An advertisement paid for by the Nevada Commission on Economic Development, bearing a California state flag minus its recognizable California bear, is shown Thursday in Hollywood, Calif. Photo by The Associated Press
Call it a new kind of animal attraction.
Starting next week, a $700,000 marketing campaign from the Nevada Commission on Economic Development will depict several California icons fleeing the state, lured by better business environs -- namely Nevada.
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The series' first ad will show the bear on the California flag abandoning the Golden State. Though the campaign wasn't scheduled for an official unveiling until Monday, a sneak peak on the Internet earlier this week has already caught the attention of the California media, drawing hostile fire on Thursday from a Sacramento Bee columnist.
"We're off and running and they're having a fit," said Somer Hollingsworth, president and chief executive officer of the Nevada Development Authority, a partner in the campaign with the state commission. "We're having a ball with it."
In addition to print and Internet ads, oversized outdoor ads will appear on downtown buildings in Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco and San Diego.
Hollingsworth said spots showing the flight of two more California institutions are on the way in coming weeks. He declined to disclose the famous fugitives, but the missingbear.com Web site links to missingcow.com, which implies that California doesn't have "happier cows" after all. Both sites feature mock newscasts detailing the animals' disappearance.
The latest marketing blitz represents another skirmish in the often-playful border war in which the neighboring states have tried to pilfer jobs from each other. In 2004, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger drove a truck down the Strip, offering to move any company to California.
In response, the Nevada Commission on Economic Development launched a $700,000 campaign a few months later asking, "Will your business be terminated?"
The ads, purchased on billboards, wallscapes and in newspapers, generated about $12 million in free publicity nationwide, including articles in Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the Seattle Times and the San Francisco Examiner. ABC affiliates in California also ran stories on the marketing efforts. Hollingsworth said he expects the same amount of national publicity to flow from the latest marketing effort.
"There's nothing delicate about this stuff. We're right there in their faces," Hollingsworth said. "But it works. Nevada is the only state that does these kinds of ads. Everyone else's ads have been very sweet and nice -- people running through meadows with flowers in slow motion. We're not there. We want new business."
Nevada's latest promotion may get some laughs, but it won't be a significant danger to the California economy, one economist said.
Any loss of jobs "is going to be marginal. The bigger threat is firms going offshore or to other states, jumping over Nevada," said Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.
Dozens of California companies have left for Nevada in recent years, but the hundreds of jobs lost represent only a fraction of California's huge economy. Nevada officials say 28 companies relocated to their state from California in the year that ended in June. But that was a significant chunk of the 77 total businesses the state's commission on economic development assisted last year.
Jeanie Ashe, director of marketing for the state commission, said the new ads might have a different look, but they carry a consistent theme.
"This is a more lighthearted approach, and it's definitely tongue-in-cheek," Ashe said. "But it has the same elements we've always promoted about doing business in Nevada: the lower utility rates, the lower workers' comp rates, the overall lower cost of doing business here. The core of the message is the same. It's how we go about getting attention that's different.
"California is our neighbor, and they're a good neighbor, but we're responding to what we're hearing from those businesses who are interested in being located elsewhere. We want people to think of Nevada as an alternative when they're trying to lower their cost of doing business."
California was more vulnerable to job raids when the energy crisis and a shaky economy exacerbated the political turmoil of the 2003 recall election.
Schwarzenegger argues that the economy has rebounded, with nearly 500,000 new jobs added to private-sector payrolls in the state since he took office in November 2003.
"We know where the bear is," said Mark Mosher of the California Commission for Jobs and Economic Growth. "He's visiting California's innovative companies, its world-class universities, its Nobel Prize winners, its research and development labs."
Worker compensation insurance and utilities remain costly in California, and companies frequently complain about heavy state regulation and taxes.
The California economy is "doing surprisingly well, even with what they throw at the business community in Sacramento," Kyser said, alluding to state regulation. Nevada officials are "just trolling for whatever they can get."
That trolling won't end with the missing mammals.
The Nevada Development Authority will begin a series of seminars around California this summer, deploying top Las Vegas businesspeople to the Golden State to meet with companies there and discuss the advantages of moving to Nevada.
The authority will also initiate its own ad campaign in March. Hollingsworth wouldn't divulge the ads' theme, but he noted they'd be launched in the state's capital of Sacramento.
