 |
||||||||
 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
Agency envisions Super sculpture
By MARK ALBRIGHT © St. Petersburg Times, published November 22, 2000 Rather than fork over a couple million dollars for a Super Bowl TV commercial, Pinellas County tourist marketers will spend $623,000 to build a beachfront photo op for hordes of out-of-town media drawn to the NFL championship game in Tampa. The St. Petersburg/Clearwater Area Convention and Visitors Bureau has hired an Orlando theme park event planner to build the world's tallest sand sculpture at the county's Sand Key Park in Clearwater. About a third of the bill will be for trucking 3,000 tons of sand 80 miles to the beach from a mine near Lake Wales to create the massive sculpture. After 10 days of sculpting, the sand castle will remain intact for five days of Super Bowl hoopla before it's bulldozed. "We regard sand sculpting as an art form akin to performance art rather than a permanent structure," said Mark Mason, whose Sarasota company Team Sandtastic, has enough ongoing sand castle work to keep three sculptors working year-round. Pinellas marketers are convinced a football gridiron outfitted with monumental-size football helmets on a beach will prove an irresistible backdrop for visiting TV crews. The opposing Super Bowl teams will be represented by twin, 30-foot-tall versions of their helmets flanking a sculpture of the Lombardi Trophy that goes to the Super Bowl winner. Twenty-nine 8-foot-tall helmets representing the other NFL teams will cover the field. All of it -- from the yard markers to the chin straps -- will be carved from packed sand. "It is a lot of money, but you have to look at this as a media buy," said Carole Ketterhagen, director of the convention and visitors bureau, which is picking up the bill with proceeds from a tax on hotel bills. "This is going to be a huge production for a huge worldwide event." The primary audience will be TV crews Pinellas hopes to woo west to the beaches just as the winter tourist season is about to begin. With an estimated 3,000 media people expected to cover the Super Bowl, Pinellas marketers think plenty of them will use the sand castle as a backdrop for their week of reports on pregame hype. The bureau's ad agency, Yesawich Pepperdine and Brown, estimates the publicity value at about $6.3-million. That's what the bureau would have had to pay for the TV time it expects to get from news and sports shows. Using a big media event for the Super Bowl is a major departure for local tourist promoters. Criticized for spending more than 10 percent of their annual marketing budget on a single Super Bowl TV ad for the 1984 Tampa Super Bowl, Pinellas chose to sit out the 1991 game in Tampa. Instead, they advertised hotel room availability in selected markets. That was because during the 1984 Super Bowl cold weather, overcast skies and inflated expectations of crowds of Super Bowl hangers-on put a damper on many events and left many budget-price hotels with empty rooms. This time, promoters are promising more community events than the 1991 Super Bowl brought to the region. The bureau also is looking for corporate sponsors to share some of the $623,000 sand castle bill, which otherwise would be paid for completely from the bureau's $9.5-million annual marketing budget. The bureau expects the sand castle to become an overnight sensation that will draw about 25,000 visitors during its five-day run that begins Jan. 24. The park has 700 parking spaces and the county has agreed to let visitors park on the grass there for the event. "We don't think there will be a big traffic problem," Ketterhagen said. Huge sand-castle events can be big draws, however. Treasure Island has refused to allow any more on its beach after two huge sand castles built there in the mid-1980s jammed city streets nightly for two weeks. At Sand Key, planners will use colored theatrical lighting to jazz up the look of natural sand, including 4,000-watt spotlights aimed heavenward from the team helmet sculptures. There will be a nightly seven-minute laser show after sunset projected off a 15-foot-diameter balloon. The unveiling/media event Jan. 24 includes a seven-minute fireworks barrage from a barge in the gulf. The county also is renting a satellite-link truck for TV crews and will distribute its own film of the sand castle to TV stations. The Lake Wales sand is being imported because, despite repeated renourishment, Sand Key's beach surface is uneven and doesn't hold enough sand for the sculpture without major excavation. "Rather than dig it up and risk harming the environment or the nearby sea oats, we're bringing in more beach sand that matches what's there," said Richard Painter, sales director for Wizard Connection, the Orlando company staging the event. "We'll leave it there after the sculpture is leveled." Planners promise the record for the world's tallest sand castle. The Sarasota company hired to sculpt it built the current record-holder: a 28-foot, 7-inch-tall carousel made of carved sand at Georgia's Stone Mountain in 1998. Six sculptors will do the job, first filling strategically deployed wooden forms with sand for the required compaction, then carving the shapes using everything from masonry trowels to dental tools. The Guinness Book of World Records people have rules: No artificial materials. No heavy equipment to pile up the sand. So a plan to spray-paint the sculptures with team colors in biodegradable paint was scrapped. A front-end loader will be used to help empty the trucks, but only cherry-picker cranes will be used in the sculpting. How long will the record stand? "Until the next client comes along willing to pay us to break it," Mason said.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111 
|
From the Times Business report
From the AP
|
