We met in Wayne's office at City Hall.
My
Questions are in Bold:
"The
new program you presented has some bold plans regarding events. How will you
proceed with implementing the plan?"
"One at a time," Wayne
responded.
"I think creating a signature
Arts Festival is important. It's the type of thing you can use as a hook to get
international and domestic publicity for the City and focus on the arts that
are already here.
So I think that the art festival is
important for us to have. We really don't have an anchor arts festival. I think
that is a critical element.
When the Suncoasters approached us
about wanting to do a festival in the fall, I thought this was a perfect match
as they have successfully managed festivals in the past and the City itself
really isn’t a festival manager so a city-wide arts festival managed by the
Suncoasters was very appealing.
There would be a lot of artists
employed and a lot of special events put into the time frame of the festival
with ideas coming from the community or various arts districts to some type of
festival programming committee when the time comes for that.
We have done some things already,
sending someone to do the New York Travel Show for example and getting some
leads there, sending someone to Art Basel
to work the media. So we are moving in those directions to try to get some
contacts, to try to get some ink if you will. Too expose the travel Bloggers,
the writers and the travel editors to St. Petersburg.
So if we have this Arts Festival we
have a news hook. It's not just visit "St. Petersburg" its visit
"The St. Pete Arts Festival" and here is a ten day festival with 130
different things going.
In reality it's many of things we
are normally doing, but when you package them up and throw together everything
that is going on it is really impressive."
"In
regard to the Arts Festival, are you looking for a corporate sponsor or someone
to come in and be a part of the event," I asked?
"I think that would be great,
but it should be something we can do without that if sponsorship didn't happen.
It would be great if sponsorship did happen, it would be great to have multiple
sponsors, and I’m sure the Suncoasters will be looking into all possibilities,"
Wayne began.
"I do think something like this
event can be done with minimal effort and minimal sponsorships as we gather
everything that is going on here and package it together pushing it out through
a marketing and public relations, promotions, advertising effort using the City
Marketing department and really get people here for the event.
When I say the "event" it is everything
going on: what is American Stage
doing at that time, what's going on at the Mahaffey,
what's going on at the Dali, what's Florida CraftArt doing, what's Duncan McClellan doing, you package all of that
up with a couple of other mini Festivals. We are looking at doing a street art
Festival maybe that goes under the same umbrella, there is a reading Festival,
maybe we can push that into the event time period.
You are not spending a whole lot of
money on product development what you are doing is packaging what we already
have."
Wayne added, "There may be some
corporate CEO somewhere reading this and thinking, wow I need to look at this market.
Call us at 727-551-3250."
In
the next Post Wayne addresses a concern from City Council regarding how much
support is there in the arts community for this new approach
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