Hotel
Sofitel
50th
Anniversary D-Day Reunion Dinner
The Sofitel
Hotel, located near Silicon Valley, asked WMG to create, plan, promote and
implement a once-in-a-life-time commemorative dinner honoring the
surviving Northern California veterans who landed in Normandy, France on D-Day. The invitation-only dinner
was held on June
5th, 1994 (which was also the morning of the Sixth of June in France.).
The campaign
involved three stages:
Stage One included publicizing the event to the veterans to
encourage attendance and excitement. In addition to sending press releases and placing
feature stories on individual veteran experiences, we also saturated the airwaves with public service
announcements and ran advertising in local consumer, senior and military newspapers.
Our goal was to attract 1000 attendees. Within three weeks of the initial media
push, we had reservations for 1125 veterans and their spouses: an unqualified success!
Stage Two
was event planning and implementation. We arranged meetings with Sofitel and the French Consul General,
the French Press Attaché and the French-American Chamber of
Commerce and obtained their full participation in the event.
Stage Three
included on-site publicity coverage, which was quite extensive. D-Day elicited enormous media attention
throughout the US and Europe. WMG's campaign resulted in live interviews on three
television stations and two radio stations prior to and during the event as well as newspaper
pre-publicity and on-site interviews.
At the
event, the cameras caught heart-felt reunions of veterans meeting
again for the first time in 50 years. Total print and electronic media impressions generated
for this event on a regional and local level ran over 8,500,000 households!
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