CHALLENGE: Los Angeles Tourism is the city’s largest industry. It supports over 200,000 jobs and provides billions of dollars in economic impact. Conventional wisdom for years had said that the best way to bring visitors to L.A. was to focus on the drive markets–cities close enough to be able to hop in the car and drive easily. And while a big percentage of visitors come from drive markets, it made growth, especially for the hotels that make up the Bureau, more difficult. They were coming, but they weren’t staying that long.

SOLUTION: Our research very clearly showed us that, especially when it comes to those experiential millennials, the most productive growth opportunity was long haul. But wait: Those big urban areas already have almost everything Los Angeles has, but what they decidedly don’t have is what we came to call the “ethos” of The City Of Angels. Yes, the place, but also the people and the way they live. They believed L.A. would give them memories they could only create here. Moments that would become their very own #LAstory.

• Totally Integrated Marketing Communication Services
• Account Planning and Research-Qualitative and Quantitative
• Complete Creative Development Brand Campaign, including broadcast, digital, print and out of home
• Neighborhood videos covering over 30 distinct neighborhoods in L.A.
• Creative Development and marketing materials for DineLA Restaurant Week, Arts & Culture
• Travel trade targeted advertising and testimonial videos
• Meetings & Convention campaign for MeetLA

Ethos:  “…the characteristic spirit of a culture, era, or community as manifested in its beliefs and aspirations.”

Through our research process, it became clear that for the long haul visitors we needed, seeing the sights, shopping and all the rest didn’t really capture what they were looking for. We needed to go deeper, to get inside the moments that they hoped to create.

One subject told us he imagined spending the day at the beach, meeting some cool L.A. locals, being invited to their house for a BBQ, spending the evening talking about amazing things with brilliant people. That’s a moment.

We began to promote and populate the Instagram hashtag #LAstory and worked with social influencers to showcase their own personal visions of The City Of Angels. We maintain that if someone wants to know what L.A. is all about, just scroll through that feed—what you’ll see is pretty amazing. The travel press also picked up on the story soon after the launch here.

Depending on who was going to be seeing the advertising, we created over 150 different digital banner ads and using iterative testing, drilled down to a handful of the most effective options.

HEILBrice has full in-house broadcast production capability, as well as post and audio sweetening and recording. Typically, for shoots of the scope of this one for LATCB, we can save significant dollars and still deliver a world-class final product.

The L.A. Story campaign was seen in markets all over the world–England, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Australia and China. Because of its incredible growth in visitors over the last few years, it was important that we speak more specifically to what Chinese travelers were looking for. Even the URL had to change because ‘Discover’ didn’t translate effectively into Chinese.

HEILBrice’s strategic partners in China provided valuable international insights and added cultural relevance to our advertising efforts. These partnerships were most recently leveraged for work on the Los Angeles Tourism and Convention Board. Communications encouraged the citizens of China to come and experience all that the city of Los Angeles has to offer. The campaign consisted of digital and out of home.

Too many meeting professionals had scratched Los Angeles off of their considered lists because of some myths and misconceptions that refused to go away. Our MeetLA campaign introduced the trade to a whole new city.

L.A. Restaurant Week started as a small promotion that allowed restaurants to put together special offers during a typically slow time of year. It has grown into a real juggernaut, with hundreds of restaurants participating and thousands of Angelenos waiting hungrily for it to begin. L.A. is now recognized as being one of the best restaurant cities in America.

Our restaurant week included broadcast, digital and print efforts as well as point of sale materials for participants.