San Francisco hopes to combat ‘doom loop’ reputation with ads

San Francisco business leaders and billionaires are launching a flashy multimillion-dollar advertising campaign to combat the city’s declining reputation and draw more companies who may be turned off by its headline-making “doom loop, according to a report.

The Golden City has been facing surging crime, drug use and homelessness, forcing many major businesses to shutter — and even prompting one man to notoriously start a “Doom Loop Walking Tour” highlighting its urban decay.

The “It Starts Here” campaign will cover the city in advertisements featuring Bay Area companies like Apple, Pixar and Levi Strauss for November’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, Bloomberg reported.

The goal is to convince entrepreneurs to start their businesses in San Francisco and remind residents of what made it such an iconic city in the past.

“There’s a lot of people who want San Francisco to win,” Gap Inc. board member Bob Fisher, who is among the local leaders backing the ad campaign, told Bloomberg.

“Forget the doom loop, it’s the boom loop,” he said.

Business group Advance SF is leading the ad attack, which hopes to change public perception of the city that has been on its heels since the COVID-19 pandemic and plagued by crime and fleeing businesses.

Larry Baer, CEO of the San Francisco Giants and co-chair of Advance SF, told Bloomberg that the business community had “to come together and begin reinforcing a story that a lot of people understand about San Francisco, but has been lost in the discussion.”

A commercial published on Monday opens with a picturesque shot of thick fog enveloping the bay, followed by a number of other iconic sites like the Golden Gate Bridge.

A narrator touts its “inexplicable magic” and describes San Francisco as “a perfect collision of conditions  — raw habitat and rare humanity” and “where grit and guts meet brain power, optimism and openness.”

Such conditions, the commercial promises, spur a “restless itch to create things that are brilliantly new and different,” followed by shots of railroads, streetcars and companies like Uber, Apple and Google.

The commercial also boasts San Francisco’s cultural history of the Beatniks and Summer of Love and Golden State Warriors’ Steph Curry taking a jump shot.

Fish told Bloomberg he and others backing the plan understand that the campaign won’t fix the city’s problems, but they believe that the issues have been overblown in the press.

“The city has long had the benefit of not needing to talk much about itself,” Fisher said. His family has lived in San Francisco for six generations.

“Over the last year, the drumbeat of negative press just got to a point where I got to a personal breaking point,” he said.

San Francisco hired a new top tourism official in September to try and change its public perception. San Francisco Travel Association, the Golden City’s tourism and marketing bureau, hired Toronto’s former top Tourist official Scott Beck.

Beck said at the time his job is to reverse the “ongoing narrative about San Francisco as a monolithic experience when it’s clearly not.”