Stars Are Out

The Greater Los Angeles Visitors and Convention Bureau on Tuesday unveiled a new advertising campaign featuring some familiar area residents to draw tourists and conventions to Southern California--but don’t expect to see your next-door neighbor.

Under the headline, “You can tell a lot about a place by the people who live there,” Joan Rivers, Bob Hope and Charlton Heston will appear in black-and-white print ads designed by the Los Angeles advertising firm of Davis, Johnson, Mogul & Colombatto.

“The ads feature one thing that makes Los Angeles truly unique--its citizens,” Executive Vice President James W. Hurst told about 600 people gathered at the bureau’s annual meeting last Tuesday. “We expect it will entice a lot of visitors to Los Angeles.”

Daryl Eagle, senior vice president of DJMC, said the agency was looking for something to set Los Angeles’ ads apart from those of other cities that all “take the most visual, the most impactful scenes that they can and put them in their ads.”

“The people who live in Los Angeles are known all over the world,” Eagle said, noting that the stars are not identified in the advertisements. The featured stars all donated their services to the nonprofit bureau, Hurst said.

Hurst said 1986 is shaping up as a strong tourism year for Southern California. Although tourism statistics aren’t available yet, visitor inquiries were up nearly 13% in the first eight months of the year, compared to the same period last year, he said.

“People are still frightened about tourism overseas and we don’t know what that’s going to do domestically,” Hurst said.

Airline traffic and numbers of visitors to tourist attractions have been up both locally and nationwide, but the apparent increased travel has not been reflected in hotel occupancy, he said. “People are staying with friends and relatives,” he said.