First Person: Hot Times for Event Marketers

August is here, and the dog days of summer are upon us. As we reach the halfway point between the Fourth of July and Labor Day, people everywhere are hanging the “Gone Fishin’” sign in the window, loading the family into the minivan, and heading on vacation. Everyone, it seems, except for those of us in the event marketing industry. We are in our busiest time of the year.

It may not always seem fun rolling up our sleeves while our friends and neighbors are on holiday, but there is a method to our madness. After all, engaging people and getting them excited about our clients is easier on a boardwalk or around a festival fairground than when they’re preoccupied and rushing to work or home.

Summer settings provide many opportunities for brand marketers to spend quality time with consumers. My company, Grand Central Marketing, has activated many summer promotions to reach consumers where they spend their leisure time—whether it’s at the beach, at a fair or a festival, at an amusement park, in a mall, or at a sporting event.

Regardless of the setting, though, providing the right interaction and being relevant in the time and place remain crucial to being welcomed into a consumer’s personal space. For example, to help Lifetime Television launch two detective programs, we’d sent beach teams “undercover” to administer portable lie-detector tests and distribute Lifetime premiums such as umbrellas, hats, and sunglasses to put beachgoers literally under cover. It was only natural that we returned to the country’s beaches last year to help Lifetime promote the miniseries “Beach Girls,” a show about the lifelong bond shared by a group of women, by using handheld PDAs to take pictures of groups of friends at the beach.

An added benefit of these beach promotions is the shelf life of our premiums. It seems that every time we go back to a beach, we see an ocean of items we’ve distributed at previous events. Whether it’s “New York” magazine umbrellas, HBO “Sex and the City” towels, or Lifetime beach chairs, consumers bring them back to the beach year after year, giving our clients’ programs and brands ongoing visibility.

Malls are another great place to reach consumers during summer months. For the second consecutive year, we are working with General Growth Properties malls to produce “The Scene,” a multisponsor 12-city teen tour. Each weekend 5,000 teens flock to these events to take part in entertainment, sports, and fashion events, such as hanging out in the Tweety Lounge, watching a performance by the DK BMX Bike Team, getting a makeover in the “CosmoGIRL!” boutique, or checking out the hottest new cell phones and ringtones in the Sprint booth.

But summer promotions aren’t limited to traditional venues. This year we’re producing a grassroots mobile marketing tour for Windstream Communications, the newly created telecommunications company. The tour is centered around two classic 1953 pickup trucks featured in the company’s advertising campaign. We are taking these trucks across America’s heartland to fairs and festivals in 15 states. Some of the unusual events the trucks will appear at include Ribfest in Lincoln, NE; the Peanut Party in Pelion, SC; the Woolybear Festival in Vermillion, OH; and the 17th Annual World Chicken Festival in London, KY.

For Napster, the target demographic may be different but the goal is the same. We’re helping Napster reach young music fans—a group that can be hard to market to during the school year—by visiting youth-oriented summer events such as the X Games, the Coachella Valley Music Festival, the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, and Download Music festivals in Boston and San Francisco.

So maybe event marketers aren’t so different from everyone else. Like most other Americans, we spend our weekends from June through August catching rays on the beach, staying cool in air-conditioned malls, and enjoying outdoor concerts and festivals. So what if our standard uniform consists of khakis and logoed polo shirts instead of shorts and flipflops. There are worse ways to spend a summer!

Matthew Glass is chairman/CEO of Grand Central Marketing, a New York-based event marketing and promotion agency, and pens a monthly column for CHIEF MARKETER.