Everybody Loves LA + LA Tourism (Webby Award Nominee)
Webby-Award Nominated Campaign
Role: Social Media Manager / Strategist
Client: Los Angeles Tourism & Convention Board
Recognition: Webby Award Nominee – Social: Culture & Lifestyle
Scope: Narrative Strategy, Community-Led Growth, Cross-Platform Architecture
Platforms: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Weibo
The most common mistake a tourism brand makes is thinking it has a visibility problem when it actually has a credibility problem. Los Angeles didn't need more content: it needed to stop sounding like a tourism board and start sounding like the city.
The strategic move wasn't just to make authentic content. It was to figure out who already held the city's narrative credibility, and then hand them the microphone.
Insight
Los Angeles is one of the most documented cities on earth. Everyone has an image of it. The postcard version of LA was so dominant that it had become a cage. Real Angelenos didn't see themselves in it. And a new generation of travelers, who were tired of clichéd destinations, didn't find it interesting.
The insight was structural: the only way to make LA feel real was to stop being the one talking about it. Give the narrative to the people who actually inhabit it — the street artists, the hip-hop veterans, the neighborhood locals, the pet owners. Let the city speak for itself, and let the brand become the platform that makes that possible.
Once I framed it that way, every content decision followed from it. We were building more than just a social media presence: we were building an editorial infrastructure for the city's own voice.
Challenge
Los Angeles had a branding problem that more content couldn't solve. The digital presence was dominated by predictable tourism imagery — landmarks, sunsets, celebrity adjacency — that felt increasingly irrelevant to the travelers and locals it needed to reach.
The goal wasn't to grow the following. It was to change what the brand stood for — to move LA from a tourist stop to a cultural authority — and to do it in a way that felt genuinely earned, not manufactured.
Strategy:
The City as the Main Character
I approached the DiscoverLA social ecosystem as an editorial platform, not a marketing channel. The city was the protagonist. The brand was the editor.
This required three structural shifts:
From broadcaster to facilitator. The brand stopped speaking about LA and started creating conditions for LA to speak. User-generated content, neighborhood takeovers, and community partnerships weren't engagement tactics — they were a legitimacy strategy. Every piece of content that came from a real Angeleno rather than a brand account was an argument that this wasn't tourism marketing. It was cultural documentation.
From landmarks to layers. I redirected the content strategy away from just famous locations toward the cultural infrastructure underneath them — the underground culinary scene, the street art movement, the hip-hop geography of the city. The strategic intent was to give the audience access, not information. Anyone can Google the Hollywood Sign. Not everyone knows where rapper Nocando goes to find the real LA.
From international reach to local truth. I designed a dual-layer creator strategy that paired international voices for scale with hyper-local insiders for credibility. The combination was deliberate — reach without local truth sounds like advertising, and local truth without reach stays invisible. You need both, in the right ratio, for the right audience.
Execution: Editorial Infrastructure
at Scale
I led the creative direction and platform strategy across a multi-channel global presence — but the executional challenge wasn't volume. It was coherence. Publishing at scale across cultures, creators, and content types without losing the brand's emerging identity required constant editorial judgment.
Editorial rhythm. I developed recurring content series — including Travel Tuesdays and neighborhood deep-dives — that created a consistent publishing cadence while allowing genuine cultural responsiveness. The series format meant the brand had a recognizable shape even when the voices inside it were constantly changing.
Narrative stewardship. I oversaw all social copywriting and visual direction to ensure the brand's evolving voice — cool, inclusive, culturally literate — stayed consistent even as the content itself diversified. The hardest editorial job in community-led content isn't finding the stories. It's knowing which ones are on-brand without making everything feel filtered.
Cross-functional positioning. I worked across Digital and Editorial to establish social as the primary driver of global tourism initiatives — not a distribution channel for content made elsewhere, but the originating strategic layer that other channels followed.
Campaign Highlights
Four partnerships defined the approach in practice — each chosen for a specific strategic reason, not just cultural cachet.
This was the most strategically significant partnership in the program. Nocando isn't a lifestyle creator or a travel influencer — he's a foundational figure in LA's underground hip-hop scene, with the kind of subcultural authority that can't be purchased or manufactured. Partnering with him wasn't a content decision. It was a declaration.
The series took viewers through the Slauson Swap Meet, Amoeba Hollywood, and Fairfax Avenue — locations that don't appear in tourism guides precisely because they belong to a community that has never needed the tourism board's validation. By publishing this content under the DiscoverLA brand, we made an implicit argument: this city is bigger than its postcard version, and we're willing to step aside to prove it.
That argument — made through presence, not copy — is what changed the brand's cultural positioning more than any caption or campaign ever could.
Nocando's Hip-Hop Guide to LA: Cultural Gatekeeping as Brand Strategy
Slauson Swap Meet
Chosen specifically because it doesn't appear in any tourism guide. This is a community space that belongs to LA's hip-hop culture — not to its tourism brand. Featuring it was a signal about whose LA we were centering.
Amoeba Hollywood
A record store that locals treat as a cultural institution and tourists walk past without knowing what it is. The perfect illustration of the gap between the postcard version of LA and the lived one.
Fairfax Avenue
The streetwear and sneaker epicenter that shaped taste nationally — and that a conventional tourism board would never think to feature. Including it said more about the brand's cultural literacy than any caption could.
#LostInLA: Exploring LA’s Mural Scene with Tommy Lundberg
Working with photographer Tommy Lundberg, we built a series around LA's mural and street art scene — a cultural layer that exists everywhere in the city and appears nowhere in standard tourism content. The #LostInLA hashtag was a deliberate reframe: not "discover LA" as a tourist, but get lost in it as a local. The series gave the audience a permission structure to explore beyond the guidebook, and a visual language to share what they found.
Reimagining La La Land with Paperboyo
La La Land's global buzz created a narrow window to do something interesting with LA's cinematic identity. Rather than producing conventional tie-in content, we partnered with Paperboyo — whose signature cutout photography transforms familiar landmarks into something playful and unexpected — to reimagine the city's iconic locations. The strategic intent was to use a cultural moment to say something about the brand: that DiscoverLA was willing to be weird, self-aware, and internet-native rather than reverential and promotional.
Pet-Friendly LA with Emily Wang
This partnership is worth noting not for its cultural weight but for what it demonstrates about editorial range. Emily Wang's series with her dogs Kokoro and Chibi covered pet-friendly hotels, outdoor museums, and neighborhood spots — content that served a highly specific audience with genuine utility. The strategic lesson was that community-led content doesn't have to be countercultural to be credible. It just has to be real.
Results
By treating LA as a movement rather than a destination — and structurally building the brand around the city's own voices — we achieved results that conventional tourism content never could.
🏆 Webby Award Nomination — Finalist for excellence in Culture & Lifestyle, competing against global media organizations including VICE
📈 100% audience growth — Instagram scaled from 400K to 800K+ followers in under 24 months
📷 1M+ community contributions — #DiscoverLA became one of the most-used city tourism hashtags in the world
🌎 Perception shift — successfully moved LA's digital brand from Hollywood cliché to global cultural authority, as reflected in press coverage, partnership interest, and community engagement quality
The brand's most engaged content consistently came from voices we featured. When you build a platform instead of a campaign, the community does the work. My job was to hold the editorial vision that made it coherent.