I didn't know they had the people from Hooters designing their Coastal Vision 3000 print stuff.

LOL on the Coastal Vision 3000 sounding like a lasik place.

A friend of mine from Destin has been sending me links on stories about this The Beach initiative.

As many may already know, the back story is that Southwest Airlines has an interest in starting flights to the area down the road. Southwest needs to serve the area as a region using only one airport to make this happen (getting almost everyone flying to the entire region to fly Southwest to one airport). To do this, Southwest needs to be able to advertise or note:

"Let us take you to (name of area)" with (name of area) being an umbrella term for everything from Navarre to Apalachicola. The term Northwest Florida is to vague. Half the people in the U.S. would think they were talking about Jacksonville. (Remember, American's aren't too great with geography). Emerald Coast at this time doesn't cover the entire area in question.

Having said all of that, even attempting to brand the phrase "The Beach" to all of the United States in terms of it representing Northwest Florida beaches is literally the most insane tourism marketing concept I've seen. An ad budget the size of McDonald's wouldn't get the job done for something this generic.

This is a joke, right?

The people at Southwest Air have to be rolling their eyes.

Per thebeachfla website... The background music in the promo video sounds like the part of a movie when someone is thinking back to a time someone died. Not music that says "come look at how amazing this is."

Off the top of my head, how about:

Florida's Perfect Beaches

or similar. You get beach, you get Florida, and you get what sets it apart.

Be interesting to watch this all pan out.