County Program to Sell Ads at Beach Rides Wave of Success

New concrete benches had barely stood a week at Malibu’s Surfrider Beach when angry surfers began calling the Los Angeles County Department of Beaches and Harbors, threatening vandalism.

The surfers were upset that the benches carried an advertising message and were installed in front of their favorite wall.

Dusty Brogan had the unlucky job of fielding those calls.

“They said, ‘I’m going to trash those benches,’ ” Brogan recalled. “I said, ‘Wait, wait! Those things cost $500 each. Where do you want them? We’ll move them.’ ”

Brogan, who heads a program to sell advertising space at county beaches, agreed to meet with the surfers’ representative at 7 a.m. one day last summer. She resolved the conflict by having the 1,800-pound benches relocated away from the graffiti-strewn wall.

“They like to sit on the sand next to the wall and lean their boards up against it,” said Brogan, 46. “There were other places on the beach that weren’t so sacred.”

The benches are part of a county program that allows companies, for a price, to place their names and logos on everything from tide charts and clocks to bike racks and garbage cans. The money helps pay for lifeguards, maintenance and youth programs.

Respecting the eccentricities of the beach culture is integral to Brogan’s job, yet most of her days center on more mainstream marketing tasks such as making a pitch to corporate executives or presenting proposals to county officials.

Since Brogan persuaded the county to let her take over the marketing program in 1989, it has raised $3 million in services and revenues for the department. Not bad for a former self-professed “bored San Pedro housewife,” whose first contact with county government began with a seasonal job at a beach parking lot in 1979.

Brogan moved up the county ladder. At first, she did the grunt work on the marketing program when it was run by a private consultant. Then she worked up the nerve to propose that the county run its own program and was put in charge of it. Now she works out of a trailer on a Marina del Rey dock.

The marketing successes at the beaches led the county Board of Supervisors to vote earlier this year to expand the program to other departments, which are developing plans based on the beach model. Recently, representatives of several other counties and cities have contacted Brogan for advice on starting similar programs, she said.

Brogan feels a kinship with the beach-lovers because she is one herself. A Phoenix native who spent years on the East Coast, she quickly moved to the beach from Beverly Hills, her first stop on the West Coast two decades ago.

“Beverly Hills wasn’t my kind of town,” she said.

Now she lives in a townhouse in Playa del Rey and walks on Dockweiler Beach nightly, striding by the fruits of her labor--a parasail company’s concrete benches and bike racks, the radio station’s garbage cans, the shoe company’s tidal information boards--as she dictates new ideas into a tape recorder.

She is obsessed with keeping the promotions free of graffiti. When she noticed that the bench on which she was sitting had been tagged with white paint, she began furiously scraping the paint off with a manicured nail.

“I call it the urban burden,” she said, shaking her head. “Some of these beaches really take a beating.”

Brogan’s personal relationship with the beaches serves as a barometer for ideas she and others suggest for the advertising program. Her two-member staff has similar affinities--both are former lifeguards, one of them an MBA who Rollerblades at the beach.

Before deciding on the low-slung, poured-concrete benches, for instance, she said she considered standard bus benches, but rejected them because she felt beach dwellers and users “would just hate them.”

When promoters of a violent, R-rated movie wanted to put an ad on the side of telephone boxes along the beach and bike paths, Brogan demurred. Too gory for the wholesome image of the beach that the department uses to woo advertisers, she decided.

Venice Beach: wholesome?

“Venice is a mixed bag,” Brogan said. “But look at Torrance Beach or Zuma Beach, places where kids are playing and whole families are having fun. . . . It’s the uncluttered, high-income market (advertisers) are looking for.”

Potential advertisers are sent a video that intersperses images of miles of beaches with close-ups of muscled lifeguards who, the video explains, are “strong, healthy, tanned and courageous.”

The county does not allow advertisers to tout their products too blatantly. Brogan rejected a shoe company’s proposal to add the slogan “Put something cool on your feet” to the tideboards it sponsors.

But more subtle forms of promotion get the nod. For instance, a Culver City chiropractor pays $500 for three months to get a message on the department’s call-in surf report, in which he advises people to “do some general stretching before surfing to prevent injuries and keep your spine aligned.”

The WAVE (FM-94.7) radio station paid about $200,000 this year, which provided 6,000 blue trash barrels and $50,000 for lifeguards and maintenance staff.

One of Brogan’s greatest challenges is walking the tightrope between slow-moving government and the fast-paced world of advertising.

In 1988, a surfwear company proposed creating a logo for the county lifeguards, which the county in turn could let the company use on a line of clothing. In return, the company offered to provide free uniforms and wet suits to lifeguards and a hefty cash donation to the county.

The county, however, needed state legislation to authorize use of the logo by the company, but that took two years. By then, Brogan said, the clothing company had been hit by the recession and lost interest.

The secret of success, she said, is “to get these deals through and get them approved before they start falling apart.”