With Los Angeles’ Image Restored, Agency Disbands

The New Los Angeles Marketing Partnership is one of those rarest of rarities: a government-backed entity that has finished its job and is closing down.

Established five years ago to burnish the image of a then-troubled Los Angeles before the world, New LAMP--as the organization calls itself--is launching a few final advertising blitzes and then going out of business. Its current campaign, which highlights home-grown Los Angeles inventions, bills everything from the Internet to the barbecued chicken pizza, from the bikini to the Zamboni as Los Angeles’ products.

“Ideas that are remaking the world are made right here in L.A.,” the ads proclaim. “That’s why Los Angeles today is No. 1 in manufacturing. And the best place to expand your business.”

In truth, the Zamboni hails from Paramount, not Los Angeles, and the Internet’s birthplace is hard to pin down with certainty, although some of its precursor systems did in fact take root here. (By contrast, the barbecued chicken pizza is solidly and undisputedly a Los Angeles contribution to the world.)

Such quibbles aside, many advertising experts and local public relations gurus credit New LAMP with helping to restore the city’s image from its dismal lows of the mid-1990s, when Los Angeles was known mainly for police brutality and riots, to its generally positive reviews today.

Sure, tourists still waver in the face of crime and local promoters still have to deal with nightmares such as the recent slaying of a German tourist in Santa Monica while thousands of travel agents were in town for their annual convention.

But visits to Los Angeles are dramatically up since the early 1990s, and the city is home to a burgeoning number of businesses, particularly small- and medium-sized firms. In the last few years, Los Angeles has become the rapidly developing center of the multimedia industry, a trend capped just last week with the long-awaited sealing of the deal for DreamWorks SKG to build its Playa Vista headquarters.

At New LAMP, leaders are not shy about taking a share of the credit for all that.

They claim no less than responsibility for thousands of new jobs and a rebirth of urban prosperity. Viewed from the perspective of New LAMP, Los Angeles’ tax rolls are fuller, its poor are more likely to find jobs, and its well-to-do are more likely to get good returns on their residential real estate investments--in part because of ads across the country touting Los Angeles as such a good place to live and work.

Not everyone is so quick to credit New LAMP, however.

After all, they note, President Clinton’s willingness to spend federal money to ensure that he carried California played a significant role in the city’s recovery, particularly its dramatic rebuilding after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. Mayor Richard Riordan and his crime-fighting emphasis probably helped make Los Angeles somewhat safer and thus more attractive to business. And Los Angeles, even in the worst of times, always has had good weather to enjoy, beaches to lounge on, mountains to hike in and movie stars to gawk at.

With all that, New LAMP hardly registers among the top 10 attractions of America’s second-largest city.

“We weren’t the sole contributors of that recovery,” New LAMP head Bob Lowe said in response to the skepticism. “But we did play a meaningful role in it.”

What did New LAMP actually do?

It tapped some of the city’s leading businesses and convinced them that it was in their interests to advertise Los Angeles to the rest of the country.

It ran a series of ads pitched to attracting tourists and new businesses to Los Angeles.

It brought together public and private entities in a joint effort to promote the region. That alliance, though seemingly natural, had never been tried, largely because the local government and its leading businesses could not agree on whether Los Angeles needed promotion or whether it effectively sold itself.

A number of factors came together to convince them that advertising might yield economic benefits. One was the success of New York’s “I Love New York” self-promotion, which helped that city in its long struggle to convince tourists that Manhattan was a safe place to visit.

The other was the double whammy of riots and recession.

The cutbacks in Defense Department spending, the closure of major manufacturing plants and then the body blow to Los Angeles’ image caused by the 1992 riots scared off tourists and made it all but impossible to attract new businesses to the area. Faced with the task of trying to rebuild the city’s image, New LAMP started by convincing major companies that they needed to do more than sit on their hands.

Bank of America, Southern California Edison, First Interstate Bank, Arco and a few others, reasoning that what was good for Los Angeles probably was good for them in the long run, each chipped in for the initial advertising campaign. They were soon joined by United Airlines, Fox and Times Mirror, publisher of the Los Angeles Times, among others.

Each promised $500,000 over the expected five-year life of New LAMP, and public sector groups, such as the city and county of Los Angeles and the Convention and Visitors Bureau, also chipped in.

The effort started modestly. Lowe and other New LAMP leaders were convinced that Los Angeles needed a soft sell, that any attempt to portray the riot-ravaged city as a Garden of Eden would be easily dismissed. Instead, New LAMP’s early ads called attention to what did work in Los Angeles, highlighting its strong manufacturing base, and its proliferation of small- and medium-sized businesses.

In fact, New LAMP started advertising Los Angeles by advertising the community’s virtues to itself. So downtrodden was the city in those days that New LAMP executives figured they could not sell the city to outsiders until they convinced people who lived here to stop bad-mouthing the place.

From there, the effort reached outward, highlighting the size and strength of Los Angeles’ economy and boasting of it as the home of everything from the Hula Hoop to Hollywood. Those modest efforts, combined with the city’s steady recovery, helped to yield palpable results.

In 1990, nearly 25 million visitors spent a night in Los Angeles, contributing just over $8 billion to the local economy. The next year, as the city became most identified with police officers beating Rodney G. King, tourism dropped by more than 1 million visitors. And the year after that, when riots cut their swath, visitors stayed away in record numbers, with just over 20 million making an overnight trip to a city that in those days seemed like a good place to avoid.

Since then, however, visits have been on a nearly uninterrupted climb, the one setback being a brief and small one in 1995, the year after the Northridge earthquake. In 1996, the number of overnight visitors climbed back to 23.2 million, and last year it climbed to 23.6 million. This year’s pace is well ahead of that.

As the years went on, Los Angeles gained strength and New LAMP flexed its muscles. One recent campaign poked directly at New York, suggesting that the Big Apple was growing “green with envy” over the growth in its West Coast rival. That particular ad, which debuted while Riordan was visiting New York, sparked a good-natured round of bickering between Los Angeles’ mayor and New York’s Rudolph Giuliani. Giuliani got the last laugh when his hometown New York Yankees swept the World Series as Riordan’s Dodgers sat home and watched the games on television.

Today, tourism is Los Angeles’ third-ranking industry, surpassed only by business services and health services. More than 200,000 people in Los Angeles County owe their jobs at least in part to tourism.

And at least part of the reason those tourists come is because they are reminded by one of New LAMP’s ads that Los Angeles is a decent place to visit.

Onetime skeptics such as City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas say that has made New LAMP worth the investment.

“It was precisely what needed to happen at one of the low points in this city’s history,” said the councilman, whose South Los Angeles district was badly damaged in the riots. “We had to market ourselves. A city that doesn’t do that is a city that doesn’t care about itself or about its future.”

So why close up New LAMP?

Proponents say that the time has come for the mission of selling Los Angeles to shift to the agencies most directly responsible for that, the Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Chamber of Commerce.

More important than that, New LAMP officials say, is the fact that when the group was formed, it promised its private sector contributors that it only would tap them for five years--seeing Los Angeles through its worst moments and then moving on. That time is up early next year.

“I think it’s important to do what you say you will do,” Lowe said. “We said we would do this for five years, and we have.”