Ahmanson’s ‘Boss’ Misses Leap of Support By JACQUELINE FOX Staff Reporter Washington Mutual Bank officials say a recent string of ads in the Los Angeles Times featuring a frog known as “The Boss” that may have cost as much as $400,000 was intended to dispel misconceptions that the proposed 3,050-home Ahmanson Ranch would threaten animal species or the environment. But advertising industry experts say the public, especially that part of it opposed to the Ahmanson Ranch project, is far too entrenched in its positions and sophisticated to be swayed by the ads, which incorporate an oft-used strategy that tries to show a softer, folksier side of corporate America to sell a controversial project or product. They also suggested that the ads point out the effectiveness of the opposition’s public relations campaign one fueled by a fervent group of environmentalists and a hefty dose of star power, including Hollywood heavy hitters like actor and producer Rob Reiner and “The West Wing’s” Martin Sheen. Ahmanson’s full-page ads pedestal the rare California red-legged frog whose habitat, biologists say, would be threatened by the project and tout Ahmanson Ranch as a “digital village” where “the automobile will take a back seat.” Washington Mutual spokesman Tim McGarry said the ads were a follow-up to a similar campaign launched by his company in September. He declined to say how much the ads cost or who is running the campaign. However, online rate cards for the L.A. Times put the price somewhere in the $65,000- to $80,000-a-day category. The ads ran for five days during the week of Feb. 10, the same week an environmental study was released that showed, with safeguards in place, threats to the frog and the endangered San Fernando Valley Spineflower could be mitigated. The study was ordered in 1999 after the two species were discovered on the property. The findings, said McGarry, indicate Ahmanson would possibly be able to break ground sometime in 2003. “I’m going to let the ads speak for themselves,” he said. “I believe that our project is outstanding for the kinds of environmental programs that it has to offer. Now you can assume that because we are a large company there is some insincerity there, but Ahmanson Ranch is going to be a community for 3,000 California families.” But Martin Cooper of Cooper Communications in Woodland Hills said the ads attempt to rely on an old strategy in the business that aims to present big corporations as responsible and compassionate corporate neighbors. California Federal Bank, for example, has enlisted “ordinary guy” Elvis Schmiedekamp as a company spokesman and State Farm Insurance uses the colloquial “Like a Good Neighbor” tagline in its ads. Just days after the Ahmanson ads ran, Hewlett-Packard Co.’s “Flip-Flop” ads appeared in several national papers, including the Times, which attempt to present H-P as a concerned corporate conglomerate despite widespread opposition, even among employees, to its acquisition of Houston-based Compaq Computer Corp. “This is certainly not a new trend,” said Cooper. “If you go back 20 or 30 years you will see that big business began early on to find ways to counteract negative publicity with an ‘it’s all of us plain folks together’ strategy. But my personal opinion is the public isn’t fooled and much more creativity and honesty is going to have to be involved.” Cooper suggested that Ahmanson would have done better to simply bullet-point the pros and cons of its project and let readers draw their own conclusions. “Look, Ahmanson Ranch isn’t just about us plain folks,” Cooper said. “If there are issues of concern, then why not go out and buy an ad saying here are the issues and address them in a serious way that gives me or the reader both information and a point of view?” But even that approach might not work after years of lawsuits and a well-organized opposition in place, said Julie Gertler, president of Los Angeles-based Consensus Planning Group. “This project has been so polarized for so long that it will be very hard to move opinion because it’s pretty hard to move people late in the game,” said Gertler. Her firm works to build community support for controversial projects, including the highly contested land use plan for Los Angeles Pierce College. “From time to time recently, development projects have been using these kinds of campaigns and they can reach people, but it’s pretty hard to believe that they could reach people who don’t already care one way or another,” Gertler said. “I think this is a really tough situation where the sides have hardened and it’s my experience that big paid ads rarely move public opinion around.” Rally to Save Ahmanson Ranch launched a series of radio spots in January opposing the project. It was the group’s first PR campaign since it formed late last year. According to Chad Griffin, the group’s campaign manager, the radio spots had two aims: increase awareness of the project and reveal Seattle-based Washington Mutual Bank, Ahmanson’s parent company, as the true power and financial base behind the project. “If you notice in our campaign, we never mention the Ahmanson Land Co.,” said Griffin. “We mention WAMU because we think they continue to hide behind Ahmanson to present their project to the public, and we see that as very misleading.” Not surprisingly, Griffin called the Ahmanson ads “ineffective.” Like McGarry, he too declined to say how much his group’s campaign cost, but indicated this could be the beginning of a long and costly public relations war between the two camps. Griffin said the recent environmental study fails to address the impact of increased traffic flow in the West Valley and Ahmanson’s ads were a transparent attempt to deflect criticism away from that particular issue. He said future ads by his group would push for a new environmental study that includes traffic mitigation plans. John Buse, senior staff attorney for the Ventura-based Environmental Defense Center, which also opposes the project, said he viewed the Ahmanson campaign as a sign of the company’s weakened position in the community. “I think the ads illustrate how effective the opposition’s campaign is,” said Buse. “When a developer starts speaking about how beneficial a project may be for the environment, I think people may start thinking that it may not be.” McGarry declined to say how effective the campaign was, only that it generated increased traffic on the company Web site. “I think we are conveying attributes of the project with accuracy and interest in a way that will garner reader interest,” McGarry said. “We are very pleased with the responses we’ve gotten.”