I recently returned from a week-long blogging conference in beautiful upstate NY…Corning, to be exact. With half of my wife’s family from the Catskills, I have driven by on the 390 interstate many times while living in Toronto. However, I never knew much about the area, other than it is famous for Corning Enterprises, makers of the kitchen glassware I fondly remember burning my arms on multiple times reaching across the supper table. I also never knew Corning Enterprises is number 293 on the Fortune 500 list, or that they make glass for fiber optic cable and gorilla glass for phones, and even supplied glass for the space shuttle program!
The people of the Finger Lakes(aka FLX) Region are wonderful, much like the travel bloggers I had the privilege of meeting. And their wine region? Who knew? It was recently selected the number one wine region in the United States by USA Today readers. Congrats!
As rich and scenic this area is, it somehow still lacks a certain cultural diversity amongst its dwellers. And this lack of diversity may very well be responsible for the abundance of traditional road sign marketing in the region – quaint and vintage but lacking an element of technological advancement, domains to be exact. Even in a place like the historic Watkins Glen Raceway, which has hundreds of thousands of race fans frequenting the track annually, very few domain names are visible to the public.
If this is an oversight these brands need new marketers. For Watkins Glen, if this is policy then they should probably evolve as the race cars do.
Don Ruiz 