Hd Digital Toast?
No sooner had Mayor Richard Riordan announced that the Los Angeles technology community would be henceforth referred to as “Digital Coast” than the L.A. bashers took aim.
The New York Times quoted a co-founder of the New York New Media Association as saying, “Already people are talking about ‘Digital Toast.'”
Very funny. Others were less harsh, but nonetheless skeptical that L.A.’s vast and diverse technology community can be galvanized by any one name, theme or marketing concept.
We concede they have a point. The San Jose-Santa Clara technology community took root years before anyone had ever heard of Silicon Valley and even today, that area thrives not because of the name but because of the infrastructure that’s been created over the years.
Would the entertainment community be any less entrenched in Los Angeles if it weren’t referred to as “Hollywood”?
And yet, the recent snickers over Digital Coast reflect a more fundamental marketing dilemma that local leaders in business and government can’t seem to shake.
The fact is that L.A. remains the place everyone loves to hate or at least make fun of. It’s a place that’s categorized as one gigantic stereotype earthquakes, mudslides, smog, actors take your pick.
Even New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani chose to take a few shots at L.A., calling it “a city on tape.”
That reality intrudes on this neat compartmentalization is usually beside the point. Many of the editors and writers within New York’s media circle simply don’t like our town, and their articles and headlines reflect such derision.
There was a time when little of this mattered. Johnny Carson could crack jokes about “beautiful downtown Burbank,” the Washington Post sniffed about “the land of fruits and nuts,” and Angelenos pretty much shrugged it all off. After all, ridicule is the sincerest form of flattery, and besides, L.A.’s economic success pretty much spoke for itself.
But the competitive pressures for attracting and retaining businesses are huge. Only recently has the area’s business community recognized the importance of joining forces for the common good and nowhere has that teamwork been more noticeable than in the technology sector.
L.A., for example, is becoming a major center of the burgeoning multimedia industry (as the Business Journal has been reporting). It far outdistances New York, both in numbers of firms and employees. The problem is that multimedia companies are generally too small and dispersed to get the kind of attention they would in New York, where most companies are located within a few blocks of each other (and not incidentally within a few blocks of mid-town Manhattan, where much of the national media is headquartered).
Ultimately, reality will win out over hype. Even now, the L.A. economy is light years ahead of almost every city in the country New York included and that dominance will become ever more obvious as a result of marketing efforts like the one that’s brought us “Digital Coast.”
Even The New Yorker magazine is taking note, devoting an entire double issue to California much of it focused on Los Angeles. As writer Alex Ross notes in the issue: “California’s trademark flashes of brilliance from ‘meteoric rise’ to ‘crash and burn’ add to the endless shimmer.”
That’s better than “Digital Toast” any day.
