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| FROM NEW YORK |
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| News
Archive for Best Buy |
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| THE SCOUT 11.10.08 3:27 PM |
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Patina's Grown-Up Tailgate Parties Offer Corporate Entertaining Alternative
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 | Tailgating, Patina style
Photo: BizBash |
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The original college football tailgate party: fun, but perhaps not the most appropriate way to entertain corporate clients. On Saturday, Patina launched a program to marry the tailgating concept and the corporate-entertaining concept with a little more finesse.
Summer Stearns came up with the idea of a gourmet pre-football game party, and launched it when she was the catering sales manager at Lawry's. When she joined Patina as catering sales manager, she brought the idea with her, and Patina's first USC tailgate party became reality this Saturday at the Coliseum for the game versus Cal. On the grassy area directly to the front of the stadium, staff served up Kobe cheesesteaks and smoked-pork sandwiches from the grills. Veev and Samuel Adams sponsored the bars. Best Buy of Westwood set up TVs and Xboxes for the over-stimulation so many football fans require.
"It's great for people who are entertaining clients—really kind of an out-of-the-box way of socializing and immersing out-of-towners like legal or corporate clients in a Southern California experience," Stearns said. Planners can pick up individual or group tickets through Stearns for Patina's future tailgate parties (details to be announced), and Patina can arrange packages with game tickets as well. —Alesandra Dubin
RELATED TOPICS
U.S.C., U.C. Berkeley, Veev, Samuel Adams, Best Buy |
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| EVENT REPORT 10.27.08 5:54 PM |
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Guitar Hero World Tour Launch Rocks on Despite Budget Cuts
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 | The Guitar Hero World Tour launch
Photo: Paul Davies |
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Although Saturday night’s Guitar Hero World Tour launch may have appeared like a large-scale spectacle to guests—the expansive event took over two sound studios at the Lot and featured an hour-long Smashing Pumpkins concert—it wasn’t the party that hosts Activision and Best Buy had originally envisioned prior to the country’s economic downward spiral.
“We had to cut a lot of different things out,” said Donna Graves, C.E.O. of NCompass International, who began planning the event about three months ago with Activision’s senior manager of retail marketing, Sean Dexheimer, and Best Buy’s senior manager of event marketing, Evonne Groves. “We looked at every single line item and asked, ‘Is this what we need to spend to do this particular thing, or can we do it a different way? How can we creatively do everything and not have to cancel this because of the situation with the economy?’”
MORE >>
RELATED TOPICS
Best Buy, Activision, Smashing Pumpkins, Guitar Hero, Budgets |
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| Q & A 10.02.08 6:16 PM |
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MTV's Kelley Electa on Launching a North American Tour to Promote Rock Band
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 | Panic at the Disco performing at a Rock Band 2 party
Photo: Jordan Strauss/WireImage |
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MTV Games senior director of promotions Kelley Electa is overseeing the Rock Band Live Tour—a traveling concert program to promote the video game Rock Band—which kicks off this weekend in San Diego. A new marketing concept for MTV Games (a division of MTV Networks that creates interactive products for its target audience) and partner AEG, the tour will visit 28 cities across the U.S., plus Toronto, ending in Texas in November. Before the kickoff weekend, we asked Electa about the strategy behind the new program.
Why did you pick the tour format to market the game?
We really feel that Rock Band is an authentic music experience, and we wanted to give fans and families a chance to really experience what it's like to perform live rock 'n' roll. We think that can be achieved by partnering up with some great bands whose songs are featured within our game and have a pretty broad appeal to our consumer base and let our consumers get involved with the show from playing Rock Band in their living rooms to playing Rock Band in an actual arena.
MORE >>
RELATED TOPICS
MTV, MTV Networks, MTV Games, AEG Live, Rock Band, The Cab, Plain White T's, Dashboard Confessional, Panic at the Disco, Pepsi, Best Buy |
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| EVENT REPORT 11.07.07 4:33 PM |
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Guitar Hero Takes Over Best Buy Rooftop With Burning Man-Style Launch
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 | Guitar Hero's rooftop spectacle.
Photo: Paul Davies/NCompass |
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For fervent fans of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, only one experience could beat playing the latest version of Activision's monster-hit music video game: living it. And for several hours before Best Buy put the game on sale at midnight on October 28, the mega video-game retailer virtually made their dreams come true with a huge launch party on the roof of its West Los Angeles store.
“The concept was for people to feel like they actually walked into the game,” said event producer Donna Graves, co-founder of NCompass International Inc., who worked closely with Yvonne Groves, Best Buy's event marketing senior manager. “Everything we did was to be as authentic as possible.”
NCompass brought in frequent collaborator Keith Greco of Greco Decor to create a nighttime landscape filled with scenes and life-size characters from the game, as well as their real-world inspirations. As 1,500 music, film, and video-game folk, media members, and cool kids ascended stairs to the roof, they found a large stage outlined in neon and emblazoned with a Burning Man-like neon figure, resembling the main stage of the game's Desert Rock Tour scene. There, Joel Madden of Good Charlotte played two 45-minute sets that flanked a nearly hourlong performance by Poison. (Poison is a band in the game, and lead singer Bret Michaels is a character.)
MORE >>
RELATED TOPICS
Guitar Hero III, Xbox, PlayStation, Best Buy, Warner Brothers, Walt Disney Company, Sony, Paramount |
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