Silicon Valley, meet the Digital Coast. Los Angeles may have borne the brunt of high-tech industry monikers like "Siliwood" and "Silicon Beach," but the companies that work in the region still take themselves seriously. Today, Mayor Richard Riordan and his new media roundtable launched a marketing campaign to name the region "Digital Coast," in the hopes of gaining both respect and credibility.
"We're putting a stake in the ground and breathing soul and credibility into the name and definition of that community," says Kevin Wall, CEO of BoxTop and one of the group that picked the name. "Certainly people who work here take [Los Angeles new media] seriously, but there are perception problems outside the region, especially with the press."
Mayor Riordan has long pushed new media in Los Angeles, in part by putting together a roundtable of industry heads. However, his public attestments that "Los Angeles is home of Internet" (a direct quote from a speech made last week at Networked Entertainment World) often show a lack of understanding of the medium.
Today, he proudly introduced the new "Digital Coast" moniker. Riordan said, "Silicon Valley, Route 128, Silicon Alley, Multimedia Gulch - they aren't very exciting names. I actually thought Silicon Valley was where women went to get fixed. But because of excellence and working together, Silicon Valley is magical."
The name that's intended to compete with the magic of Silicon Valley was picked by the 30 members of Riordan's roundtable, though they recruited ideas off the BoxTop site from other companies and educators in the area. Though Kevin Wall recognized the contrived nature of the "nickname", he pointed out that the name Digital Coast was recommended by almost all of the contributors.
Explains Wall, "In LA, we really feel that the 'coast' embodies a lot of what people around the world think of Los Angeles, and 'digital' embraced a lot of the different industries in this area," such as software, Internet, aerospace, bandwidth, and multimedia companies.
A common theme of today's announcement was the belief that Los Angeles is more important in the technology industry than it's given credit for. While Yahoo Internet Life recently ranked Los Angeles as merely the "16th Most Wired" city in the US, don't bring up that fact to the Angelenos, who snorted and called the allegation ridiculous. Wall asserts that the Yahoo study is biased, and that Los Angeles is at least the second or third most wired city - and they're commissioning a study to prove it themselves. Riordan announced that LA's multimedia industry "far exceeds the Bay Area and New York put together."
Unlike Silicon Valley or Alley, Digital Coast is being turned into an official brand. The name has been trademarked as a nonprofit organization by Riordan's roundtable, a logo and Web site are being put together, and local companies will be encouraged to put the logo on their Web sites and letterhead. Then the marketing machine will kick in, as the Digital Coast companies utilize Hollywood's greatest talent: self-promotion.
"Silicon Valley took 15 years to become a widely accepted idea or concept," says Wall. "Our goal is to do it in a smaller period of time, and we have a lot of the best marketing companies in the world here."
