Alliance Joins Preservation Marketing Campaign

What Will You Leave the Next Generation?

Picture this: a snapshot of a brick schoolhouse. An American flag waves out front. Trees dot the landscape.

But this picture is only a piece of a larger scene: A larger photograph shows children posing for their class pictureŠtheir teacher standing to the side smiling proudly. The happy, laughing children sit cross-legged and kneeling along the side of a road on a concrete sidewalk, while a seven-story parking garage towers in the background where the school used to stand. The caption under the image reads: "No one looks back fondly on the time they spent in a parking garage."

The National Trust for Historic Preservation and the Ad Council joined forces for the first time to create a series of public service ads showing the importance of saving the places that tell the story of our lives.

These poignant, slice-of-life messages promote building a new American preservation ethic-one that cherishes and protects important places in every community. The ads end with a question to leave the audience pondering: "What will we leave the next generation to remember us by?"

The Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia has joined the efforts as a local partner in the initiative, along with two other Pennsylvania organizations: Preservation Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh History & Landmarks Foundation.

Nearly 60 state and local organizations have signed on as local partners to assist in the promotion of the three-year public service advertising campaign. Through nationwide television, radio, and print advertisements, the National Trust encourages individuals to recognize the importance of local environments and to work to conserve and promote their unique qualities.

"We want to make preservation issues more visible to Americans," said Richard Moe, president of the National Trust. "We're trying to make people aware of the historic structures in their own communities."

Don't think that historic preservation applies only to famous buildings and landmarks. Of course, we'd never think of destroying world-famous icons of history and architecture such as Mount Vernon or the Alamo. But every day, other historic places that enrich and inform our daily lives are destroyed by demolition, neglect, and the simple wear-and-tear of weather and time. No other place is this more prominent than in our own backyards of Philadelphia.

The campaign was created pro bono by Arnold Worldwide, including television, print, and radio ads urging people to protect and save their communities' historic structures. The ads were sent to 28,000 media outlets across the country in April 2003 and were to run in advertising time and space donated by the media. By late summer, the National Trust reported that Pennsylvania led all media outlets in using the PSA ads.

Watch-and listen-for the ads on your local stations.

Check out the ads

This is a competitive program with approximately 40 percent of all requests receiving funding. The number of applications has continued to increase in recent years.

Click here to see the radio, television, and print ads. Then let us know what you think! Your comments are important in helping us evaluate the effectiveness of the National Trust ads.

Please email info@preservationalliance.com.

Thanks!

The Alliance's participation in the National Trust campaign is made possible by a generous grant from the Masonry Preservation Group and by contributions from the Chestnut Hill Historical Society and the Lower Merion Conservancy.