Myer Christmas Parade 2008

After successfully producing the Myer Christmas Parade in 2007, Myer asked us to once again manage their largest public event, designed to foster consumer goodwill and induce a strong start to the vital Christmas shopping period.

Producing the parade involved assisting Myer with sponsor acquisition from brands such as Sesame Street, Hasbro and The Wiggles before designing and constructing each float to meet the marketing objective of its sponsor.

We were then responsible for the logistics, stakeholder, risk, operations, creative and budget management required to ensure the safe and effective delivery of Australias largest Christmas parade.

After securing the Seven Network telecast in 2007, one of our primary challenges was to make the event more television-friendly, to ensure that the excitement on the ground translated to this entirely different medium.

Our other challenge was to raise the bar even higher than the significant improvements we brought to the event in the previous year (see the case study here).

We out-performed expectations in each of the areas established in 2007: our in-house workshop designed and created 11 large-scale floats, each with higher production values than previously seen in Melbourne; our community engagement team curated, costumed and rehearsed 1100 performers from 30 different community groups representing a 40% increase from the previous year; and we grew the number of celebrities and performers to 30, providing the icing to the wow-factor.

Additionally, we implemented a television zone which was inspired by our experience at the 2007 Macys Thanksgiving Parade in New York. In this area celebrities, floats and selected community performers stopped to present a routine directly to camera. This improvement, along with opening numbers by Wicked and the Myer Chorus of 100 performers, provided Channel Seven with more quality content than they could fit into the one-hour broadcast.

As an added bonus, we also secured Government funding for the event, which wasnt even in the brief.

The end result was a safe and truly spectacular event attended by tens of thousands and watched by hundreds of thousands. Myers level of satisfaction is evident in the fact that weve already been engaged to produce the parade in November 2009. Want to know how were going to raise the bar even further? Watch this space!

Category:

Travel & Events

Tags:

• Myer
• Christmas
• Parade
• Ready
• Set
• Go
• Jennifer
• Hawkins
• Rebecca
• Twigley
• Andrew
• Gaze
• Ricki-Lee
• Coulter
• Carl
• Riseley
• Mahalia
• Barnes
• Wicked

[dani906]

this parade was awesome my mum was driving leisel jones it was so cool