=20 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- This article was sent to you by someone who found it on SFGate. The original article can be found on SFGate.com here: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=3D/chronicle/archive/2004/02= /15/BAGV351FP81.DTL ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Sunday, February 15, 2004 (SF Chronicle) S.F. tries far-out sales pitch/Smugness dropped to woo Virgin USA Joan Ryan Do you remember the scene in "Funny Girl," when a young Fanny Brice, played by Barbra Streisand, is auditioning for the great Ziegfeld? She's dancing, she's belting out songs, she's smiling for all she's worth. She's working so furiously that her brilliance is nearly lost behind the odor of desperation. The scene flashed in my mind the other day as San Francisco staged an unusual, some say unprecedented, courting of Virgin USA, the new domestic branch of Virgin Atlantic. San Francisco International Airport is competing against Boston's Logan Airport and Washington, D.C.'s Dulles to persuade the airline to base its headquarters here. The seven execs from Virgin were feted at a swanky party at California legislator Jackie Speier's house early in the week. They were greeted at their hotel, at their limousines, on the street corners, everywhere they went, with a steady procession of characters -- from Santa Claus to surfers to drag queens -- wearing the company's trademark red. At a luncheon the following day at SFO's international terminal, cheerleaders in red met the execs at the door. Mayor Gavin Newsom was there in a red tie, handing the Virgin CEO a half-case of his PlumpJack wine. There was a Judy Garland impersonator in a plaid suit, red, of course, singing "San Francisco," and the Stanford chorus, and a custom CD in a goodie bag featuring every song ever written about our fair city. It was like watching the pope show a little leg. Not that I'm comparing San Francisco to the pope. But it must be said th= at San Francisco historically has been comfortable with the notions of infallibility and providence. To those who live here, no place is prettier, cooler or smarter than San Francisco. The city rose on the water's edge, some have presumed, not so it could establish thriving ports but so it could admire its own reflection. So San Francisco never needed to sell itself to outsiders. It was a city with red velvet ropes at the border, and you were made to feel lucky and grateful to get in the door. Yet there was the great city this week, dotting its cheeks with rouge to woo an airline that exists at the moment only on paper. The two-day marketing blitz, as creative and smart as it was, pointed up San Francisco's growing realization that its singular charm is not enough anymore to counterbalance the high cost of workers' compensation in California, the ragged men and women slumped outside department stores and cafes, the $500,000 fixer-upper homes, the uneven public schools, the 1.5 percent payroll tax. The famous San Francisco smugness is disappearing under a pile of statistics that say the city has lost 60,000 jobs in the past two years, that Silicon Valley lost 158,000 in the last three. Commercial vacancy rates have soared. Mission Bay, the mixed-use China Basin development, is still waiting to fill its offices with commercial tenants. "This city is no longer going to sit back and wait," Newsom told a gathering of businesspeople soon after he took office last month. "San Francisco is on the move." To that end, Newsom is establishing a marketing department in his office of economic development. For the first time ever, SFO hired a marketing company four months ago to help sell itself. And if the pitch to Virgin is any indication, San Francisco is taking the counterintuitive tact of attracting big business not by downplaying the city's antiestablishment spirit but also by emphasizing it. The airport's marketers used risque, edgy humor to make the case that San Francisco is as quirky and individualistic as Virgin and its owner, Richard Branson, are. Between pictures of Kerouac and Janis Joplin, Carol Doda and Father Guido Sarducci, Robert Mondavi and Nemo, the power-point presentation to the Virgin execs culminated in a photo illustration of Arnold Schwarzenegger carrying a wedding- dressed Branson above the caption, "California Takes a Virgin Bride!" The city that is known for snubbing business promised Virgin citywide promotions: Buildings from SBC Park to the Ferry Building, Union Square and Pier 39 would turn their lights red to mark Virgin's move to the city. The city promised to wrap buses and taxis in red and to mark the airline's first flight with a celebration in Union Square. It promised to have the governor declare California the Maverick State and name Branson the first Maverick of the Year. Just as the mayor's office and the airport have ramped up their marketin= g, San Francisco's Convention and Visitors Bureau is about to start an ambitious campaign to lure tourists back. Officials are careful to say they are not "re- creating the brand" of San Francisco. "It's about how to re-express it in a new way," said Laurie Armstrong, the bureau's vice president of public relations. In other words, we are still as special as we always were. It's just that outsiders seem to have forgotten. I'm not sure that's true. I think we're becoming aware we are not what we used to be. Worse, we're afraid others are aware, too. So we're singing and dancing, flashing a little shoulder. There's something both melancholy and hopeful about the city finally acknowledging that cable cars and cuisine and nonconformity are not enough anymore to keep the office buildings filled and the shops bustling. Maybe it means, after all these years, we're growing up. E-mail Joan Ryan at joanryan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx --------------------------= -------------------------------------------- Copyright 2004 SF Chronicle