Marketing: Are We Cool With That?

BACK IN MARCH, on the last day of Austin’s South by Southwest Festival, I was looking for someone not from Philadelphia.

Simple enough: South by Southwest is the largest independent annual music festival in the country, with more than 1,500 bands vying for attention in parking lots and bars and a church and other venues rigged up around the small, rolling, quirky city — so of course there were tens of thousands of folks there not from Philadelphia. Except where I was. In a parking lot behind a vintage clothing store near the University of Texas, a handful of Philly indie bands had assembled, some of them via large white Ford vans driven all the way South, for the second annual Philly Jawn party, sponsored by the Philly blog Philebrity.com, the website Movetophilly.com (which encourages young, hip people to do just that), and … you. Or at least the nonprofit, tax-funded organization called the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation, which, with an annual budget of $13 million and staff of 45, holds the extraordinary responsibility — and/or unique power — of defining to an international audience just what the massive, divergent and often inexplicable City of Philadelphia is.

The point was, obviously, to attract an audience of non-Philadelphians to this parking lot, people who could be swayed into believing something new about our city. The folks from the GPTMC want the greater world to know that Philly is not just “gray,” “industrial,” “old,” “cold,” “fat,” “cheese-steaks,” “the Liberty Bell,” and “that gay movie with Tom Hanks” — the descriptors Philly has struggled for decades to shake off, and the same ones people who’ve never visited offered me in Austin. For Philly is also apparently this: the good-looking and perfectly tattered young men playing decent if not totally memorable indie rock onstage, the pale-skinned, randomly tattooed androgynous hipsters in pencil-legged jeans and checked Vans and jean skirts and leggings milling about in the audience, even the skinny unshaven guys in the back of the lot stealing tokes from a bowl just a few feet from a well-built bouncer in a cowboy hat, and getting drunk on the sun and the free beer. They were variations of the same images splashed across huge banners the GPTMC had hung in the parking lot — Philadelphia images was the point, one showing a group of young adults in thrift-shop dress standing outside what looked like a South Philly dive bar eating yellow-mustarded soft pretzels.

There was just one problem: For the first hour of the city’s coming-out party, I couldn’t find anyone among the few dozen attendees who wasn’t already from Philadelphia.

Then I spotted him.

He was sitting inhaling the free beer and free tortilla chips and — embrace the irony here — free Philly cheesesteaks the ­GPTMC was offering, a thin guy wearing John ­Lennon-style glasses, with a thick beard, longish straight dirty-blond hair poking from a baseball cap, old jeans, thick woolen socks, and a pair of black slippers he’d laid down beside the green Army-style duffle bag from which poked the neck of an acoustic guitar. When there was a break in the music — after he’d scarfed two cheesesteaks and several beers — he abruptly got up and left. I followed him out onto Guadalupe Street, where he threw down his bag, pulled out his guitar, and began strumming.

His name was Brian, and he was from Oklahoma. I asked him what had brought him to the Philly Jawn. “The free cheese-steaks,” he answered, still strumming.

But what about Philadelphia?, I asked. Did he have a prior impression of the city? And had seeing the Philly contingent here today affected that impression in any way?

He told me he’d been to Philly once, on the bus, “in that Chinatown area.” He went on, strumming all the while, and it was hard to tell whether what followed was commentary on the city or just part of some free-­associative song. “I was carrying an anvil,” he said/sang. “I found an anvil on the street in New York, and was going back to Oklahoma, and I didn’t want to have to put it down, ’cause I thought, ‘Oh, someone’ll take it,’ ’cause obviously I took it, so I figured it was worth taking.” Um, okay. So that’s what brought him to Philadelphia.

It wasn’t until an obviously much more perceptive guy than I walked by and offered him a half-eaten slice of pizza that I realized Brian’s clothes were probably tattered not by choice, but by circumstance, and that he, well, probably wasn’t planning an extravagant trip anytime soon to the cool, hip enclave that apparently is our city. 

And so the obvious question: What the hell is the GPTMC up to, sponsoring parties in Austin?