San Francisco’s business leaders and billionaires are launching a flashy multimillion-dollar advertising campaign to combat the city’s deteriorating reputation and attract more companies that may be turned off by the “doomsday loop, according to reports.”
The Golden City has faced rising crime, drug use and homelessness, forcing many major businesses to close — and even prompting one man to famously start a “Doom Loop Walking Tour” that highlights his city’s decay.
The “It Starts Here” campaign will cover the city in ads featuring Bay Area companies such as Apple, Pixar and Levi Strauss for November’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Bloomberg reported.
The goal is to convince entrepreneurs to start their businesses in San Francisco and remind residents of what made it an iconic city in the past.
“There are a lot of people who want San Francisco to win,” a Gap Inc. board member said. Bob Fisher, who is among the local leaders behind the ad campaign, told Bloomberg.
The ad campaign will reportedly cover the city ahead of the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.Credit: AdvanceSF
“Forget the doom loop, it’s the boom loop,” he said.
Business group Advance SF is leading the ad onslaught, which hopes to change public perception of a city that has been on edge since the COVID-19 pandemic and plagued by runaway crime and businesses.
Larry Baer, CEO of the San Francisco Giants and co-chairman of Advance SF, told Bloomberg that the business community should “come together and start reinforcing the story that many people understand about San Francisco, but have been lost in the discussion.”
San Francisco has been plagued by homelessness, drug use and record-breaking store vacancies.David G. McIntyre
The ad, published on Monday, opens with a beautiful view of thick fog enveloping the bay, followed by several other iconic sites such as the Golden Gate Bridge.
A narrator extolls “inexplicable magic” and describes San Francisco as “a perfect collision of conditions – raw habitats and rare human beings” and “where tenacity and courage meet brain power, confidence and openness.”
Such conditions, the commercial promises, prompt a “restless itch to create something radically new and different,” followed by the catch-up of trains, streetcars and companies like Uber, Apple and Google.
The ad also featured the history of Beatnik culture and the Summer of Love in San Francisco and the Golden State Warriors’ Steph Curry taking a jump shot.
The new ad campaign aims to remind people of what makes San Francisco so great. AP San Francisco has also hired a new head of its tourism bureau to change its public perception. David G. McIntyre
Fish told Bloomberg he and others who support the plan understand that the campaign won’t solve the city’s problems, but they believe the issue has been blown up in the press.
“The city has long benefited from not having to talk about itself so much,” Fisher said. His family has lived in San Francisco for six generations.
“Over the last year, the drumbeat of negative press just got to the point where I reached a personal breaking point,” he said.
San Francisco hired a new top tourism official in September to try and change its public perception. The San Francisco Tourism Association, the Golden City’s tourism and marketing bureau, hired former Toronto top Tourism official Scott Beck.
Beck said at the time his job was to reverse “the persistent narrative about San Francisco being a monolithic experience when it clearly isn’t.”
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Source: thtrangdai.edu.vn/en/
