They’re the best in show
GIVEN the job of promoting Meow Mix, Matthew Glass came up with what he called “the first-ever reality show for cats.”
His crew first salvaged 10 “Cat-testants” from animal shelters around the country, thus winning heartwarming media coverage in those locales. Then they carted the critters here to cavort around a human-looking “Cat House” built in a storefront, complete with miniature kitchen and living room. People could see them live there or on the Internet, where the public got to vote on which felines to evict, one at a time -- for adoption, of course -- until there was a “pick of the litter.”
“Look, we come up with all sorts of crazy ideas,” Glass said.
Crazy, perhaps, but his stunt to promote cat food put him in contention for a BizBash Award, in the best event/PR strategy category. That’s what brought Glass to the Nokia Theatre in Times Square, along with other men and women who make their livings transforming museums into fantasy spaces for charity galas or cooking up entertainment for conventions of dental surgeons or figuring out how to create buzz for ... if not Meow Mix, then Q-tips.
Glass would have to wait to see if he’d won a “Big B,” for coming up first were the awards for best tabletop, best gift bag, best use of tent design ...
BizBash, which puts out trade magazines and websites for event planners -- “don’t call us ‘party planners’ ” -- was the brainchild of David Adler, the son of novelist Warren Adler, who wrote “The War of the Roses,” the tale of divorce as deadly combat. The younger Adler previously worked for Primedia, where he decided to liven up a Los Angeles party for Soap Opera Digest by inviting drag queens. Problem was, he didn’t know where to find reliable drag queens in L.A., so he had to fly some in from New York.
It struck Adler then that event planners could use a better way to advertise themselves and find services they needed, whether lighting technicians or entertainers, however they were dressed. BizBash estimates that the nation’s 15 leading markets host 875,000 “special events” a year, accounting for billions of dollars in spending.
After starting out in New York in 2000, it expanded into Florida and Toronto and last year held its first event in Los Angeles, hosting a panel on the “gift bag issue” -- the IRS’ attempt to tax celebrities who collect lavish giveaways at, say, the Academy Awards.
And speaking of the Oscars ... why couldn’t planners have their own such honors? Adler said it was time for them to follow the lead of chefs, who used to be hidden away back in the kitchen, but “now they’re the stars.”
So he launched the BizBash Event Style Awards to spotlight planners’ work as an “art form.” This spring’s awards ceremony was BizBash’s sixth in New York and it drew 800 industry insiders to the Nokia, where the guests came down escalators and found models lounging on two oval beds in a lobby -- a “decor element,” explained Adler, 53.
At a VIP reception, the vice president for special events at HBO, Eileen Rivard, chatted up caterer Joan Steinberg, who was up for an award for her work on the cast-and-crew party for that network’s marquee show.
When “The Sopranos” premiered in 1999, the cast celebrated in a Manhattan pizzeria. But by last year’s completion of primary shooting on its final episodes, the party drew 1,000 to Roseland Ballroom, where Steinberg’s Match Catering re-created a Little Italy street fair by bringing in vendors to display bushelbaskets of walnuts, figs and flatbreads; stuff cannoli by hand; and fry up dough. “And afterward, the cast still went to the pizzeria,” Rivard recalled with a laugh.
Nearby, well-wishers gathered around the elegant David Monn, who was just back from Venice, Italy, where he was planning an artist’s opening party for the biennial contemporary art festival there, and from London, where he was working on an event for “I can’t say who.”
Like many in the field, Monn followed an unlikely path into event planning. By his own account, he was a “very poor” boy in small-town Pennsylvania, and fat -- 235 pounds in eighth grade. So he’d retreat into fantasies of pretty things, “the consummate make-believe daydreamer.” On weekends, he’d go to a drugstore that let him leaf through House & Garden and Architectural Digest magazines as long as he didn’t bend the covers.
Before he turned 20, Monn headed to New York to work in a sewing factory, then got into the jewelry business and soon was throwing unusual parties, such as one at Easter for which he covered his dining room in sod and had guests arrive barefoot. He was befriended by two society women who had him work on charity affairs, including the Library Lions gala at New York Public Library in which attendees were greeted by mists of Monn’s own fall fragrance -- part of his philosophy that “all five senses have to be engaged for an event to be magical.”
Today, the onetime doughy daydreamer cuts a svelte figure in custom suits and advertises himself as the “Architect of Style.” Here he seemed a shoo-in to win for best nonprofit event concept for the 2006 Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose great hall staircase he covered in moss while a couple of thousand candles “spun through it like a swarm of fireflies” to create the ambience of an English manor house.
As waitresses offered up miniature tuna burgers and plum martinis, another “custom event styling” expert, David Beahm, told of the mysterious tryout that won him his most high-profile gig: the wedding of Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas. “We auditioned, but we didn’t know whose wedding it was. They just said, ‘Design a fantasy wedding at the Plaza.’ ”
For that headline-grabbing affair, Beahm had the guest cards dangle from ribbons off a 20-foot-tall tree. “Like it or not, a wedding is theater,” is one of his mantras. Another is, “Too much is never enough.”
Beahm was just a spectator at this year’s BizBash Awards. Another relaxed attendee was Steve Frost, president of Connecticut-based Stamford Tent and Party Rental, which has “literally thousands” of tents and imports others, giant ones, from Germany. There were only two tent design finalists and his company did both, a fundraiser at a yacht club and a corporate Christmas party.
“It’s me against me,” Frost said. “If I lose, I’m going to slink out.”
EVEN on a night for libations and self-promotion, reminders arose of what can go wrong in event planning: There was gossip about the catering cook diagnosed with hepatitis after an L.A. party celebrating Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue. Also fresh in memory was the New York-based “guerrilla marketing” agency that put circuit boards with blue and purple lights around Boston to promote a Cartoon Network show, only to set off a terrorism scare and earn a $2-million fine.
But soon it was time to open the envelopes, so the lights went down and the evening’s emcees, New York TV morning show duo Jodi Applegate and Ron Corning, took the stage -- and promptly ribbed “the coveted ‘Big B’ awards.”
“Does that mean we’re B-listers?” Applegate asked.
The silver B for best tabletop design of 2006 went to David Stark, a painter who began orchestrating events to support his art only to find “the installations we were doing were more exciting than little paintings.” His winning tabletops -- for the 25th-anniversary gala of Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute -- had napkin rings and centerpiece flowers made from pages of scripts showcased at the film festival.
Stark later won a second trophy for a benefit of the Robin Hood Foundation -- created by Wall Street hedge fund types -- for which he produced enormous chalk drawings of city scenes, with the theme of “erasing poverty, crime and hunger.” The 4,000 guests were offered chalk and invited to “redraw the city themselves.”
This year, the best gift bag wasn’t a fancy tote but a handout in the form of a pizza box, at a radio station event. Best invitation was a life preserver notifying attendees at a conference that they were going on a dinner cruise sponsored by Alize, the liqueur company. Best new product was a “decorative snowflake” made of spandex.
One luminary came up short, though. Karen Bacon, sister of actor Kevin Bacon, was a theater costume designer before joining the team that in the ‘70s created wild acrobats-hanging-from-the-ceiling environments at Studio 54, the famed nightclub that had a large influence on event planning in New York. A leader of the Studio 54 team, former florist Robert Isabell became the “in” designer for grand-scale charity affairs -- he did JFK Jr.’s wedding too -- and inspired successors such as Monn and Stark.
Bacon was just back from a job in the Virgin Islands, overseeing the fireworks-and-Beach Boys-concert opening of a yacht club for really big boats, like the one belonging to “the guy who owns the [Miami] Dolphins.” That would be H. Wayne Huizenga, whose 228-foot yacht has its own helicopter, naturally.
At BizBash, Bacon was a finalist for her use of puppets in a Saks Fifth Avenue fashion show, only to hear another name announced as the winner.
But one name was sure to be called in the PR strategy category, where the Matthew Glass who dreamed up the cat reality show was pitted against ... another Matt Glass. The second Glass, with his wife, used to be in the special events unit of Macy’s, where they worked on the Thanksgiving Day Parade and a mass tap-dancing event (“Tap-O-Mania”) that drew thousands of participants.
Now, with their own firm, Eventage, they had two PR finalists: one for Snapple White Tea, using hot-air balloon rides above Bryant Park, and the other for Q-tips, held in Grand Central Station, where women off the street -- and the reigning Miss America -- got five-minute beauty make-overs from makeup artists using the product best known for cleaning ears.
“It’s a safe bet,” said Meow Mix’s Matt Glass, “that there’s gonna be a Matthew Glass winning this award.”
This Glass, whose company is called Grand Central Marketing, used to work for Lincoln Center. As to how he gravitated from opera to cat food, “my mother asks me that all the time,” he said.
He joked that he pondered using Oscar-style “For Your Consideration” ads to beat his namesake, “but I don’t know if the industry’s ready for that -- there might have been a backlash.”
No worry. When the emcees called him up, the description of his Meow Mix stunt set off chuckles and murmurs in the audience -- the “wow factor,” as event planners term their highest compliment.
“I would have loved to have tasted the catering at this event,” quipped Applegate, the host.
Later, when the winners accepted congratulations in the rear of the theater, Glass even revealed the theme of this year’s Meow Mix promotion: “Think Like a Cat.”
A few feet away, HBO’s Rivard celebrated with the caterer, Steinberg, who had a Big B for the final “Soprano’s” cast-and-crew shindig, which also won for lighting design and best corporate event concept. “Three out of three!” Rivard gushed. “I guess we have to have another party.”
NEXT up? Los Angeles.
BizBash’s first L.A. awards and trade show will be June 27 at the California Market Center on East 9th Street. They’re giving editor Tina Brown an award and have lined up attorney-turned-TV personality Rikki Kleiman to introduce Hall of Fame honorees with her husband, Police Chief William J. Bratton. Former Gov. Gray Davis will give the keynote address on how special events boost the California economy.
“We have 100 submissions,” Adler said, leafing through them the other day. “The Emmy Gift Lounge, Crash Pre-Oscar Party, Red Line Movie Premiere at House of Blues.
“Yeah, there’s a lot of entertainment industry,” he said. “But we also have UCLA School of Medicine Millennium Ball, New Year’s celebration of the Wynn Las Vegas. And we have the Frederick’s of Hollywood Valentine’s Season Architectural Projection. It’s up for best fresh idea.”
