Panama City Plunge

We've said it before: if your money-grubbing idea for how to market your beach community to tourists is to encourage everybody to get drunk and high, then the least you could do is wire-off the high balconies.

Or, not.

"On a personal level, I got to know Matt quite well over the past few years, and he was a wonderful young man from a great family. Matt was an extremely talented person who was very bright and possessed a great, dry sense of humor. He could not wait to join the Notre Dame family."

Instead, you might tweak the promos just a little, and adopt a new slogan. How about:

"Come to Panama City for Spring Break:
It's to die for."

Panama Beach Balcony Fallings

According to the Panama City Herald, a Spring Break reveler died early last night "after falling five stories from a motel balcony... ." He was identified late today as Brandon Ward Kohler, 19, of Winder, Ga.

The Panama City newspaper adds that this --

was the first fatal balcony fall during this year’s Spring Break — one of the busiest in recent years — and the only such death since 2008.

The paper sounds almost proud of those statistics, doesn't it? The "only such death" in three years.

Of course, another way of putting it is, Panama City Beach is batting 2 for 3 annual balcony deaths, or .666. That's a major league average. Never mind the other near-death experiences:

Two people have survived falls this year. Earlier this month, a 21-year-old spring breaker fell three stories between a parking garage and the Laketown Wharf resort on South Thomas Drive. He suffered deep cuts, bruises and a sprained ankle.

Days later, a 20-year-old spring breaker fell about 12 feet when a second-floor balcony rail broke at a rental house on Beach Drive.

We don't care to speculate about the how's or why's of Brandon Kohler's death. It is a tragedy.

But all those young people fallings off high places in a single beach town can't be coincidental.

It's probably too much to expect Panama City Beach bar owners to stop serving manifestly inebriated or high Spring Breakers when they still have spare change or plastic in their pockets. But you'd think a beach town that promotes itself as the place to be for Spring Break drunk fests would put wire cages, or something, around all of its hotel balconies and other high perches.

Dept. of Panama City Spring Break Necropsy
04-04-2010

Another balcony death in Panama City: "Panama City Plunge"

Hooking Freebies on Panama City Beach

WaPo's style reporter, Libby Copeland, writes today about the aggressive commercial marketing that infects Panama City Beach every year at Spring Break. The "ocean of promotion," she calls it. Copeland seems alternately amused and alarmed, but mostly thoroughly disgusted.

The alarming parts are easy to spot through the reporter's faux tone of exited wonderment --

Behold, the marketers of spring break have descended, transforming the beach into a corporate wonderland. There's a Geico gaming tent and a Neutrogena spa, and the Trojan booth offers pina-colada-scented oxygen you can inhale through a tube. There's free mouthwash and chewing tobacco, free sunblock and tampons, and after a free massage, you can make a delightful lunch out of Jack Link's beef jerky and 180 energy drink. So very free!

The snarky parts show up when she contrasts the 'natural' way Spring Break is supposed to be with the artificial marketing orgy it has become--

Some folks might believe that youthful revelry occurs naturally, the way rocks are slowly worn down to sand, but it turns out that's not true. During spring break, at least, lusty excess must be carefully planned. Who makes the machinery of this annual celebration turn, bringing in the hot salesgirls and organizing events overseen by bawdy emcees? Who schedules a "J-Lo Booty Shakin' Contest" to promote a new perfume?

The marketers, that's who.

Look over there! As part of a "Sand Castle Demolition" contest, a squirming heap of spring breakers are scrambling for bottles of Vitamin Water hidden in the sand. They emerge with sand all over their chins.

Even the U.S. Army, no surprise, is muscling in on the selling bonanza:

Above the Venus Breeze banners floating proudly on the wind, above the Def Leppard wailing from the speakers (pour some sugar on maaay), a lone parachuter spins and spirals across the sky, spewing a majestic trail of red smoke. Then there are more parachuters, and more, all members of the Army's Golden Knights, trailing yellow parachutes that say ARMY. The spring breakers gather around and squint up, watching the golden creatures float to the sand like gods.

"If you want to find out more," a voice says over a loudspeaker, "GoArmy.com."

Do you suppose the kids who do Spring Break on Panama City Beach are so besotted with raging hormones and alcohol (or worse) that they actually might fall for this stuff and trade Panama City Beach for Baghdad? Might be.

One clue that the marketers really are on to something is hidden in the boastful reminiscence of Matt Britton, "chief of brand development for a company called Mr. Youth." Now more than a decade out of college, Britton confesses that he still uses --

a credit card he signed up for in college to nab a free T-shirt. "That's college marketing at its finest," Britton says.

The hidden part, we're guessing, is that Britton is so deeply in debt on that card he can't afford to quit his shitty job. Why else would a mature, obviously intelligent guy like him agree to endure Spring Break in Panama City Beach every year?

WaPo also has a video of Britton extolling the profit opportunities presented by a beach full of nearly naked, mostly drunk young people. He can be insightful and engagingly candid, as when he tells the camera that at age 32 he thinks he's too "old" for this; or when he reflects --

"Our culture has a way of, y'know, year by year really lowering cultural standards in every institution and marketing is no different."

Still, our favorite part is buried deep down in Copeland's article where she describes how local Panama City Beach residents are handling the marketing blitz. They're becoming what is known in corporate circles as "opportunity seekers." (As another voice on the video explains, that's usually a marketers' resentful phrase applied to the smarter college students "who go to events just to get the free T-shirts.")

Writes Copeland:

The loot accumulates as if splitting off from itself, amoeba-style. One guy has four hats and three T-shirts. A college senior named Tori Voorhees makes off with an entire case of Vitamin Water.

Even the senior citizens want a piece. An old guy with a cane limps off toward a condo with two energy drinks and a bag of skin-care samples.

We're on the old guy's side. Like him, perhaps, we've always made it a point of principle not to wear clothes with someone else's name on it unless they're paying us for the advertising space. But free energy drinks and skin-care products? We'll take two, please.

Panama City Spin

UPDATED BELOW

The schizophrenic personality of Panama City Beach is evident in the Real Estate section of today's New York Times, right from the get-go. Using an unexpected simile, Julia Lawlor likens our distant eastern neighbor to a fashion model like one of these.

She writes --

Like a supermodel showing off her good side, Panama City Beach is not shy about flaunting its most valuable asset. “The World’s Most Beautiful Beaches,” boasts the sign at the end of Hathaway Bridge, which leads into the city.

But anyone driving through this resort on the Florida Panhandle can’t fail to notice the honky-tonk strip on the main drag, Thomas Drive: video arcades, body piercing shops, tattoo parlors, adult novelty shops, down-at-the-heels motels, vacant lots. [print version here]

Of course, city boosters don't market Panama City as an anorexic Victoria Beckham, much less a schizophrenic. They prefer to spin it as a 'town in transition' climbing the social ladder.

“We’re going from what used to be a blue-collar resort and sharing that with a higher-end customer,” said Bob Warren, president of the Panama City Beach Convention & Visitors Bureau.

The good news?

“Spring breakers are a lot better behaved,” said Patrick Pfeffer, who owns Club La Vela.

The bad news? Pfeffer actually boasts --

“You don’t see as much nudity and throwing TVs out of the windows.”

Huh. Imagine that.

It must be challenging to market Panama City as a "family resort" when the local papers are filled with news that a Panama City judge has dismissed over thirty felony and misdemeanor charges against the film-makers of the notorious "Girls Gone Wild" video. The video was filmed in 2003, presumably before Spring breakers cut back, some, on their nudity and TV smashing.

Allegations included charges that the film-makers turned their cameras on under-aged intoxicated Panama City female visitors. The judge dismissed the charges not because they might not be true, or that the video isn't disgusting; and not because the video isn't marketed with all sleazy tricks pioneered by The Video Professor.

No, she dismissed the charges on the grounds that Panama City cops were "intentionally misleading or reckless with the facts" when they applied for a search warrant to gather evidence.

That's not the kind of law enforcement behavior likely to be of much help to a beach town longing for Resort Respectability.

UPDATE
March 28, 2007

Hooking Freebies on Panama City Beach
Libby Copeland explores the aggressive commercial marketing that infects Panama City Beach every year at Spring Break. It's an "ocean of promotion" she says.