Yesterday I tried to explain to one of my friends WHY we were doing all this: the campaign, the blog, these videos, trying to bring MySpace to Barcelona, why MySpace, why Barcelona,… and at one point she said: “You have a problem, you know! I don’t really care about MySpace and I don’t see why I should campaign to get them to Barcelona“.

Well, as the night went on and we poured more and more wine down our throats, I convinced her to leave a support message at least. Of course, she’s right. One does not care about things one does not know, and normally one cares even less about big North-Amercian multinationals even if they are part of the whole web 2.0 hype. No emotional connection -> no clear motivation to support the campaign, it’s as simple as that. MySpace is not a “Lovemark” over here so far and the fact that it’s part of News Corporation does not exactly help to make it one either. So, why the hell did we start a campaign to bring them to Barcelona? And talking about Internet companies, aren’t there others we’re more emotional about, like Amazon, Flickr, Secondlife, you name it. Shouldn’t they open their headquarters in Barcelona?

Let me just recall how this all got started in the first place:
At the end of November we learnt that MySpace is coming to Spain and they started to look for people to hire. People who started sending them CVs asked where they would open up their office but by then they hadn’t made a decision. I got a mail from them, saying: “We might go to Madrid but if we find out that the more creative people are in Barcelona, we’ll go there”.

And at that point the emotion clicked in. Emotion about Barcelona. And we thought: How can any international company planning to open market in South Europe, call it Amazon, Flickr, Google, IDEO, or MySpace NOT think about Barcelona? Especially when they need confluence of local and global creative energies.

So we started to call more people, asked if they would support an independent campaign in favour of Barcelona in order to bring one of the top five Internet companies (and the sixth most visited website!) to this town. You might think “Oh my god, wake up and start to think rationally. Companies go where the money is and that’s where other companies and clients are”. That’s a point, ok. But things are changing, companies go where the money is but they also go where creativity and innovation is and that’s where creative and innovative people and projects are. So this is a “Just in case you didn’t know about the unique potential of Barcelona’s people - campaign” - 100% emotional.

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