Most consumers are by now familiar with advertising campaigns designed to promote cities, states, and regions. But are those ads really effective in achieving economic development, increased tourism, or whatever their goals might be?

Jeff Leitner and Howell Malham of Insight Labs recently weighed in on the question on Eight Forty-Eight, the popular morning show on Chicago Public Media station WBEZ. The pair reacted skeptically to several ads from the Great Lakes region, but also pointed to principles local governments could use to design successful campaigns.

Malham said that, as a rule, he did not find ads of this type to be particularly useful.

“Rebranding cities as if they were deodorants or the latest Wonderbra seems a little silly to me,” he said.

The problem is that most such ads overestimate what can be accomplished through branding. While they may be rooted in a sincere desire to change the narrative about a place, he said, “changing the narrative doesn’t change the reality.”

Leitner added that there is a common misconception among people who do not have experience in brand strategy that a well-produced commercial or snappy jingle can radically alter consumer perceptions.

“Branding, as a rule, is something that people who don’t do it for a living think they need,” he said. “You put a lot of otherwise very smart people in a room together, and they say, ‘We need a branding campaign!’”

But good campaigns, Leitner said, are designed to achieve specific, realistic goals.

“Branding is intended to move an audience from one place to another place,” Leitner said. “It’s not clear who the audience is in most of these ads or where you’re trying to move them.”

The Labsters cited several campaigns that have achieved their goals, however. The best-known is probably Las Vegas’s “What Happens Here, Stays Here” series. The slogan, designed to portray Vegas as a total experience rather than just a collection of casinos and entertainment venues, has been revived several times and is now a part of pop culture. Similarly successful, they said, was the “Don’t Mess with Texas” campaign designed to stop littering on the Katy Freeway.

Time and again, we’ve discovered in Labs that before amassing a set of impressive tactics, leaders of organizations need to be able to answer the question, “What does winning look like?” It stands to reason that that’s something local governments should ask before they start buying air time and column-inches.