Fort Bragg City Council Renews $180K Marketing Contract Despite Brouhaha Over AI-generated Fourth of July Flyer

Firm apologizes, said flyer was taken down within 2.5 hours

Entering Noyo Harbor from the ocean (Photo by Philip, courtesy of Flickr)

The flyer promoting Fort Bragg’s Fourth of July weekend — the biggest tourism weekend of the year — got the date wrong. It also featured a trail that doesn’t exist in Fort Bragg, a barbecue that never happened, and fireworks bursting over a harbor that isn’t Noyo Harbor. Not a single image in the flyer was real. Every element was generated by artificial intelligence, and every person who reviewed it — at the city’s marketing firm and at City Hall — missed the errors before it was posted to Facebook.

That flyer turned a routine consent-calendar contract renewal into more than 40 minutes of public criticism at the June 29 special City Council meeting. When it was over, the council voted 5–0 to renew Idea Cooperative’s marketing contract anyway — $180,000 a year through June 2027 — while pointing to a 10-day cancellation clause and a looming August decision about the future of the city’s entire tourism program.

“Every single person who looked at the flyer presenting the biggest weekend of our year, the 4th of July weekend, missed everything — the date, everything,” online commenter Jay McMartin-Rosenquist told the council, recounting a morning phone call with Idea Cooperative president and creative director Tom Kavanaugh. “Not only his employees, but also those at City Hall.” McMartin-Rosenquist suggested the firm owed the city an apology and a month’s refund.

The flyer was produced by a local subcontractor to the San Rafael-based firm — a woman who also sits on the Visit Fort Bragg committee and is paid $500 a month by Idea Cooperative, an arrangement Kavanaugh confirmed in an interview. Council Member Lindy Peters characterized the episode as “a human error” by someone who “knows a lot of people and does an excellent job typically at this particular task.”

In an interview with MendoLocal.News, Kavanaugh pledged to do better. “It is a mistake on the agency’s part that we take full responsibility for,” he said, describing it as a single post that ran only on Facebook for a total of 2.5 hours before coming down. He said it was the firm’s first use of artificial intelligence on Fort Bragg’s behalf. “Because of that, we should have given it an extra round of proofing before it went live,” he said.

Kavanaugh said the criticism has stung a little, and he defended his company’s four-year engagement with the city. He pointed to metrics showing that traffic to visitfortbraggca.com, the tourism website, has more than doubled, and that traffic during the winter shoulder season increased 135 percent. “We all work very hard for the city,” he said.

Kavanaugh also pointed out that the vast majority of the city’s contract with his firm goes “not into our pockets but into paid media” — the paid advertising that drives visitors to town. And he said the firm would strive to improve as a result of the snafu. “We know we can always get better.”

Residents were not easily mollified. “I don’t know why they would be using fake photos of a trail that doesn’t exist here,” Jenny Shattuck told the council, noting the image resembled Big Sur. “Posting fake fantasy images of places is false advertisement, in my opinion, and lying.” Shattuck urged the council to limit any renewal to two- to three-month terms.

“Taxpayer dollars were spent on promotional materials that included irrelevant dates and images that weren’t even of the Fort Bragg community,” Rachelle Sutherland, a lifelong resident, told the council. “That kind of oversight is unacceptable.”

Anthony Wells, who runs the Fort Bragg digital media agency Mendocino Drone, told the council the firm used to hire real local photographers — including him — before it turned to AI. “It’s hypocritical to say the talent isn’t here, but, hey, can we subcontract you?” he said.

Marc Tager, a Fort Bragg resident and founder of the ClickEthos marketing agency who has separately pursued marketing contracts with the city, attacked the campaign’s search performance. He said typing “Skunk Train” into a search engine returns Visit California, Visit Mendocino County, even Visit Willits — “and not even a sniff of Visit Fort Bragg. And the Skunk Train’s our biggest draw.”

The $180,000 comes from a 1% share of transient occupancy tax that voters dedicated to destination marketing in a 2016 advisory measure — roughly $240,000 to $250,000 a year, City Manager Isaac Whippy told the council, with the remainder funding events and shoulder-season programming. A 2024 request for proposals drew four submissions; a review panel that included Visit Fort Bragg committee members chose to continue with Idea Cooperative.

The renewal’s timing drew as much concern as the flyer. The Visit Fort Bragg committee heard a presentation from Jon Glidewell on June 15 laying out three alternative models — keeping the current arrangement, hiring city staff to run marketing directly, or spinning off a private destination marketing organization, possibly in partnership with Visit Mendocino. The committee made no decision and will revisit the question in August.

Council Member Tess Albin-Smith questioned approving a year-long contract in the middle of that reassessment. The 10-day termination clause — which lets the city exit with only that month’s costs — satisfied her and Mayor Jason Godeke. “It’s important that it be one that can be changed,” Godeke said.

Shattuck returned to the podium during the item discussion to argue the problem predates the flyer: no vetting of members of the Visit Fort Bragg committee and no one accountable when misinformation posts. “They just delete it,” she said.

Peters offered the night’s only levity: “We can only hope that a whole bunch of people saw that post and show up July 3rd and decide to stay an extra day in Fort Bragg, California, so they could see the fireworks on the fourth,” he said.

Vice Mayor Marcia Rafanan moved to approve the contract; Peters seconded. The vote was 5–0.