Putting Pessimism on Hold

SAN FRANCISCO —  I don’t remember what I was watching. Maybe it was the news, the nightly rundown from Apocalypse California--economic chaos, riot politics, fresh blood, outbound U-Hauls. Or it might have been baseball, the Giants vs. Dodgers in a struggle to determine who becomes the sports page metaphor for statewide collapse. I’m sure it wasn’t “Happy Days.” I would have remembered such an easy piece of irony.

Anyway, the show was interrupted by a commercial I had not seen. The spot presented a montage of California, a series of slow, grainy shots, all artfully done, of sand dunes and pristine shorelines, bicyclists and tourists, hippies and hard hats. It jumped from a yoga class hanging upside down, to a proud old man posed on his bright green lawn, to a kayaker paddling through choppy Pacific waters.

Off camera, actress Susan Sarandon narrated in a calm, almost flat, voice: Perfection. Like nowhere else on Earth, Californians persist in believing it is achievable. And even though to the outside world we appear lucky just to survive, nowhere else is perfection pursued with such a vengeance. We work on the inside . And the outside . At Pacific Bell, we too believe ‘good enough’ isn’t.

Yes, another phone company commercial. What made this one interesting, though, was its message about California. At a time when so many of our politicians and business leaders keep yammering that California is a lost cause, here comes a big company with a megabuck campaign built on the premise that we just might survive after all. How unusual. How quaint.

The spots, created by the Foote, Cone & Belding agency here, began airing in June and will run through October. The creative director who produced them is of a strain of Californian often thought to be endangered--a young, talented professional who came from somewhere else and adopted the state as her own.

Michael Farnam arrived from Chicago two years ago with a common East Coast perception of Californians as strange, self-absorbed, humorless. For this sin, she was greeted upon arrival with a modest earthquake. Over time, she learned. She began to detect something deeper in Californians: “It’s the idea here that everyone expects things to get better. They have a belief that will happen. It’s the idea that when something goes wrong, that they can fix it. That is not the attitude you find in Chicago or Boston or Seattle. It’s different.”

Farnam sought to tap this California attitude with the Pac Bell ads. She relied less on market research than on instincts which told her that, despite a constant battering, most Californians would stick it out. She had not been living underground. She had watched the Oakland Hills fire burn to within three blocks of her home. She knew all about the drought and recession. And on the first day of filming in Los Angeles, the riots broke out.

She sensed early on that the cliched Madison Avenue view of California as all sunshine and blonde skaters would get laughed out of the house today. To maintain credibility the ads needed to be tempered with realism. So twists were applied. The ads depict, not the Golden Gate, but the Bay Bridge, a casualty of the 1989 quake. There is more fog in the spots than sunshine. The obligatory hard hat, a Pac Bell worker, walks among the Oakland fire rubble. The old man’s bright green lawn has just been painted. The kayaker is a paraplegic. Still, the tone remains optimistic, resilient: It’s just another day in California, the spots conclude. Tomorrow will be better.

Pac Bell, of course, had pragmatic incentive to push away from the gloom that envelops California. With deregulation, it faces new competition from national phone giants, and thus wants to project in a positive way its roots here. Also, fleeing to Arizona is not an option for a regional phone company.

What is most remarkable about this message of tempered hope is not that it comes from Pac Bell, but that it comes from Pac Bell alone. With only a few exceptions, our political and business leaders have been too busy writing off California as a failed proposition to suggest things can get better. This might be clever politics, a way to advance an agenda. It is not leadership.

Certainly, to argue that double-digit unemployment, natural disasters and urban unrest can be overcome with glossy advertising would be unrealistic. But it is equally unrealistic to insist California is sunk. This remains a young state of great beauty and untapped resources, capable of pulling through a bad season, of reinventing the dream so many people are convinced is dead. Tomorrow will be better. Count on it.