marketing downtown tampa
tommy permalink | categories: business, channelside, development, downtown, marketing, neighborhood, quality of life, tampaby tommy @ 2:42 pm
While on the set of Flashpoint, I spoke to Christine Burdick about the Tampa Downtown Partnership’s marketing efforts and offered my opinion that the Partnership should put more money into marketing the downtown area and their neighborhoods. But I was wrong about that. They already put plenty of money into marketing, they just don’t get much visible bang for the buck.
Here’s the opening text from Tampa Downtown Partnership Marketing page:
Creating and image and identity for Tampa’s Downtown as one of the region’s most vibrant, active and up and coming neighborhoods and then communicating this message effectively is a major role of the Partnership. The Partnership’s marketing, business development and public relations role involves informing the local media, the downtown workforce, visitors and residents about downtown amenities and happenings to effectively market downtown as a destination. Evidence of this message reaching its intended audience is becoming more and more apparent in the growing trend to live downtown, be seen in a downtown restaurant, work for company located downtown and attend downtown events and festivals.
And there’s the problem. The Partnership’s marketing and public relations role is specifically tied to business development. The vast majority of TDP marketing goes into convincing builders to build, and people to move here. But they are missing a great opportunity. What about the 1,000 people who already live downtown? What about the 66,000 that work in downtown? What about the 80,000 people that live within 3 miles of downtown? They are all but ignored.
Oh, their 2007 list of marketing achievements brag of 19 “major” accomplishments, only six of which are directed at getting potential visitors to come downtown now.
- A new monthly evening concert series – Downtown Alive after Five – was launched. The focus is to attract people downtown in order to explore restaurants, retailers and cultural venues open in the evening.
- Focusing on downtown residents, the creation of a new Web site – www.hilifetampa.com – began to be constructed. It is designed to help residents become more acclimated to the community.
- A new welcome kit for residents was created. The kit contains information about the Special Services District, restaurants, retailers and area attractions.
- Through a new partnership with the Tampa Bay Lightning Foundation, a children’s book titled “Thunderbug’s Street Hockey Tour Downtown Tampa” has begun. The book will highlight fun places children in 4th and 5th grade can take their families in downtown. It will be released in the 2007-2008 school year.
- Tampa’s Downtown Guide Book 2007 continued to be a successful downtown marketing tool to workers, residents and visitors. For the first time ever, the book began to be updated every 6 months.
- The Partnership’s three electronic publications - Monday Morning Memo, Weekly What’s Happenings and InTown Tampa – were increasingly in demand over the previous year and subscriptions to the publications continued to increase.
At least six are in the right direction. But are these efforts working? I want to hear from you.
You are a potential visitor to downtown Tampa. How many of the above six initiatives were you aware of before today? Which of the six have convinced you to visit downtown? For those of you who did come downtown for a Downtown Partnership event, how was your experience, and was it as you expected it would be? Let us know here, and feel free to offer any other suggestions.
Tags: business, development, downtown, events, marketing, tampa, Tampa downtown partnership, visitors
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January 10th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
“Creating an image and identity for Tampa’s Downtown as one of the region’s most vibrant, active and up and coming neighborhoods”.
What “region” do they refer to?
Port Tampa and Tampa Heights?
The Partnership’s marketing, business development and public relations role involves “keeping up the hype” no matter what a glance out the storefront might tell em’.
If the Partnership actually gave a flip about “the 1,000 people who already live downtown, or the 66,000 that work in downtown, or the 80,000 people that live within 3 miles of downtown” they would have conducted a public charrette (can they spell it?) with the best planning team they could find (and not necessarily from Tampa) to create a viable comprehensive master plan and form-based code for the downtown area, and that downtown plan would have included Ybor and Channelside! Instead the Partnership spent a pittance and hired a lackluster local planning team to create a pitiful master plan that encompasses a couple of blocks and currently collects dust. Public input consisted of inviting local developers to an unveiling to look at the plans and “get in early on the action”.
The Partnership’s accomplishments amount to siphoning funds to local yokels, a web site, various pointless brunches with Teco or some other local corporate power player, and a welcome kit.
Meanwhile, the character of Channelside has been destroyed after the “real” industrial loft buildings from the 1920s were torn down to build the “faux” ones. And why in all of Channelside isn’t there a grocery store or sizable retail on the ground floors of all those nifty condos? Because when it came time to implementing a master plan and code for Channelside that would have dictated it, it was already too late as the developers who owned the land were already in the “mindless condo planning stage” and didn’t want a new plan or code telling them they had to build anything more difficult, or community oriented; true vertical mixed-use development being far, far beyond them.
The type of progress the TBP encourages is merely the same old, same old.
January 11th, 2008 at 7:09 am
Everyone knows good downtowns are built on one thing and one thing alone…. a seedy gay bar.
step 1: seedy gay bar moves in and homos go there to get blown “on the down-low”.
step 2. respectable gay bar moves in and homos go there for drinks
step 3: homos start buying property close to the gay bar so they don’t get DUI’s driving home
step 4: Housing prices go up and the breeders move in with children.
It’s not rocket science.
January 11th, 2008 at 10:24 am
LOL Tom…so true.
Only 1,000 people live downtown? Did they count the homeless?
January 11th, 2008 at 12:00 pm
And as Tom perfectly illustrates above, there is a also a certain ignorance and rusticity to our region that allows do-nothing groups like the TBP to thrive. Case in point, the retro term “homo”….which I haven’t heard since the third grade.
January 11th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
people go downtown when there is a real reason, not an artificial one. tampa’s downtown achieved that critical mass about 75 years ago, and then lost it about 45 years ago. look at the old pictures. downtown was teeming with life. why? that’s where everything was, i.e., retail, restaurants and entertainment. you can have all the yuppy mixers you want at the ‘art museum,’ but that won’t bring em back downtown. there’s a lot more work to do.
January 11th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Anonamous, I am a HOMO and call myself thus. BIG FLAMING HOMO… that’s me.
As to being “ignorant”, Yes, there are many things to which i’m ignorant. However, Gay Culture and it’s under-representation in American life is not one of them. We don’t get credit for anything. We cleaned up Old Northeast in St. Pete… now you can’t touch a house down there for under 500k. We’re cleaning up Kenwood and housing prices went from 75k eight years ago to 150k -200kish now. You want downtown tampa inhabited, go to the guy who owns georgie’s alabi and have him open a bar close to the tampa theater. Then sit back and watch the area turn around.
January 11th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
p.s. if you want a good education in how things like this change, read THE TIPPING POINT by Malcom Gladwell… you can find it on amazon.
January 12th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Nice one Tom! Is that what happened with Seminole Heights? Also, is it hate speech to call you an IDIOT?
January 13th, 2008 at 9:47 am
There’s already more than one gay bar just north of I-275. What sort of radius of influence can we expect from these epicenters of culture, Tom?
January 13th, 2008 at 9:53 am
Sorry, on a completely different, but related subject:
“Hybrid Car of the Future”
http://www.yahoo.com/s/781790
January 13th, 2008 at 9:56 am
Tom:
Who cares? The discussion was not about your sexuality.
January 14th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
Too bad, I was hoping to see more first hand experiences with the Downtown Tampa Partnership here.