For Philadelphia and Britain, a busy summer looms
The queen's 60th anniversary on the throne - she ascended upon the death of her father, George VI - and the Summer Olympics are making for a high-impact focus on the United Kingdom. Millions will travel to Britain for events, and the Olympics alone will bring about 30,000 athletes, friends, and sports officials to the country, 20,000 accredited workers from the media, and 4.5 billion television viewers from around the world.
The four-day celebrations for the queen, which begin June 2, are largely supported by donations and money raised in grassroots campaigns, not by public funds. The events, which also will attract worldwide media coverage, include a vast number of parties and spectacles, from the traditional British lighting of beacons and a flotilla of 1,000 vessels on the Thames, to a nationwide jubilee luncheon and the presentation of a portrait of the queen composed by a farmer using 200 of his black-and-white sheep.
The Olympics begin July 27 and run through Aug. 12, and the Paralympic Games pick up there Aug. 29 and run through Sept. 9. Transportation has been upgraded with improved links, and waterways have been cleaned. The Games "will leave a lasting impact" because of the infrastructure upgrades, says Emma Thomas, who manages public relations for VisitEngland, one of the nation's three official tourist agencies. (The others are VisitBritain and VisitLondon.)
The combination of two major events in a single summer, with the world looking on, has brought an enormous amount of added work to the agencies, which promote tourism year-round. In Philadelphia, summer always brings a big push for tourism with a special event lasting many days - the Welcome America celebration of the nation's birth in its birthplace, officially called Wawa Welcome America. The sort of connections Britain has long been building with sponsors and others for the summer of 2012 are evident in Philadelphia every summer, albeit not on anywhere near as grand a scale.
City representative Melanie Johnson, whose office creates and manages the Welcome America festival, can appreciate the current efforts in Britain. Welcome America, she says, "is a year-round commitment. It takes the whole year, from the time it ends to the time it begins again, to put it together. The city produces this event in its entirety."
Johnson describes the effort here in precisely the same terms as the Brits describe theirs: getting funding, creating partnerships, bringing together not just point people but community members "for anything you're thinking of doing at a certain location or at a certain event."
This summer in Britain, that would include developing the marketing so that people know about the farmer who will craft the sheep portrait of the queen.
That event has its own built-in oddity, which could make the marketing simple: By the way he arranges his sheep, the farmer hopes to produce a portrait of the queen as she appeared when she ascended the throne in 1952, and then he'll herd them across the countryside and end up with a portrait of Elizabeth as she looks today.
When it comes to a load of different events - the swath of celebrations Britain is about to have, for instance - "on the marketing side, you want to make sure that nobody gets lost in the shuffle," says Meryl Levitz, CEO of the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp., marketer of the region's attractions to expand the local tourism industry, which brings about 40 million domestic visitors here annually.
A case in point, she notes: In May, the Barnes Foundation will open its new museum on the Parkway. And the Franklin Institute will present an exhibition of the Dead Sea Scrolls. And the Center City District will open the new Sister Cities Park at Logan Square.
"For each," Levitz says, "we want to understand who their specific audiences are, what messages they are trying to get across, and then balance out the energy and excitement across all the media platforms."
Already, those platforms are buzzing with competing images, which brings us straight to July for both Britain and Philadelphia. On July 25 - two days before the start of the Summer Olympics - Major League Soccer's All-Star Game will play out in Chester at the Philadelphia Union's PPL Park. Team owners from around the world will be partying and meeting and seeing the city. The game will be telecast in 150 countries.
The Greater Philadelphia marketers are, like their counterparts in England, in the trenches. Levitz puts it in the most understandable terms: "It's a big thing when you've got a bunch of stuff."
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