Only time will tell. [NYC.gov; CityLab; AdWeek]