Billboards Bring San Diego Message That Pittsburgh Is Tops

Pittsburgh?

The most livable city?

That’s what San Diegans are being told in a message carried by 15 billboards throughout San Diego County.

The billboards have baffled some members of the San Diego Convention and Visitors Bureau (ConVis).

“Why would someone place a billboard for Pittsburgh in San Diego, a vacation capital, in the middle of summer? It doesn’t make sense,” said Shirley Hulett, ConVis’s public relations manager.

But the Greater Pittsburgh Convention and Visitors Bureau hopes the advertising campaign will make dollars and sense.

The billboard advertisements, which are also in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Boston and other cities, stand as a reminder to other urban dwellers that, of 329 major U.S. cities, Pittsburgh--a city once stereotyped by soot-spewing smokestacks and polluted rivers --was named the nation’s best all-around city in a survey earlier this year.

The authors of Rand McNally’s “Places Rated Almanac” gave Pittsburgh the top ranking based on nine criteria including safety from crime, climate, arts and entertainment, recreation, transportation and the economy.

San Diego, which promotes itself as “America’s Finest City,” ranked 28th in the Rand McNally study because, according to its authors, the city’s housing costs, health care facilities, crime rate and education system pulled its rating down.

But many of the criteria would seem to be of little concern to vacationers.

“How many times do you look for houses while on vacation?” Hulett said.

But that hasn’t deterred the Greater Pittsburgh Convention and Visitors Bureau from placing 290 billboards in major cities around the country.

“The ranking is the best thing that’s ever happened to us (Pittsburgh),” said Michelle Mancini, director of marketing for the Pittsburgh bureau.

“Everybody’s got to capitalize on something, whether it be weather or, in our case, a comfortable quality of life.”

Pittsburgh’s boosters hope this quality of life will lure San Diegans from their sunny climate to the Allegheny Mountains, where Pittsburgh rests at the spot where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers meet to form the Ohio River.

Fat chance, says Terry Cahill, ConVis’ marketing director.

Pittsburgh has to compete with San Diego and other vacation heavyweights like Florida, the Rockies and the rest of Southern California.

“Now, where would you vacation?” Cahill asked.

While San Diego ConVis employees chuckle over the Pittsburgh billboards, their Pittsburgh counterparts are poking fun at San Diego’s multimedia tourist promotion road show, which includes a 10-minute aerobic dance skit and hors d’oeuvres of fresh fruit and juices.

Tourism is big business. In fact it is San Diego’s third-largest industry after manufacturing and defense, and in 1984 it produced a record $2.09 billion in tourist spending.

Pittsburgh can only hope to reach these figures, Mancini said.

Rankings such as the Rand McNally “Places Rated Almanac” have marginal impact on the tourist industry, Cahill said.

“If the (advertising) boards are still there in October or November, we’ll pass them and have a little chuckle,” Cahill said. “If I lived in Chicago and it was the dead of winter, all things considered, I doubt I’d choose to vacation in Pittsburgh.”