Clean Laguna Summer Campaign

Laguna is one of the most visited stretches of coast in California, and the towns, beaches, trails, and neighborhoods feel the crushing impact every summer, all summer long. Most of the people who flood in aren't reckless. They're genuinely and devotedly attached to the place. They have a favorite beach, a favorite trail, a favorite taco stand. They call it their beach. Yet, whether they mean to or not, they leave behind an ocean of litter.

That love is real, and it's the City's most powerful asset when it comes to turning visitors into stewards. It doesn't require convincing them to care, the emotional investment is already there. What's been missing is leveraging that love for Laguna with a direct invitation to act on it, to use that personal connection and ownership for the greater good.

The insight wasn't about stopping people from being thoughtless, but about inspiring people to activate their love and sense of ownership.

The people of Laguna Beach carry a specific kind of civic pride, a sense that living here comes with an unspoken obligation to the place. They pick things up. They shop the local shops. They talk to their neighbors. We wanted the idea of being a local to be less of a zip-code status, and more of a practice.

The core conviction was that visitors don't want to be told what not to do. They want to be invited into something. Frame stewardship as aspiration, not obligation. Give people a behavior to adopt rather than a rule to follow. If you can make someone feel, even briefly, like they belong to Laguna rather than just visiting it, they'll treat it differently.

That's the idea behind Laguna Like a Local. Not a slogan. An invitation.

The campaign launched over Memorial Day weekend, the unofficial starting gate for Laguna's busiest season, with 72 high-visibility bin wraps installed across the city's beaches, parks, trails, and neighborhoods. Each bin became a small act of civic wit: a piece of the town speaking for itself, in a voice that was warm and wry rather than bureaucratic.

The master line, Laguna Like a Local, anchored everything. Beside it, one of 12 distinct messages rotated across the system, each one unique, specific, and designed to land with a shared smile before it landed with a point.

Vibrant pole banners greeted drivers from every direction of entry into the city, serving as the first impression before anyone reached the beach. A business partnership pact enrolls local merchants as co-stewards of the campaign, extending its reach into the storefronts and restaurants that visitors move through all day.

Future phases include a mural installation in partnership with Laguna College of Art + Design, blending the city's deep artistic heritage with the campaign's visual identity, proof that the work was designed to grow.

Clean Laguna didn't come with a media buy or a performance dashboard. It came with bins, banners, and a message written in the voice of a town that knows its own worth.

The results weren't tracked in clicks. They were felt in the community. The bins became a talking point. The solution was now as out in the open as the problem was, and its relevance traveled on its own.

When a city's public infrastructure makes people feel something; pride, belonging, a little humor about a completely mundane act, that's not a soft outcome. That's the whole point. The metric that matters most is a community that feels heard, and a place that feels cared for. Clean Laguna delivered both.

Clean Laguna is one expression of a larger stewardship platform P&M has been developing with the City and Visit Laguna Beach, one that connects environment, culture, and heritage into a coherent civic identity for one of California's most distinctive communities. The bins are one expression of something larger: a long-term effort to shift how visitors relate to Laguna Beach, from guests who consume it to stewards who protect it.