It was all planned out. Sort of. When Business Week’s manager of marketing events, Phyl Monroe, found out that the mag’s 75th anniversary party on September 30 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of Dendur might coincide with the first presidential debate, she planned to add a debate viewing component to the event to keep guests from leaving early to watch at home.
“We were ready to go to print with [debate party] invitations,” Monroe says. “We wanted them mailed so people knew this was something we didn’t just accidentally decide to do—that it was something planned.”
But the debate schedule announcement came much later than expected, and regular invites—without mention of a debate-viewing party—had to be mailed in the meantime. (To add to the anxiety, on September 17, the accidental death of a maintenance worker who fell from the temple’s glass ceiling prompted the museum to close the temple for a month, leaving Monroe scrambling to find a new location inside the museum.)
Immediately after the debate schedule was announced on September 21, a second invite—already ready to go at the printers—went out, calling the evening “A Night of Two Parties,” a play on words promoting the anniversary event and a debate-viewing party.
The quick fix worked. “We had about 550 in the first party. We expected the debate party to be less, around 150 to 200,” Monroe says. By the time Senator John Kerry and President Bush had exchanged postdebate handshakes, more than 200 guests were still mingling.
—Suzanne Ito
“We were ready to go to print with [debate party] invitations,” Monroe says. “We wanted them mailed so people knew this was something we didn’t just accidentally decide to do—that it was something planned.”
But the debate schedule announcement came much later than expected, and regular invites—without mention of a debate-viewing party—had to be mailed in the meantime. (To add to the anxiety, on September 17, the accidental death of a maintenance worker who fell from the temple’s glass ceiling prompted the museum to close the temple for a month, leaving Monroe scrambling to find a new location inside the museum.)
Immediately after the debate schedule was announced on September 21, a second invite—already ready to go at the printers—went out, calling the evening “A Night of Two Parties,” a play on words promoting the anniversary event and a debate-viewing party.
The quick fix worked. “We had about 550 in the first party. We expected the debate party to be less, around 150 to 200,” Monroe says. By the time Senator John Kerry and President Bush had exchanged postdebate handshakes, more than 200 guests were still mingling.
—Suzanne Ito
