Canyon Ranch:  “Eat, Play, Live” Integrated Sales and Marketing Event 

The Goal: 
Create an integrated event to showcase Canyon Ranch and build brand awareness among media, trade, and consumer audiences.

Strategy:
The Canyon Ranch experience was brought to life in a three-day event branded “Eat, Play, Live.” In order to demonstrate Canyon Ranch’s healthy lifestyle while directly engaging consumers, media, and industry partners, the Canyon Ranch experience was created in a multi-level New York City loft space including an outdoor rooftop.

The media experienced a day in the life of Canyon Ranch by participating in cooking demonstrations, one-on-one meetings with medical staff, health evaluations, cutting-edge fitness classes, and spa treatments. In addition, Canyon Ranch’s Outdoor Specialist led a “Primitive Skills Survival Program” including fire making and animal tracking on the roof.

To engage consumers, Canyon Ranch’s culinary team provided healthy delights on the streets of Manhattan via a food truck wrapped in “Eat, Play, Live” signage.  To increase awareness, street teams were deployed in the promotion of locations prior to the event and audiences were engaged through social media channels. In addition, the food truck visited key industry partners providing a fun, interactive way to showcase the brand.

Results:
The Canyon Ranch chef and culinary team fed more than 1,000 consumers throughout Manhattan including Wall Street, Midtown East, Midtown West and Flatiron.  Canyon Ranch representatives also visited top travel agent clients, delivering lunches and information about the brand.

The “Eat, Play, Live” event was attended by 80 top media, including Vogue, Town & Country, Glamour, Fitness, Self, O Magazine, Redbook, Brides, Worth, Men’s Health, The Today Show, Access Hollywood and many more. WCBS featured numerous segments of the day’s consumer events.

Queen Mary 2 Remastered Case Study

The Goal: 
MGA Media Group was charged with creating a high-impact public relations campaign to re-launch Cunard’s flagship ocean liner, Queen Mary 2, to the media and public after the ship underwent an extensive renovation costing in the region of $132 million.  The task was to develop and execute a large-scale event to showcase the newly-designed ship and generate national and local news coverage of QM2’s U.S. debut on July 6, 2016, following the U.K. launch a few weeks earlier.

Strategy:
To set this renovation apart from all other commonly occurring ship refurbishments, the agency worked to distill key facts and figures about the complexities of the work done during the refit as well as the unique design elements which took their inspiration from history and the original Queen Mary. The main objective was to generate press coverage of Queen Mary 2’s Remastering through a variety of mediums, including print, broadcast, online and social media with these key messages: contemporizing the brand, luxury at sea, business, and the kennels.  

One way into the broader Remastering story was to leverage the unique position QM2 has with sailing pets. The agency engaged NYC’s most famous Instagram dogs to come onboard July 6 for a formal ribbon cutting of the newly Remastered Kennels. The strategy proved to be a huge success!

Results:

The Remastering of Queen Mary 2 generated global news coverage, with more than 40 million broadcast audience (54 radio and 151 TV spots), 6 million print circulation (133 outlets), and 742 million online UVM in North America (113 online sites).

The Associated Press story alone ran in 123 newspapers and websites nationwide including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, MSN and Yahoo; a CBS nationally-syndicated segment ran 94 times in 75 markets across the country; an Associated Press radio piece aired 46 times in 26 markets in the U.S.

Media coverage highlights include:
Broadcast: CNBC live remote with Carnival Corp CEO Arnold Donald, CBS-TV National, ABC News National, Reuters TV, Time Warner Cable News, News 12, AP Radio, CBS Radio

Online: New York Times, CNN, MSN, AOL, Huffington Post, Yahoo! Finance, USA Today, FOX Business, FOX News, Travel + Leisure, Veranda, Town & Country, Robb Report, The Street, Architectural Digest, ESPN, Skift, Cruise Critic and Hospitality Design

Print: Associated Press, Departures, LA Times, Wall Street Journal, NY Post, USA Today, Philly Inquirer, Dallas Morning News

Social Media: Bloomberg Pursuits Live Facebook Feed, Conde Nast Traveler Snapchat video, Instagram posts from top NYC dogstagrammers

Launch of Hotel Café Royal

The Goal: 
Create anticipation for and launch London’s 160-room Hotel Café Royal following a period of extensive renovation. Introduce the property as an independent luxury hotel by the newly formed hotel brand, The Set.

Strategy:
The launch of the Hotel Café Royal was a challenging public relations task because little was known about this long-famed institution in the United States.  Although London’s intellectual, political and artistic literati – including Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, Winston Churchill and Mick Jagger – had frequented Café Royal, the iconic establishment needed an introduction in the U.S.

The mission was complicated by the fact that the building had a number of incarnations over the years and had never served as a hotel prior to this re-opening. In addition, the independent status of the hotel brand made the hotel launch more challenging.

The focus of the campaign was to position the reopening of the Café Royal as the rebirth of a London landmark by referencing the hotel’s rich cultural heritage. The strategy was to provide historical background and relevance of the property to the U.S. media thereby demonstrating the significance of the re-launch.

The media campaign also leveraged the building’s historical significance, David Chipperfield’s award-winning architectural design, and Donald Insall’s painstaking restoration to secure news and feature-length coverage in the months leading up to the re-launch.

Results:
The launch of the Hotel Cafe Royal marked the return of a London institution that, throughout its 150-year history, had continually reinvented itself to define the moods, social mores and style of the capital.

The campaign successfully positioned the Hotel Café Royal as the rebirth of a landmark by educating U.S media on the Café Royal’s rich history, as well as showcasing the newsworthy historic restoration.

During a media road show within the U.S. market, Café Royal senior management attended 35 media appointments. As a result of pitches to top U.S. media outlets, extensive news and feature coverage was secured in key target media including Architectural Digest, Elle Décor, Surface, The New York Times, Condé Nast Traveler, Travel + Leisure, Afar, Robb Report, Forbes, Billboard, T Magazine and more.

Cunard's 175th Anniversary Celebrations