Long Beach Film Office – Advertising Campaign

Non-traditional advertising campaign for the Long Beach Film Office. In film and television, Long Beach has stood in for a myriad of locations – from Chicago to Miami to the vast reaches out outer space; sometimes it has even played itself. This campaign leverages the many faces that the city of Long Beach has put on in the past, and references just a few of the many productions that Long Beach has played host to. Running with the theme of Long Beach being a stand in for far-off locales, we devised a non-traditional campaign that sought to bring this capability of Long Beach to the eyes of filmmakers in the Los Angeles area. Perhaps a film or television production wants a location that looks like the harbor areas of Miami, or the suburbs of Chicago, or perhaps even wanted to use the industrial nature of the Long Beach shipyards themselves – this campaign brings that awareness to these key entertainment figures. We chose three major (and memorable) productions in which Long Beach has played a part – the TV crime drama CSI: Miami, John Hughes’s 1986 production Ferris Bueller’s Day Off starring Matthew Broderick, and the action packed thriller Gone in 60 Seconds starring Nicholas Cage – all of which have had major portions filmed in Long Beach. Working together with the Tribune Company, which owns many major newspapers across the country, we’ve created three fictitious newspaper front pages. Each front page represents the geographic area of the aforementioned film and television productions, and made them in the style of a Tribune Company publication: the South Florida Sun-Sentinel (CSI: Miami), the Chicago Tribune (Ferris Buller’s Day Off), and our own Los Angeles Times (Gone in 60 Seconds). The news stories on the top half these fake front pages relate directly to a pivotal theme or event in each production, while the bottom half is a reveal for the Long Beach Film Office. These fictitious newspapers would run for one day in the greater Los Angeles area, with one of the three front pages going to a separate region. Credit: Jack Curry and Julian Jones-Pittman.