News
State's tourist ads aim to pack 'em in
By Jim Wasserman
Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 am PDT Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Story appeared in Business section, Page D1
National ad blitz bolstered by fresh funds from taxpayers
On the theory that nobody knows your name if you don't advertise, California's $82.5 billion tourism industry is preparing a massive blitz of the nation's television screens to show off a state still renowned globally as golden.
The landmark yearlong advertising campaign - "California: Find Yourself Here" - is aimed at the hearts, minds and wallets of America's 25-to 54-year-old tourists and comes courtesy of California's just-passed $117.4 billion budget.
Alongside the budget's highway and health care funding is a newly restored $7.3 million for California's travel industry to ramp up a novel "branding" campaign for a state that's already the nation's leading tourist destination. The plan: Spur still more visits to a state battered in recent years by a downturn in visitor spending and tourism-related job creation.
Travelers in California spent 5.2 percent less in 2002 than two years earlier before spending resumed its upward climb in 2003 and recovered last year. But tourism jobs remain 4.5 percent below 2000 levels and officials hope an ad campaign will spark more hiring.
"For the first time in history, California will be able to buy national media," said Caroline Beteta, executive director of the Sacramento-based California Travel and Tourism Commission. "This is a colossal difference."
The promotion money, restored after two years without state contributions, highlights the nation's ruthlessly competitive travel market where states such as Illinois, Hawaii and Florida greatly outspend California to attract visitors who fly in, demand few services and leave lots of money.
Collectively, visits last year to California beaches, mountains, amusement parks, wine country and malls generated $39.5 billion in hotel stays, supported a $26.5 billion payroll and paid $5.2 million in state and local taxes, tourism officials say.
"In newspapers or politics, everybody knows that advertising works. It has a return," said Ted Burke, a California Restaurant Association official and vice president of the tourism commission. Burke said up to one-third of restaurant revenue comes from travelers.
Together with private travel industry funds, a newly muscled $18.2 million tourism budget will finance the television campaign while boosting California's promotion budget to seventh among states nationally behind such states as Hawaii and Illinois, tourism officials say.
Unlike other states, where the public sector pays the full cost of promoting tourism, California relies on a public-private partnership between the travel industry and government.
But the private sector had lost its government partner for the past two years amid state budget shortfalls.
While tourism experts acknowledge the state's budget crisis, they say California mistakenly rested upon its golden reputation as state government withheld its share of a combined promotion budget.
"There's lots of other places people can go other than California," said Kris Reyes, spokesman for Santa Cruz Boardwalk, which last year attracted 3 million visitors. "You can't take it for granted that just because it's California they're going to come here."
Research conducted for California's travel and tourism commission showed 48.6 million people visited California last year from other states, along with 8.4 million international visitors.
"We don't track where they come from," said Patrick Kaler, executive director of the Lake Tahoe Visitors Authority. "But from my own experience walking around Heavenly Village and walking around the mountain, it's an international draw."
Once here, tourism officials say, these visitors spend an average of $101 a day.
Combined with Californians who take road trips of 50 miles or more and stay overnight, a total of 314 million travelers visited state attractions last year, the tourism commission said. All told, they spent $82.5 billion, ranking tourism and travel among California's largest industries alongside manufacturing, entertainment and agriculture.
But the travel business wants to stimulate still more visits from other states as Americans increasingly spend freely and return to the air following the downturn spurred by Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York City and the Pentagon.
Even as more Americans are also traveling overseas, those trips represent only 5 percent of all American travel and pose no "cause for concern" as a diversion from California destinations, said Cathy Keefe, spokeswoman for the American Travel Industry Association.
The new $8 million television campaign, produced by the Sacramento advertising firm Mering & Associates, begins in October with a winter theme and switches in spring to a spring-summer approach, said account director Lori Bartle. Mering's 30-second advertisements will feature a montage of celebrities "talking about our brand character of wanting to live life to the fullest and put pleasure first," Bartle said. "That's how we want to show the California experience."
She declined to say what the firm is being paid for the campaign, saying contracts aren't finished.
The goal is to plant fresh impressions on millions of U.S. residents, luring a new round of visitors for local and regional attractions to fight over, said Steve Hammond, president and chief executive officer of the Sacramento Convention and Visitors Bureau.
Hammond, who also is chairman of the California Travel Industry Association - a group of hotels, attractions, visitors bureaus, airlines and wineries - said, "We have to get visitors here to California in the first place to have an opportunity to compete for their business."
The travel industry association played a key role in winning back the funds, following a three-year lobbying campaign in the Capitol.
"The frustrating thing was to hear legislators say, 'California sells itself,' " said Terri Taylor-Solorio, the group's president and CEO.
"We've got so much to offer the visitor, but unless we're out there just like Las Vegas or Hawaii or New York reminding people why they should come to visit, why should they return?"