| Q & A 10.11.05 9:00 PM |
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| Kindling the Creative Fire |
| Fox's Tomiko Iwata is obsessed with finding new ideas to help events draw attention to the network's blockbuster shows. |
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Tomiko Iwata
Title: Vice President of Special Events, Fox Broadcasting Company
What She Does: Iwata plans about 40 events each year, from corporate meetings for 200 to blowout parties for more than 2,000. During Upfront Week this past spring, Fox’s party at the Boathouse in Central Park featured boat rides around the lake for 2,200 guests. Once Iwata packed a Simpsons party on the Fox lot with carnival-like rides and games. And she created a mini beach on an island in Times Square to promote North Shore. She even put costumed mermaids in a tank on the bar at a Super Bowl party in Jacksonville, Florida.
Career Path: Iwata graduated from California State University Long Beach with an art degree in 1987. Her first job was working at ad agency Tracy-Lock—whose credits include Taco Bell’s memorable if un-PC “run for the border” campaign—while she took a special events class at a UCLA extension. She started in the event industry as a designer at Parties Plus (“It was the most fun job. I’d create all kinds of customized stuff for huge clients, and I used to go, ‘Oh my God—I get paid for this!’”), and later worked at incentive travel company Ultimate Incentives and event production firm Now We’re Cooking. She got the Fox job in January 1998.
Age: 40
Where She Grew Up: San Francisco Bay area
Where She Lives: Sherman Oaks, California
Favorite Fox Shows: Arrested Development and the now-canceled Greg the Bunny
Favorite Non-Fox Shows: PBS’ Cooking Under Fire and the WB’s Gilmore Girls
Full-Time Staff: Four
Favorite Magazine: Details
Tips: “Be good to your vendors, because you’re only as good as they are. Oh, and always have enough ice.”
Your work always includes such unique ideas for entertainment and giveaways. Where do you go for inspiration?
I get a lot of inspiration from Las Vegas because [casino owners] have
unlimited money to spend on crazy, cool shit. For example, at Taboo restaurant at the MGM Grand, I saw these 4- by 4-foot concrete block cocktail tables outfitted with Reactrix systems [interactive projections that respond to movement]. We found out who made them, and had some branded ones made for our Super Bowl
party. I see stuff like that and get obsessed with the challenge to
make it work [for events]. For example, I wanted to do this claw game
that was on free play [set to override coin operation for unlimited
free games], with iPods at the bottom. It turned out
we couldn’t do it because there would have been 800 guests [at one of
Fox’s Super Bowl parties in Jacksonville in February] and 30 iPods and
we thought people would have gone crazy. Instead, we just put in Fox
T-shirts, and the thing was cleared at the end of the night. So then we
had it at an American Idol party, with all kinds of Fox merchandise, and now we’re talking about doing it for an O.C. party—that game is my new obsession.
Fox has never tried to be like the other three networks, so our MO is
always doing something with a twist. It allows us a lot of freedom to
be crazy, weird, different. Even if it’s a low-budget event, I always
try to do one thing people are going to talk about. For example, at a
party at the Mondrian [hotel], we put little plastic Fox-branded fortunes in the pool, and we got [vendor] Beautiful Bartenders to supply guys to dive for them and present them to the guests.
What’s your most memorable Fox event?
The Jacksonville Super Bowl was a nightmare. There was nothing there!
The host committee brought in cruise ships to house our corporate
group. Luckily, we were the broadcast network, so we got a killer
ship—we got the Radisson Seven Seas Navigator,
which had 200 rooms, all with outside views and walk-in closets. But
the logistics were tough. It was a foreign ship, so we had to
reconfigure all the electricity, and we brought in landlines for the
telephones.
We also did the Simpsons Global Fan Fest on the lot in 2000. It was an all-day festival celebrating The Simpsons’
12th year, and we brought about 2,500 licensing and merchandising
people from all over the world to show how powerful and far-reaching
the brand was. We built a stage where the cast members did a live
reading from their scripts. It started to pour rain when they were up
there and there was a river of water running by and we got this call on
the Nextel: “Pull the registers [at a merchandise
store set up at the event]! We’re all going to get electrocuted!”
Everybody was drenched but nobody cared since it was so much fun. We
had branded carnival games, a giant Ferris wheel with a pink donut in
the middle, bumper cars painted with the Simpsons kids’ faces, a Krusty Burger Station, and Marge’s blue cotton candy.
Do you do a lot of events on the lot?
Not typically because it’s about $120,000 just to get into a
soundstage—and those spaces are totally raw. There aren’t even walls.
Plus our soundstages are constantly booked.
Has your job changed now that Fox shows like American Idol and The O.C. are so big?
When I started in 1998, it was all about corporate meetings, and every
now and then we’d have a party. But now we’re doing tons of premiere
events—the folks who used to run the network didn’t believe in that,
but now it’s essential—and we have no trouble filling our guest lists.
For every event, our internal clients give us a different goal: either
it’s all about the red carpet, or it’s about sponsors feeling great, or
whatever. For American Idol,
we have a Top 12 party where the producers announce the group of
finalists and it’s the last time the press can access the talent until
[the winner is selected]. For that event, we must choose a location
that can accommodate a 100-foot-long red carpet [to allow media
abundant access to contestants] because every time someone gets kicked
off, you see their picture from that party, on that same red carpet,
with that same step-and-repeat. It’s smart how the producers maintain
control [of contestants’ publicity] through the event.
You work in L.A. and New York. What city inspires you more?
For press events, we’re always in L.A.—it needs to be easy for press to get there. Even when we do [events related to] The O.C.,
we rarely go to Orange County, because it’s just too hard for everyone
to get down there. Our corporate meetings are attached to trade shows
like the [National Association of Broadcasters show in Las Vegas], so we go where they are. For Upfront Week,
we satellite downlink the New York presentation to Detroit, Chicago,
and L.A. In New York, we mostly do press events and stunts, sometimes
in Times Square. Once we set up a hula show and sand with people
passing out pineapple drinks in Times Square to promote North Shore. I love going to New York to get inspired by all the restaurants.
Are your ideas ever censored for being too out there?
I haven’t experienced censorship yet, or at least not censorship
because the idea was too way out there. I suppose you could call the
iPod incident more of an operational issue. Thankfully, there is a lot
of trust between the special events department and our internal
clients. Sometimes they laugh and say something like, “OK. You guys are
nuts, but it sounds like fun.”
—Alesandra Dubin
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