Lori Raimondo, vice president of marketing of the Times Square Alliance, recently spoke to the Event Leadership Institute about what it's like to plan the New Years Eve Times Square celebration, including its challenges, curiosities, and confetti testing.
Here are some (condensed) highlights from the interview. You can watch a video of the full conversation here.
On the pressure: "You can feel that [pressure], the closer you get to midnight, if something goes wrong. I mean, there are other people that are really making it happen at that point. I do most of the lead into it and, yes, people can get very angry and very curt and very short because they don’t have the time to deal with that or someone is trying to change or things are delayed. You just have to be, 'No, this is the way it’s got to be.' I remember one year it had something to do with the police and a production guy, and it was like, 'Take me to jail now if we can’t do it this way.' So yes, everyone’s got to be focused, and things will happen, and you have to make adjustments that nobody will ever see. But everything is timed down to the second."
On confetti testing: "We test the confetti every year to make sure that it’s air worthy and it flutters and flies down and doesn’t come down in clumps, etc. So we do this event where we just throw the confetti out the window and all the press comes and goes, 'Yay, it works,' and there’s even a college kid that wants to come every year and goes, 'When is the confetti test?'"
On Times Square as a tourist destination: "The Times Square Alliance is actually a Business Improvement District, which was formed back in 1992, when Times Square was a little bit of a scary place. We are a nonprofit organization funded by the businesses of Times Square, and briefly, our goal is to keep Times Square, to keep its creativity, energy and edge—that’s actually part of our brand. A lot of things go into that, but when it relates to events, especially something like New Year’s Eve, that keeps Times Square as this world iconic destination. So 80 percent of tourists that come to New York actually visit Times Square. That’s tremendous support for our businesses, etc. So this event puts Times Square in so many homes around the globe and gets them excited about wanting to come to New York, and that supports the goal and mission of our organization like no other event that we do."
