Category: Tourism

Huge Hole in Sidewalk at Pier Park

With 24 peices of art and over 15 artists, the Emerald Coast Street Painting Festival (aka Madonnaro 2008) held at Pier Park in Panama city Beach this weekend was a huge success.  There were artists from as far as California, but most were local to our area.

Signature artist, Tracy Stum returned this year to share her interactive talent with the crowds that often surrounded her performance.  I say performance, because all weekend, the artists could be viewed creating their work.  I have to say, it was one of the coolest events I’ve been to all year.  The energy of being outside, with beautiful weather all weekend, with all the people was amazing.

This was her second year to come to Bay County for this event.  Last year she did a painting of the Dalai Lama that actually looked like she was sitting next to him.  This year, she did a Alice in Wonderland piece where it actually looked like there was a huge hole in the ground with colorful cartoon mushrooms planted in the bottom.  The caps looked as though they were level with the pavement, it was amazing.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2267878&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1

Madonnaro 2008 – Street Painting Festival in Panama City Beach from Jason Koertge on Vimeo.

Jeanie Burns did a painting of a scene from Jack and the Beanstalk.  The detail was amazing, regardless of the rough and pitted surface.  The colors were vivid and the effect was amazing.

Ellen Killough, from the Visual Arts Center, painted a recreation of Lord Frederic Leighton’s Fisherman and the Siren.  The detail was amazing, the colors perfect, and the size was actually quite enormous.

Other paintings included an excavation site, beautiful parrots with an azalea, a portrait of Edgar Allen Poe, and the logo from the Panama City Beach Seafood Wine and Music Festival just to name a few.

My day at Pier Park – Madonnaro Street Painting Festival

I believe this is the first time I’ve spent almost all afternoon at Pier Park.  The weather was perfect, people were everywhere, kids were laughing, it was a great time.

Today and tomorrow is the Madonnaro Street Painting Festival, hosted by the Visual Arts Center of Panama City.  Local artists and a few from out of town gathered on Panama City Beach to create art that will inevitably wash away, only to be preserved in pictures and video.

The day started out cool and overcast, but around noon, I watched the clouds be pushed away by crystal clear blue sky.  The air warmed to nearly 80 degrees.  Artists shed layers as they crouched on their knees smoothing and blending fresh chalk with their hands.

Lunch time brought an original Viking Hot Dog.  Stuffed in a fresh baget with a hole in the middle the all natural dog had a crunchy skin, and perfect inside.  The flavor was exceptional, but the price for how it filled my belly was twice too much at $5. The cart was from Seaside, out here for the weekend.

As the day wore on, the artists knees and backs grew sore, but the paintings grew more vivid and elaborate.

Tracy Stums flew in from California to share her talent with The Beach.  Last year, she created an interactive piece of the Dali Lama that, when looked at from a specific angle, appeared to be sitting next to her.  This year, she is painting an Alice in Wonderland scene.  Other paintings include Jack and the Bean Stalk, Iron Man, and a dinosaur excavation site to name just a few.

The street painting festival brings out an interesting culture, something I was very glad to be a part of.  Who knows, maybe next year, I’ll paint something.

Last night rain washed away most of what was created yesterday, but tonight, all that threatens is cold, expected to get in the high 30’s tonight.  All afternoon, we could feel the temperature dropping, most likely a 25 degree change from this afternoon to 5 this evening.

Tomorrow, the artists will all return to finish off their paintings.  Provided we don’t get any rain, many will last for a couple weeks.

Madonnaro has begun!

This weekend’s street painting festival at Pier Park in Panama City Beach began yesterday with artists from around the county and around the country.  High school students started their paintings yesterday, despite the threat of rain, and the two signature artists are beginning their paintings as I write this.

As they cordoned off their square many of the artists spoke their concern of rain, as it threatened the entire festival this weekend.  Today is overcast with a chance of rain.  The temperature is a almost perfect, but a little chilly 65.

The artists will be out all day, painting in various spots around the main boardwalk area of Pier Park, and bring the kids, as there will be a special kids painting section.

The Modannaro Street Painting Festival is put on by the Visual Arts Center of Panama City.

Tracy Stum to Paint the Streets of Pier Park

This weekend, at the Madonnaro Street Painting Festival in Pier Park will feature returning artist Tracy Stum.  Tracy painted the portrait of the Dalai Lama that when looked at from a specific angle, it appears as though he is actually sitting next to Tracy.

You guys should all come out to Pier Park this weekend to see all the awesome art. Tracy will begin her painting, along with Jeanie Burns, on Friday, and everyone else begins painting on Saturday at 9 am.

Here is some of her other work.

Painting Streets of Pier Park

For the first time, Madonnaro 2008, Emerald Coast’s Street Painting Festival will be held at Pier Park on Panama City Beach.  Painting will be November 14 – 16 and is sponsored by the Visual Arts Center of Panama City.

Street painting has been popular all throughout Europe since the 16th century.  Street painters in Italy were known as madonnari because they often created pictures representing The Madonna, one of the central icons of Christianity.

Madonnari were nomad artists who traveled from town to town, festivity to festivity to cover the streets with their art.  Historically, using bits of broken roof tiles, charcoal and chalk, the artists would paint images, sometimes larger than life that would wash away at the first rain.  When the festivities were over, the artists and paintings would vanish.

Today, “street-artists” use varying shades of chalk to depict their creations and several forms of media, including digital photography, video and blogs to share their work with the world.

Be sure to support this unique form of art at Pier Park in this weekend.

Taste of the Beach at Pier Park

Pier Park played host to The Beach’s Taste of The Beach Friday evening.  With hundreds of wines to taste and 8 restaurants participating, a broad range of flavors wafted through the air.

“We expect 600 to 700 people here tonight,” said Paul Wohlford, VP of Sales and Marketing for the Resort Collection of Panama City Beach.

I’ve never been a good estimator of quantity, but I’d say if they hadn’t hit that mark, they sure were close.

Pier Park closed off the main boardwalk section between Hofbrau Beer Garden and Buffalo Wild Wings to place two tasting tents with a wide assortment of wine, cheeses, food and deserts.  Sponsors came from all of northwest Florida to participate, in addition to local Pier Park restaurants.

The restaurants that had a food sampling were Baja Grille, Margaritaville, Back Porch, Reggae J’s, Hofbrau Beer Garden, Buffalo Wild Wings, Longhorn Steak House, and Firefly.  All of the food was great, and many offered discount cards to dine at their restaurant during the off-season.

As people tasted, reggae music floated through the air.  The mood was pleasant and everyone seemed to be having a good time.

The schedule for the rest of the weekend:

  • Telluride Mountain Film Festival
    • Friday and Saturday night, November 7 & 8th, 2008
    • Mountain Film Festival celebrates the best in independent thinking – where adventure is celebrated, history is important, and people are passionate about what they believe.  It attracts an audience seeking a culturally rich, conversation-inspiring experience in which to discuss films, share ideas and be inspired, all under a dramatic canopy of stars.  Showtimes are 7 to 10 pm and gates open at 6 pm.  Tickets are $25 per person for one night, or $40 per person for two nights; kids 5 to 12 are 50% off, and free to children under 5.
  • Seeing Red Wine Festival
    • Saturday, November 8th, 2008, 1 – 5 pm
    • Join us for an intimate afternoon of wine, food and music in the tranquil beauty of Seaside, Florida.  As you explore, sample and expand your knowledge of the latest in trends in wine from aficionados who are willing to meet and educate you.  $100 per ticket.
  • Winemaker & Shaker’s Dinners
    • Saturday, November 8th, 2008, 6:30 – 8:00 pm
    • “Winemaker & Shaker’s” Dinners will be held in the area’s finest restaurants along the Northwest Florida Gulf Coast.  Celebrity vintners will be paired with a spectacular chef at each of these locations to create an unforgettable evening.  $150 per ticket.
  • Rosemary Jazz Brunch
    • Sunday, November 9th, 2008, 10 am – 1 pm
    • The Rosemary Jazz Brunch blends premium wines, gourmet food and Gulf Coast culture into a sophisticated, educational and entertaining event.  Brunch with champagne, light wines and the Green Hit Band on a tranquil day as you take in the sights of beautiful Rosemary Beach.  $50 per ticket.
  • Taste of The Beach & Charity Auction
    • Sunday, November 9th, 2008, 3 – 6 pm
    • Taste of The Beach & Charity Auction at the luxurious Hilton Sandestin Beach Golf Resort and Spa.  Guests will be treated to distinctive wines from internationally acclaimed vintners, the area’s top restaurants.  While wining and dining attendees will enjoy live music and the excitement of a silent auction.  The night will culminate with a high-energy and entertaining live auction that will include rare and distinctive wines, themed get-a-ways and other spectacular, one-of-a-kind items.  $150 per ticket.

Cruizin Hot Rods Roaring Through Panama City Beach

The monster motors are loud, very loud.  The 25 inch slicks on the back barely grip the pavement under the strain of 500 horses of power under some of the hoods of Panama City Beach’s visitors this weekend.

Robert “Rakes” Parish said that we’ll see over 3000 cars at the Emerald Coast Cruizin Classic Car Show tomorrow.  “You won’t be able to move, there will be cars lined up with only five feet apart filling up this entire field,” said Tommy with TCG Productions, the sound and light manager on site this weekend.

“We have people from all over, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kansas, Missouri, Texas, Illinois, everywhere to come to this show,” said Parish, “people come from all over to show off their hot rods.”

The hot rods are everywhere, and their owners, typically middle aged consumers with good incomes are filling up our condos, hotels and restaurants.  They are driving money into our economy during one of the slowest weekends of the year, and notably one of the most beautiful.

Many of these cars have 10’s of thousands of dollars invested in them with everything from custom engines, custom body work, to fully restored classics.

“Last year was a huge success with over 50 cars that sold at auction,” said Rap Peavy, owner of Big Boys Toys on Thomas Drive, across from the Navy Base, “this year, as of right now, we have over 80 cars registered.  We expect more to show up tomorrow.”

Show activities around the beach have been going on all week with tomorrow to be the huge show.  The gates open early in the morning and the action will be taking place all day.

I’ll be out there, be sure to say high if you see me.  This is a great event, and great for our area.  Local businesses, be sure to support this event, we need stuff like this to make it through our shoulder seasons.

See ya at the show!

Jennifer Barbee Takes the Cake – New Panama City Beach Web Site

In addition to talking about MTVu, today’s TDC meeting included presentations from the board’s top 3 web development companies that submitted their RFQ’s to build the CVB’s new web site for Panama City Beach.

The three included Miles Media, Jennifer Barbee Inc., and Simple View, in order of presentation.

If you subscribe to our Twitter page, you may have seen some opinions as the presentations took place, if not, well, you missed out.

First, I’d like to say, working in the digital media/marketing world for the last 3 years, I’ve consistently noticed particular trends.  Most of the time, the guys that can create brilliant back-end cms systems with tons of “coded” features including data collection, reports, functionality, automated processes, etc. tend to really lack on the creative end.  Their pretty pictures may look pretty to them, but to everyone else, they are pretty plain and not very visually stimulating.  This is good for some, but not for all.

Next, the agencies that are great graphic artists, that create very visually stimulating graphics using trendy, relevant and current design elements tend to lack on the back end capabilities.  The sites look good, but don’t do much.

The trick is to find an agency that is good at both, not good, but great, actually.  The agencies that are great at both are few and far between.  This observation was consistent with the presentations today.

The first group to present, Miles Media came out guns blazin, suits ‘a wearin.  Ok, not really, but they were all wearing suits.  Their presentation began with intros by none other than Roger Miles, himself.  They rotated what looked like a practiced and choreographed routine, sharing presentation points with the entire team of 3, plus Roger.

They began with credibility statements, explaining that they had doubled their revenue and more than tripled their client base in the last 5 years. Currently they have over 180 clients and $35 million in annual revenue.

They operate one of the largest travel web sites in the country, visitflorida.com, which fights Vegas for number 1 with regards to most visited in the tourism/travel industry during the peak season, and falls to around number 5 during the shoulder seasons.  They’ve never spent any money on any SEM efforts and have always focused on SEO.  SEM = search engine marketing, or paid placement; SEO = search engine optimization, or optimizing the site so that search engines will pick it up on crawls.  “Competitors spend millions annually on SEM, we spend nothing,” Roger Miles said.

I took a bunch of notes, but I’ll cut right to the chase.  Their creative was weak, their ideas were OK, just OK, and nothing in their presentation poped.  I think I said in one of my twitter updates, they were good, but not WOW.

Roger, I know you read pcbdaily, no hard feelings.  You guys do great work, just not what PCB is looking for right now.

I’ll skip Jennifer Barbee real quick and go to Simple View.  At first, the board thought Simple View had the lead, and I agreed.  They seemed to have the experience we wanted, the client list to back it up, and the capability to fulfill our creative marketing desires.  I think they blew it with their presentation, which was very dry, boring, and displayed their complete lack of creative talent.  They started the whole thing out with a 5 minute video that looked dated, poorly put together, boring, and entirely too long.  At first, I was able to tolerate the vid, but after about 2 minutes of the same music, no narration, and screen-shots and words flashing across, they lost me.  They started reviving me when they showed some of their web work, which some was pretty good, but I started dozing off with the “tech-talk” on how the back end cms system works, etc.  Their entire presentation seemed to be working up to a system that the TDC could take and make changes themselves, with the ability to create pages, new navigation menus, or new web initiatives.  This seemed like good flexibility, but everything seemed geared towards, “ok, we’re done, here ya go,” and then the vendor disappears.

All in all, the board decided they were NOT what they were looking for as they worried Panama City Beach might get lost in the middle of all of Simple View’s ‘big’ clients.

Last, but not least, Jennifer Barbee Inc. Their presentation was second, and I knew right away, they would probably be the best.  First off, their presentation was very graphically oriented, very fun to look at.  That captured my attention, I was ready to see what they could do on the back end.  It was very apparent, very quickly, that they were great graphic artists and could make very visually stimulating creative.  And, the more Jennifer spoke, the more impressed I was.

Jennifer started out as a software developer, and over the years morphed into web development and marketing.  As of two years ago, she had worked her way up to be (I think) one of the Presidents of USDM, an interactive marketing company, regarded to be one of the best in the destination and tourism industry.  Her separation from them was because she wanted to get back into something that was smaller, or a boutique.  She wanted to get back that intimacy that came with having only a few select clients.  She isn’t the only one that I’ve know to do that over the last couple of years. Sometimes “corporate” just gets too corporate.

One of the big concerns in the RFQ review process with Jennifer was her company size and age.  The marketing committee was concerned that maybe she was inexperienced or that her company didn’t have the resources to handle an account like Panama City Beach.  Turns out, this is exactly what ended up giving her the greatest value. She conveyed the feeling that we would be special and given personal, individual treatment.  Something the TDC very much liked.

Jennifer clearly demonstrated her knowledge of all the latest trends in the social media side with innovative ways to implement marketing initiatives across the web, not just on the Panama City Beach web site.  She mentioned not only the importance of up-to-date, fresh content, but the importance of distributing that content across the web using social media, link exchanges, paid bloggers, videos and more.

Something else that was cool was their idea of customizing site content based on user submitted information.  She showed an example of a visitor coming to a site, a brief survey may come up, and based on the results, the visitor is taken to a page that is specific to what that visitor may be looking for, with interactive capabilities that are tailored to him or her.

Jennifer spoke into her agency’s capability to make marketing recommendations based on varying environmental changes, i.e. economic downturn, etc., tailoring initiatives to best leverage what people may be looking for during these times.

At the end of the presentations, it was clear that Jennifer Barbee Inc. had the graphical talent to stay on top with the look and feel of the new site, and a strong back end knowledge to create a site that has tons of interactive capabilities.

The board was all in agreement, with the exception of Mr. Walsingham, that JBinc. was the right choice.

Even PanamaCityBeach.com’s Charles Mason commented at the end his agreement with the board – there’s your published confirmation Marty!

I was convinced that JBinc. was not just the best of the three, but the best for the job.  Congrats Jennifer!

TDC Approves working with MTVu for Spring Break

The Tourist Development Council approved moving forward with MTVu for promoting Spring Break 2009.  I guess at this point, it is too late to “go back to the drawing board.”

Here is the evolution of how it all went down.

The original MTVu proposal included a 10 day village with 8 concerts over 4 days, 300 30 second TV ad spots, 10 million online impressions, a database by which to collect user contact info (mobile numbers, email addresses, etc.), and a few more things.

The whole proposal was discussed during a marketing committee meeting and overall a motion was made to approve moving forward, but with the stipulation that the TDC wanted the price to be lowered to $200,000 (stemmed from what some believe as an effort to come up with less co-op money).

When MTVu heard about this, they weren’t that happy and came back with a proposal that was just more than half of their initial proposal for 20% less money.  Of course, that wasn’t gonna work for the TDC.  After calming MTVu down, Dan Rowe, et.al. was able to negotiate 250 30 second TV ad spots, 10 million online impressions, database collection, a 10 campus kick-off tour featuring Panama City Beach as a spring break vacation destination, featured premium placement on the MTVu hub page (what does that mean??), and a link back to the micro site (from where???).

Dan explained that some of the benefits of working with MTVu include that they are regulated by the FCC, they have a brand to protect, that they do NOT advertising any alcoholic products, will not publish any film/pictures of alcoholic related activity or drunk students, and that they are good for our image and our initiative to vacation responsibility.

The board stressed their desire to not spend more than $150,000, and that the rest MUST come from co-op sponsors.  Staff (Dan and co.) have so far received commitments for co-op in the amount of $50,500 and anticipates that number to grow as we come closer to spring break.  All additional funds generated will go first to operational costs associated (costs can be up to $90,000 above and beyond the $150,000 – someone correct me if I’m wrong here), then go to paying the TDC back for the initial $150,000 investment.

This year, compared to last year, there are actually three categories for co-op sponsors:

  • Lodging – hotels, condos, resorts, etc.
    • There will be two levels of sponsorship opportunities, premium and all the others.  Premium will be limited to 6 advertisers and will have premium placement on the main lodging page, and all the others will be on a page linked to through an “all offers”, or “all other offers” text or graphic link from the main lodging page.
  • Food/entertainment – restaurants, bars, clubs, etc. For this category, there are unlimited opportunities available, for premium and otherwise.  The premium sponsors will have the opportunity to have their specials, etc. broadcasted to the TDC database via text messages (that is supposed to be geo-targeted).
  • Retail/attractions – the new element (can’t beleive this never existed before), includes retails stores or services such as Victoria Secrets or California Cycles.  This category will have the same premium “text message” opportunity as the food/entertainment category.

There are a lot of cool things that can be done with text messaging marketing.  I’m not sure the geo-targeting aspects are all they are cracked up to be as they require to user to have an application up and running on their phone in order to receive messages, and I’m not sure that students will be walking around with their phones open and an app running, or if they’d even start the app in the first place.

Also, with doing just plain text message advertisements are still limited to 160 characters per messasge, which can get used up pretty quick.

Can this be done without MTVu, I’m sure of it.  However, at this point, what are the alternatives?  I don’t know, and neither does the TDC.  I’m sure they would be open to suggestions of anyone that could come in, set up a whole online marketing campaign with millions of impressions, put on a fairly large scale show with several concerts, incorporating a variety of web and tv posibilities and do it all for a package price.  Anyone?