The city of Minneapolis posted a police recruitment commercial this week as part of its $950,000 marketing campaign, but there was one problem — a 2-second clip showed footage of a street in an American city that was not Minneapolis.
Minneapolis posted a police recruitment ad. But the ad showed another city.
The commercial, part of the city’s $950K marketing campaign, has been reposted with a clip showing a south Minneapolis intersection.
The Minnesota Star Tribune
March 8, 2024 at 1:00PM
The video, created by the marketing firm Accenture LLP, was posted Wednesday on the city’s YouTube page as part of its “Imagine Yourself” campaign, which is intended to help recruit new candidates for the city’s Police Department and 911 dispatch center.
The video starts as you would expect: shots of Minneapolis’ skyline, officers out in the community, a 911 call center employee at work.
But at 31 seconds, it switches to a panning shot of a neighborhood that looks decidedly not like Minneapolis. It shows tightly-packed row houses and flat roofs, with an atmosphere and ambience more like a city in the Eastern United States.
Charlie Rybak, co-founder of Minneapolis Voices, discovered the discrepancy on Wednesday and pointed it out on X (formerly Twitter). He thinks it’s a clip of Baltimore.
“I immediately realized that it looked unfamiliar, because Minneapolis has very few row houses,” Rybak told the Star Tribune. “If we’re going to pay someone $1 million of taxpayer money to create a video, the least we could ask them to do is include images of Minneapolis in it.”
A spokesperson for Accenture didn’t say what city was shown in the footage, only that it was stock footage “tagged for several cities, including Minneapolis.”
The video was pulled down and reposted at 5 p.m. on Thursday, with a shot of Lyndale and Franklin avenues replacing the questionable clip.
Rybak said he did a reverse image search to trace the non-Minneapolis clip to an online collection of stock footage on iStock by Getty Images. Other clips show various American cities, a few of Kansas City, some of Baltimore, and some from locations in the United Kingdom. The video used in the Minneapolis commercial is titled “Aerial zoom of American city,” and lists Washington D.C. as one of the categories.
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