City Shout Outs

"Hey, Kansas City! You have hard water!"

A simple and blatant tactic for pandering to your audience is to simply state the location where they live. Live performers will often open their performance by saying, "Hello, [city name]!" Certain commercials will try to target specific cities by addressing the viewer as the city, regardless of whether they're a tourist or only live close to the city.

See also Listing Cities.

Examples of City Shout Outs include:

Advertising

• The advertising campaign for Zest Hard Water Soap. They basically had one template commercial and they rewrote it for each city being advertised to. It was quirky, but most probably expensive because of the customization.
• Another example are those Hidden Valley Ranch commercials set in "local" cities. Oddly enough, the commercial doesn't look like it was set in the city they say it was.
• A Southwest Airlines commercial has a band playing to a room full of screaming fans, and the lead singer ends the set "Thank you, Detroit!". The room falls silent, the fans all look at each other in confusion, and another band member turns to the lead singer and says "Detroit was last night". Cut to the "Wanna Get Away?" tag line of the commercial.

Magazines

• A Mad Magazine feature on boy bands (the same one as the Trope Namer for Cardiovascular Love) suggests to producers that boy bands can be made to look less formulaic than they are by allowing them to express a little of their "spontaneous side":

Exactly 43 minutes into your Friday night stage show, one member might yell, "Let me hear you scream, Miami!" But the next night, he should feel totally free to change this to "Let me hear you scream, Orlando!" At the 43-minute mark, of course; let's not go completely nuts. But that sort of freewheeling improvisation is what makes or breaks a live performance.

Music

• The Stealth Parody hip-hop song "I'm In Miami Bitch" has been reedited for various other cities: "I'm in Chicago Bitch," "I'm in LA Bitch" etc. Nothing changes except the city name.
  • For some reason, the same has been done to the chorus of Jay Z's "Empire State of Mind". Ignore the fact that the entire song is a love letter to New York City. Apparently, the listeners are supposed to believe that Hova thinks those things make our cities awesome, too.
  • Starship's "We Built This City" had a version recorded without the San Francisco-themed DJ patter, so that local DJs could insert their own shout outs.
• They Might Be Giants had a tour in which they wrote a song about each venue they visited and then performed the song at the venue. By all accounts, they were good songs, too! Darn musical geniuses.
• The Frank Sinatra song "My Kind Of Town" has a published footnote saying that "Any city name of three syllables can replace Chicago; such as Manhattan, Las Vegas, etc."
• The remix to "Welcome to Atlanta" by Ludacris and Jermaine Dupri featured P. Diddy, Snoop Dogg, and Murphy Lee raving about their hometowns as well (New York, Los Angeles, and St. Louis respectively). This song spawned a small meme among Hip Hop fans, adding verses about their hometowns if it wasn't one of the above.
• Happens in Drake's song "Fancy" with this line:

Atlanta/NY/LA/TO girls, let me see your hands
Wave 'em at them bitches hating on you with their friends
Girl you got it
Let 'em know that everything big
Nails done, hair done, everything did

• • Considering that he was born and grew up in TO, that's probably the original lyric.

Professional Wrestling

• This also tends to happen as a normal course in professional wrestling. WWE and TNA definitely tour. Mick Foley is well known for his Cheap Pops "right here in [name of town]!"

Recorded and Stand Up Comedy

• There's a joke about a British comedian on tour who always opens his act by shouting out the name of the town he's visiting, eg "Hello, Cardiff!". This usually goes down well, until he happens to play a Ladies' Night in Cowes, Isle of Wight.
• Back in the ancient 60's, 1968 to be exact, Pat Paulsen, a comedian who became popular on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, "ran" for president. He would fly into a town, get off the plane and give a speech which always included the sentence, "I've been all over the United States, and met all kinds of people, but the people of <Insert city> are the best in the country." Someone put together a video of him saying just that sentence in town after town. Picky, picky, picky!
• Michael Mcintyre's comedy roadshow had him open every episode with a referance to the current location being his favourite city in the world.
• In Monty Python at the Hollywood Bowl the straight man in the Nudge Nudge sketch claims his wife was born in Glendale (and gets a huge cheer for it).

Theatre

• In one of the Bottom Live stage shows, taped in Southend, Eddie claims to have been born in Southend. "Whyever did you leave?" cries Richie. "I found the railway station," replies Eddie. Later on during an ad-lib storm Rik Mayall drops out of character to say something along the lines of, "Let's hurry up and get back to the script or we'll never get out of fucking Southend!"
• In the Forbidden Broadway song "Ambition" (set to the opening number from Fiddler on the Roof), there's a line that on the cast album that goes, "But here in our little village of Manhattan, there are over 50,000 actors, all trying their best not to end up in Baltimore." When on tour, "Baltimore" usually gets changed to the town they are in.

Western Animation

• Parodied in The Simpsons episode "The Otto Show" when Spinal Tap has the name of the place they are in taped to the back of their instruments.
  • Discussed during the episode "How I Spent My Strummer Vacation":

Mick Jagger: And no matter where you are, you always say 'It's the wildest town in the whole damn world.
Chief Wiggum: So, when you said it in Springfield last year, you didn't mean it?
Jagger: (pausing) Yeah, sure I did, but only because Springfield really is the wildest town in the whole damn world!
(everyone cheers)