Seize the Moment
Commentary
by Rick Reiff
BILL GROSS. HE MOVES THE MARKET. HE RUNS THE BIGGEST MUTUAL FUND in the world. He’s in Orange County.
Allergan. It makes the wonder drug Botox. Its revenue tops $1 billion a year. It’s in Orange County.
The Anaheim Angels. They define teamwork. They’re the champions of baseball. They’re in Orange County.
Orange County, California. Check us out.
Excuse me for getting carried away every time I think about a branding campaign for Orange County. Ads like the ones above (or cleverer and catchier ones) could promote the county as a great place for achievers, creators and trendsetters.
The fodder for a campaign is almost endless: Quiksilver and the rest of the surfwear/skateboard crowd, QLogic, Oakley, Broadcom, Kingston Technology, No Doubt, artist Shag, Boeing, auto design shops, St. John Knits, In-N-Out Burger, Olympic gold medallists, the Irvine Spectrum, the Offspring, Taco Bell, South Coast Plaza, South Coast Repertory and so forth.
Some ads could be triggered by events,another bestseller for Dean Koontz, another major for Tiger Woods, another Nobel Prize for UCI. Imagine an ad pairing the Rally Monkey with designer Paul Frank’s simian, Julian. (We mean monkey business, We go ape over great ideas ) And the ads could plug www.locationoc.com, an Orange County Business Council Web site geared to corporate recruiters.
Why bother?
Because Orange County is in a unique predicament. As a post-industrial metropolis shaped almost entirely by the automobile, it is horizontal and decentralized where most places are vertical and concentrated.
That’s fine, and preferable in many ways. But it leaves Orange County without some of the usual urban identifiers like a genuine skyline, a downtown, a big-city mayor or a recognizable spot on the map.
Moreover, the county’s nearly 3 million people are relegated to the vast Los Angeles media market, leaving them without the local commercial television and radio stations that help to define other big communities and many smaller ones (Lubbock, Texas, Altoona, Pa., Palm Springs).
Almost any traveler knows that O’Hare International, Wrigley Field and Lake Michigan are part of Chicago. But ask a traveler to make similar connections with Orange County. John Wayne Airport? In a place called Santa Ana, I think. Edison Field? In Anaheim, by Disneyland, near Los Angeles. Newport Beach, Huntington Beach, Laguna Beach? All places somewhere along the California coast. Orange County? Isn’t that the place that went bankrupt?
Yet, despite its relative obscurity, Orange County has grown into one of the most vibrant and diversified economies in the world, with more technology jobs than Austin, Texas, a bigger fashion industry than San Francisco, more office space than Denver and a higher output than Minneapolis or Seattle.
Wouldn’t it be nice if more executives, journalists, academics and other opinion-shapers understood what, and where, Orange County is?
Retired Disneyland president Jack Lindquist says a multimillion branding campaign would be a good way to leverage the free publicity that the Anaheim Angels brought to the county last month.
But the Business Council, a logical entity to champion the effort, isn’t interested in hitting up its corporate members for the necessary donations.
The council used to be more ambitious, to the point of overkill. In the late ’90s it raised $7.5 million for job retention and expansion, during the strongest economic recovery in history. The council claimed its efforts helped to attract and preserve 12,000 jobs. But even if true, local businesses were creating more than 100,000 jobs on their own.
In fairness, the jobs initiative sprang from concerns forged in the early ’90s recession. Still, a branding campaign runs less risk of becoming pass & #233;,Orange County needs an image boost in both good times and bad.
The folks at the Business Council say they do their best to brand OC, spending about $150,000 a year to target corporate recruiters. They say among outside executives in such key industries as microelectronics, biomedical, software and product design, awareness of Orange County is high; they fear that diffusing a message over broader business or consumer audiences would be ineffective and a waste of money.
I’m unconvinced.
In recent months a number of things have piqued public interest in Orange County, including a B-flick of the same name, features about OC’s hipness in USA Today and on VH1, and the Angels’ mania.
I’m with Jack. Let’s seize the moment.
If the Business Council could raise $7.5 million a few years back, why not $4 million now? That would be enough for a few bursts of advertising, or for one prolonged campaign.
Four million dollars buys 27 full pages, 49 half pages or 95 quarter pages in the national edition of the Wall Street Journal.
Just choose an ad agency (we’ve got plenty of them too), decide on a message and raise the money.
What do you think?
, Rick Reiff
