by Max Marbut
Staff Writer
It’s been said that “any publicity is good publicity” but if you ask people who live in Oakland, Calif. or Binghamton, N.Y. they might have a different opinion. National exposure for acts of mayhem isn’t the sort of thing that makes chambers of commerce happy.
Jacksonville has lately been riding a wave of positive national exposure including Thursday’s Bravo cable television network “Top Chef Tour” stop at Hemming Plaza. Jacksonville is one of 20 cities that will host the touring show, joining top-tier locales like New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Dallas and Pittsburgh.
Why Jacksonville?
“Bravo TV called us from New York City. They found our Web site and learned about our Friday Market at Hemming Plaza,” said Downtown Vision, Inc. Director of Marketing Pamela Elms. “They told us one of the things they like to do is have the Top Chef Tour in conjunction with an existing food event.”
DVI and the City’s Office of Special Events immediately went into action to seize the opportunity for a new “Make a Scene Downtown” event. A conference call to the tour’s producers less than 24 hours after the first contact enabled the logistics to be worked out, including scheduling an extra day this week for the market (DVI) and providing traffic and crowd management (the City).
“We immediately saw it as a way to present Jacksonville to the national audience in a positive way,” said Elms. “In just the past several months, we’ve had both Presidential candidates and former President Bush here, American Idol came to Jacksonville and the city has been featured in two in-flight magazines.”
Fred Haug, Bravo Media Group’s project director for the Top Chef Tour, said he had a personal experience with the exposure on the airlines.
“I was on a Delta (Airlines) flight a few weeks ago. I picked up the magazine and I was reading all about Jacksonville,” he said.
With only 20 stops on the tour, Haug said choosing the group to join the major metropolitan cities was a complicated process.
“We looked at a lot of things. ‘Top Chef’ is top-rated in Florida and Jacksonville was a good fit because we could partner with the farmers’ market,” he said. “The buzz around the tour here has been bigger than in some of the larger markets.”
Haug also said the exposure for the city will continue even after the tour heads for its next stop in New Orleans.
“Jacksonville will be part of the chefs’ on-line video blog and there will be a section dedicated to the stop in Jacksonville on the Bravotv.com Web site,” he said.
People who work to promote Jacksonville as a destination also appreciate the value of positive image national exposure. The Top Chef Tour probably didn’t generate many room nights or much bed tax revenue, but the event and others like it are valuable assets, said Visit Jacksonville spokesperson Lyndsay Rossman.
“Jacksonville is a destination and national television exposure or being featured in an airline’s magazine shows our city is an important player in this country and that’s what makes people want to come here,” said Rossman. “It would be difficult to measure any direct economic impact from that kind of visibility but free positive exposure is priceless.”
Photo by Max Marbut
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