A Doctor Performing Miracles

Let’s start with the disclaimer: Peter Facinelli isn’t a doctor. But don’t bother arguing the point with the fans who stormed Harrisburg Mall in Pennsylvania, USA this past October 4. As far as they are concerned, he is both Dr. Carlisle Cullen from the movie blockbuster “Twilight” and Dr. Fitch Cooper on Showtime’s “Nurse Jackie.” So they were more than fired up when they heard that Facinelli would be making an appearance at the mall, giving them a chance to ogle at his boyish good looks, celebrate his acting talent, scream and ogle some more.
Facinelli has been to several shopping centers across America and SG Celebrity Productions was responsible for bringing him to Harrisburg Mall—the agency set the ticket prices and formulated the rules and regulations for the event.

Facinelli was scheduled to make his anticipated entrance at noon that Sunday, but fans started lining up as early as Saturday afternoon and camped out in their vehicles overnight—due to time restrictions, only those purchasing autograph or photo tickets were permitted to line up.

“We used a vacant anchor space to contain the crowd, [reserving] the former store’s take-back area, adjacent to Center Court, for the meet and greet,” recalled Jessica Lind, Harrisburg Mall’s marketing director.
“One of the biggest hurdles with an event of this magnitude is that both mall management and retailers want the additional foot traffic without blocking the common area or store entrances. Having an empty anchor space in this situation definitely helped.”

Fans could obtain an autograph for $25, while $40 was enough to have their photograph taken with the star. No personal cameras were allowed at the event because a professional photographer, Ann Foster from the Patriot-News, was on site to capture the images.

Lind said the money went to good use. Facinelli drew nearly 2,500 people to the mall and donated $10,000 from ticket sales to the Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation (www.AlexsLemonade.org), a non-profit organization dedicated to raising funds to help fight childhood cancer.
The foundation began as a single lemonade stand that cancer patient Alexandra “Alex” Scott held back in 2000, when she was only four years old. Alex wanted to raise money for the hospital that had taken such good care of her when she received a stem cell transplant. She raised $2,000 that first year and continued to gather funds right up until she passed away in 2004 at the age of 8. Her family, including her three brothers, have picked up her fight and continue to raise funds through the foundation.
Peter Facinelli had donated money to the foundation in the past, but the Harrisburg Mall event gave him a chance to meet Alex’s mom, Liz Scott. The two stood together to address the crowd and the press, helping to raise a further $2,000 by encouraging the public to buy some lemonade and related merchandise from the foundation’s stand.
For six hours straight, Facinelli interacted with ticket-holders and signed autographs. He even cancelled his flight to make sure that he could meet everyone in line, and ran out into the common area a few times during the event to greet other fans and passersby who had stopped by in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the star.
To boost the excitement further, Harrisburg Mall’s partner radio station, 99.3 Kiss FM held a live remote during Facinelli’s appearance and ran a contest series in which fans had a chance to win tickets to the November 20 premiere of “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” at the mall’s Great Escape Theatre. The series included a character look-a-like competition and “biggest fan” contest.
“The radio remote was able to address the crowd all at once, something that would not have been possible had the line been scattered throughout the mall,” Lind pointed out.

On the Web, the mall’s marketing team spread the word through every social networking means at its disposal, including Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.
“A quick search on Facebook of the word “twilight” revealed hundreds of fan pages, some with over three million followers,” Lind noted.
“We posted information on these fan sites daily. ‘Twilight,’ ‘Peter Facinelli,’ ‘Nurse Jackie,’ ‘Stephanie Meyer,’ we covered them all. We received an immeasurable amount of exposure from blog sites such as ‘Twilight Moms’ and ‘Facinelli Fans.’ We set up a Google alert to inform us whenever the mall or the event was mentioned, and the alerts kept pouring in. [Through such media vehicles], not only are you advertising directly to your target audience, but you are reaching that audience free of charge. Facinelli himself even twittered to fans about the event.”
Lind also said that Facinelli’s Twitter account boasted more than one million followers.
“Twitter is so popular that the site often displays an “over capacity” message because of the number of users. We’ve reached a new age in marketing, one in which everyone’s connected and information can be disseminated to thousands in just seconds. It’s a powerful force.”
Harrisburg Mall not only received a copious amount of press coverage from the likes of local paper The Patriot-News and other publications around the USA for the Facinelli appearance—all press interviews were conducted in the mall’s Great Escape Theatre, which helped to attract positive attention for the tenant—but it also garnered some TV coverage. The mall recorded significant increases in retail sales as well.

Media Mix

Print
Radio
Television
Online

The Bottom Line
• The agreement through SG Celebrity Productions cost Harrisburg Mall $5,000 and the center spent an additional $5,000 to promote the event, for a total of $10,000. Harrisburg Mall’s marketing director Jessica Lind noted that, since most celebrity appearances cost anywhere from $25,000 to upward of $75,000 for the booking fee alone, this event was an offer that the center simply could not refuse.
As per its contract with SG Celebrity Productions, the center had to provide the staff for the massive event. That means the entire office staff helped out, including the property accountant who, alongside Lind and her marketing assistant, took on the critical task of herding the crowds.
• Mall traffic increased by 21 percent from the Sunday prior to the event and was up 23 percent over the comparable Sunday in 2008.
• The majority of Harrisburg Mall retailers experienced significant spikes in sales, many reporting increases of more than 100 percent over the comparable day last year. One tenant’s productivity soared—while the store had rung in sales of $300 for the day in 2008, its sales for the day totalled $8,000 this year.

Photo credits: Ann Foster, The Patriot-News 2009.

Dec.
2009

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