The Public Eye
Call me obsessed, call me an idiot (I'm used to it) but I still don't get this advertising thing with the Ocean City Council.
Here we are agreeing to spend almost $4 million in tax money on an advertising program without knowing how it's going to be spent. This is like hopping on a bus knowing the price of a ticket and the destination but not the route it's going to take.
"What? We're going straight to Detroit before we have a pit stop at Holly's on Kent Island? What was that old Sam and Dave song, "Hold On …'"
It's not that the chosen ad agency won't do a good job, but I'd like Rodney the Lifeguard more if he wasn't so … so… clean. Of course, it's his shtick to "rescue" people from the stress of work and to send them off to the beach and I understand that this approach is much better than, say, Rodney the Windshield Washer Man. Still, I'm guessing that if Rodney ran up and attempted to "rescue" someone off the Boardwalk around 11 p.m. in July, he'd still be getting his cheeseburgers through a straw.
The thing is, though, this is not about bringing more people to Ocean City. According to the city's water department, the resort is not that far from its peak weekend population projection of about 380,000 some 15 years from now. I also recall that the city's engineering department years ago calculated that if every piece of usable space was occupied, beach included, that we might be able to accommodate maybe a half-million people. Of course, that would mean having to stamp all your body parts "Property of …" so you'd know whether you were scratching with your hand or someone else's.
The issue is quality versus quantity and enticing the people who come here to spend a little more money. That's it, because when you're already drawing between 200,000 and 300,000 people every summer weekend, with or without Rodney, we need Rod to flash his roll and start taking some of these people out to dinner. I don't mean $3.50 meatloaf night, either.
After dinner, it's out to the clubs, where Rodney gets his groove on, or whatever it is that people get on these days, and then on to the local pharmacy the next morning for some aspirin before going on a clothes-buying spree, with or without a free hermit crab with every purchase.
And then he goes fishing offshore with the guys, hits on the fish-cleaning girls on his return, grabs a pizza and starts the whole process anew.
So that's it. That's what we need. And by the way, these are my creative ideas so don't tell anyone.
