As a rule, ReelChicago doesn’t go in for editorializing. There are times, however, when something provocative comes up that can’t be ignored. Like now.
Illinois Tourism, through JWT Chicago, its agency since 2004, continues, unchecked and unabated, to hire LA production companies for its television advertising.
Tourism/JWT still and again hired an LA company for a two-week shoot starting Sunday for a new package of Tourism commercials.
Ever since the first Illinois Tourism commissioner bought TV time, we have taken umbrage at how Tourism and most all of its agencies routinely award taxpayers’ money to LA companies, as if Chicago were Tombstone, Arizona and no production companies exited.
To wiggle out of “why not Chicago?” criticism, some years ago an Illinois production company had been blatantly set up to as a blatant front through which out-of-town, non-Illinois companies would be paid.
This way, Tourism could “honestly” defer criticism by pointing to the “local” company they had hired. “So what’s the beef?” they can shrug.
Part of the beef is, that while mostly local labor is employed, the taxable profits from the project wind up in another state. Common sense dictates that a state-funded agency would hire a registered state vendor so the vendor’s taxable profits would end up to benefit the state.
There would be no complaints, of course, if this irregular business had not been ongoing and unchecked for decades. For just as long, we have criticized Tourism’s blind eye to the talented services of local production companies.
The bigger shops, especially, boast lengthy rosters of acclaimed, award-winning directors that helm commercials for some of the world’s biggest brands.
If Chicago production houses are good enough to work for, say, P&G, McDonald’s, Samsung, Sony, BMW, Ford, Coca-Cola, Allstate, State Farm, GM, Kmart, Kraft, John Deere and the Illinois Lottery, to name a few, surely they must be sufficiently qualified to handle commercials for our own state.
Why not give them a try. It’s a win-win situation.
