| EVENT REPORT 07.18.08 1:42 PM |
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Microsoft Taps Welsh Singer, Local Eatery for E3
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 | Microsoft's media presentation at E3
Photo: Nadine Froger Photography |
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Microsoft hosted a press briefing and series of post-conference events at this year’s E3 Media and Business Summit, which kept the invitation-only formula it adopted last year. But Microsoft ditched Barker Hanger and Santa Monica hotels as show venues—perhaps because of the widely reported trouble attendees experienced while traveling between spots—and returned to its previous location, the Los Angeles Convention Center. Zed Ink's Julia Zarro worked with Microsoft group manager of global events Mark Harper to attract media attendees to the technology company’s events.
Prior to the conference, which began on Monday and wrapped yesterday, Zed Ink targeted international and domestic media with multipurpose invitations attached to lanyards; the backs of invitations featured scannable barcodes that granted guests access to Microsoft’s press briefing, while a swiveling wheel on the front of each revealed useful information about local restaurants and hotels.
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Microsoft, Xbox, E3 |
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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.)
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Guitar Hero III, Xbox, PlayStation, Best Buy, Warner Brothers, Walt Disney Company, Sony, Paramount |
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| EVENT REPORT 09.10.07 4:46 PM |
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MTV VMA Parties Embrace Vegas Style
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 | Held at the Pearl Concert Theater in the Palms Hotel and Casino, the VMAs were more intimate this year, and shorter, coming in at a little over two hours.
Photo: Getty Images |
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FROM LAS VEGAS In hopes of revitalizing a franchise that has seen considerable drops in ratings and reputation in the past few years, MTV took its Video Music Awards to Las Vegas on Sunday for the first time since the awards’ 1984 inception.
With its own reputation as a glittering, all-night, no-holds-barred city, Las Vegas proved to be an appropriate milieu for the 72-plus-hour barrage of bashes related to the main event. And flush with new nightclubs, the city—which embraces its reputation for wild antics as much as the show does—provided plenty of party-ready locations.
During the show itself, MTV found that along with the celebrities, publicists, and marketers that followed its move to the desert came a series of gaffes. Although Britney Spears’s amateurish opening performance certainly got people talking, it was widely considered a bomb. Later, technical glitches and mic failures abounded.
Producers reinvented the show’s format, flipping between the ceremony in the new Pearl Concert Theater in the Palms hotel and live video snippets from a series of satellite concert-house party hybrids filmed throughout the property. (With the broadcast’s coverage of so much of the Palms’s space, viewers could hardly be blamed for thinking they were watching a two-hour commercial for the hotel.) One highlight of the proceedings was Chris Brown’s performance, which had the singer and his backup dancers leaping among the glowing circular platforms on the main floor of the Pearl.
Going on around the show was a weekend-long party lineup managed largely by New York- and Los Angeles-based planners and vendors—perhaps not surprisingly, given that many of the events’ hosts were magazines and brands based in those cities. The majority of event organizers relied on Las Vegas’s wealth of over-the-top, highly publicized new venues to impress guests, rather than use heavy production to make a big impact.
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MTV, MTV Video Music Awards, Rolling Stone, Maxim, GQ, Xbox, Samsung |
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| EVENT REPORT 07.18.07 4:02 PM |
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E3 Scales Back at New Venues
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 | E3 attendees tested video games at the software showcase at Barker Hangar.
Photo: Courtesy of E3 Media and Business Summit |
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The Entertainment Software Agency’s newly downsized E3 Media and Business Summit—formerly known as the Electronic Entertainment Expo—debuted in Santa Monica last week from July 11 to 13 with a series of radical changes to the 12-year-old gaming convention. The ESA contracted show management to IDG World Expo C.E.O. Mary Dolaher, who acted as show producer and helped the agency reach its goal of creating a more intimate and businesslike environment.
Organizers scaled back the now invitation-only event from 70,000 to 3,000 attendees—consisting of select media, retailers, and financial analysts—and from 400 to 38 exhibitors. The need for a smaller space prompted the show's move from its previous home, the Los Angeles Convention Center, to the Barker Hangar and a series of Santa Monica hotels including the Viceroy and Fairmont Miramar. Buses shuttled attendees from hotel to hotel for press conferences and appointment-based in-suite meetings with game company executives, as well as to the software showcase at the hangar, where they could test video games. For their own press conferences, gaming giants Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo elected to tap into other venues, such as the Santa Monica High School amphitheater, which hosted Microsoft’s briefing.
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E3, Xbox, Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo |
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