Ellen Michaels Presents, Inc.
How Complex Can An Event Get?
Setting up a meeting or event is never easy, but there's a sliding scale. If you want to know how complicated things can get, a recent event held by Kendall-Jackson Winery may set some kind of new standard.
In an unusual publicity move, Kendall-Jackson put its reputation on the line by spending more than $2 million on a single-night event to promote the release of its two new tiers of wine.
From New York to San Francisco, sommeliers, restaurant proprietors, wine merchants and other invited guests took part in Kendall-Jackson's Vintage Release 2001 event, hosted by renowned wine critic Anthony Dias Blue. The event was a massive undertaking and a first on this scale for the wine industry. Nearly 3,000 of Kendall-Jackson's top clients in 18 cities across the U.S. witnessed, via a live satellite broadcast, eight prominent wine critics holding court and openly critiquing the newly unveiled wines.
"To the best of our knowledge, and we have talked to people in the wine industry, it's probably the first time an event of this scope has been done," said Jim Caudill, vice president of public relations for Kendall-Jackson. "And it was definitely a unique event."
At each location the four-hour event began with a 1.5-hour interactive tasting and was followed by a question-and-answer session, reception and dinner. For the tasting portion, guests, with 11 wines placed in front of them, sipped in stride with the wine panel's critique, which was broadcast live via satellite from Kendall-Jackson's headquarters here.
From event coordination at the 18 locations, to the live satellite transmission and extensive contingency plan developed in case of broadcast interruption, the single-night event presented serious operational challenges from both event-management and production standpoints.
"So many things could have gone wrong — that was one reason we wanted to use very experienced, top professionals from both the meeting planning and the video production area," said Caudill. "And both Ellen Michaels Presents and TVA [Television Associates Inc.] met that standard and carried it off beautifully."
"If you took each city as a stand-alone city, it didn't seem like that complicated of an event," said Susan von Winckler, director of operations for San Jose, Calif.-based Ellen Michaels Presents.
"But when you combined 3,000 people in 18 different locations, the production elements, timing of the live broadcast, transportation for VIPs, hotel rooms, and being careful with people who may be intoxicated after the event, it was pretty difficult to coordinate."
Even such details as obtaining the wine glasses, which at first was not given much thought, presented major obstacles by virtue of the sheer number of glasses required.
"That's 11 glasses for the tasting and five for the dinner times 3,000 people," said John Kennedy O'Connor, director of marketing and business development for Ellen Michaels Presents. "It sounds so trivial, but it was enormously difficult just finding a supplier that has that number of matching, identical glasses in the right size."
And the process of properly preparing the glasses and setting the tables was almost an event in itself.
"Every glass had to be double washed with no detergents, dried, buffed and inspected before the wine was poured," O'Connor said. "Kendall-Jackson's clients have very refined palates and could tell if there was any dishwasher detergent on the glass. None of the staff could have on cologne, none of the floors could have any fragrance, and if there were candles they had to be unscented. Even down to what the linens were washed in — we had to be extremely careful."
From the production standpoint, the event presented additional technical challenges.
"Probably the toughest and most critical thing about the production, in terms of communication, was the timing of the event," said Ed Schultz, executive producer for Ellen Michaels Presents. "It's like producing a hotel-ballroom show, only with 18 ballrooms that have to run at the exact same time. And there were all sorts of audiovisual cues throughout the evening that were not all satellite related. Some were generated locally and some from the studio we were broadcasting from."
And then there were those good old uncontrollable elements on which the success of this event, like that of so many others, depended.
"The Mir spacestation was scheduled to fall, and a solar flair was predicted — these things can take satellites out," said Schultz. "We had to have a contingency plan where every city was attended by a wine master from Kendall-Jackson so that in the event we lost satellite transmission for any reason, the tasting would be done by the wine master at that venue."
The combination of the "live" broadcast and the panel's unscripted responses lent an unusual edge to the evening. If a panelist didn't like a wine, everyone in the audience knew it.
"The wine tasters were not prepped, it was their honest reaction," said O'Connor. "If the panelists had said every single wine was horrible, it would have gone out live to 3,000 people."
And indeed a few panelists did suggest that certain wines would "go well with pizza" or that they should go back in storage for another few years. "Kendall-Jackson knew they had some killer wines," said Schultz. "I don't think they went into this thinking they were going to get bad reviews, but there were a few, not-glowing responses from some panelists — and that's the honesty of having it live."
