A pretty good case
City planning to use website to tout its advantages to others, too
The City of Halifax is serious about a bid to entice Amazon to locate their second HQ in the harbour city and an online element is also designed to catch others’ attention.
Halifax’s bid to be the second North American headquarters for online retail giant Amazon is now online, on a slick new website.
The site, launched last week by the Halifax Partnership economic development organization, can be viewed at http://amazonhfx. com/
“I love it,” Halifax Mayor Mike Savage said Thursday. “I think it’s very cool. It sort of encapsulates the themes of what we were talking about.”
A tagline at the top of the site simply says, “Amazon HQ2 could be anywhere. It should be here. Halifax,” with a video highlighting area attractions playing in the background.
Further enticements tout Halifax as “the technology, commercial and cultural heart of Canada’s east.” A link allows users to download an executive summary of the region’s bid.
Scrolling further down, the site offers a series of five points relating aspects of the city that Amazon might find appealing such as the culture, the location, the economy, the availability of talent and “the soul of this place.”
An aerial view of the proposed Shannon Park site is featured below links to missives penned by supporters of the bid, including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Premier Stephen McNeil, Savage and business stakeholders such as Halifax Stanfield airport, Air Canada and Nova Scotia Power.
At the very bottom, a video link
offers another look at the vibrant culture of the area.
“We wanted to make it public what we were talking about,” Savage said. “There were a number of components to the bid – the video as well as the booklet – so the folks put it together in a website and I think it deserves to be out in the public realm.”
Amazon announced in September that it is looking for a site for a second office in North America. It projected it would cost US $5 billion to build and would employ 50,000 people at wages averaging around $100,000. But the company also said it wanted HQ2 to be in a region with a population of one million people. The Halifax area falls short in that aspect.
“From the beginning we were a long shot and a number of the people who put time into it, I
think initially would have said to you, ‘it’s crazy,’ ” Savage said. “I think as they worked on it and we started to put together our value proposition for a company like Amazon, we started to realize, ‘We could do this.’
“I think while we don’t have a million people, we have a million reasons to come to Halifax, particularly on the quality-of-life piece and the value that it would be. We’ve stressed the value – why we think Halifax is the best deal in North America – and we made our case.”
Halifax Partnership president and CEO Ron Hanlon said the website grew out of public interest in the Halifax bid as well as recognizing that it’s a great story for the city.
“It’s a good, uplifting story,” he said. “We want to share that with
people so that they can hopefully appreciate it and secondly . . . (so they can) feel more positive about the city.
“And then the third reason is we want to use the information that we’ve built around Amazon. We want to build on that as a narrative for more sales efforts for other companies, not necessarily with a response to bids or things, but in terms of a proactive effort, selling effort, to help sell and promote the city.”
Hanlon said the site itself contains the same information included in an electronic version of the bid presented to Amazon.
“(Amazon) got a paper copy and they also got an electronic copy,” he said. “This is that electronic copy, so it really is the content from the bid that we are putting out on the website.