It's well established that Oakland is San Francisco's Brooklyn, right? Well, maybe not according to international Australian airline Qantas, which is excitedly marketing the other city by the Bay to its many customers as like San Francisco, but you know, edgier. "Introducing Oakland," a huge splash page on an Oakland feature reads, "the wild side of San Francisco."
This, likely, would have gone unnoticed by Oakland residents had an employee of Visit Oakland, a non-profit booster organization trying to increase tourism for the city, not posted the image to her Facebook page. The response was swift, reports CBS 5, and generally displeased.
“Oakland is magnificently Oakland," the channel reports Oakland City Councilmember Desley Brooks as writing in response, "not in the shadow of anything and not the comical ‘wild side.’ I didn’t and don’t approve of this marketing campaign."
Not so if you ask Qantas, which prints a stereotype-laden first-person narrative of one writer's "whirlwind 24-hour visit through the wilder corners of the city."
"Technically, Oakland is a city completely separate from San Francisco," the post helpfully begins, before noting that even though "for plenty of residents, the East Bay Area is just an outer suburb of SF, an easy commute from city jobs, gigs and restaurants," it excels at "breathing gnarly creative energy into the spare industrial landscape."
Qantas, for its part, doesn't even fly to OAK — so to visit San Francisco's "wild side," you'll fist have to book a ticket to SFO. How tame.
