It has been a decade since I supervised pubic relations for the Miss Universe Contest on Hawaii, but I’ll always remember the lesson I learned from the experience.
The local public relations we generated for each of the 84 girls in their individual countries was just as important as the media we got from the two-week long pageant on Oahu. I took some work and fortunately I had also supervised the Western Union money transfer account for 100 countries just a few years before, but the interest from the media was much stronger for the individual candidates than it was from the big print and broadcast outlets—particularly since CBS owned a piece of it with Donald Trump at the time. So we did our share of getting the big stuff but we also made sure that media in each of the girl’s countries (presuming they had media) got information as well.
It means finding the right kind of translators who know how to reproduce the English journalistic style into foreign languages but we did it. It also meant finding the right media in those countries. The girls, their sponsors and the translators were very helpful.
Nearly all of the girls who ranged from shopkeepers from Eastern Europe to a doctor and a dentist (that’s right!) had little stories about themselves worth feeding back to the home country press. We even had a great story for Miss Israel who participated in services with an Oahu Jewish congregation for Passover—a story that went international.
The Miss Universe contest stands n stark contrast to another beauty contest I had supervised for public relations several years before. It was a tugboat beauty contest held on the Hudson River and hosted by Bert Parks who had been fired the year before by the Miss America people. The contest was for Jones Lange Wooten then one of the world’s largest real estate developers to celebrate the opening of Harborside Financial Center in Jersey City, across the Hudson from Wall Street. Jersey City is now a back office haven for Wall Street. Then, it was nothing. We got the tugboat captains to decorate their boats and parade up the Hudson in front of Harborside while Bert Parks, company officials and local politicians rated the tuggies. Thanks to Bert and the idea we got national media coverage that night for the Center which years before had been a cold storage terminal for goods coming into the New York port. I knew because I had worked loading boxes there as a teenager.
Other events of note:
• A party three stories down in a construction hole on Park Avenue in New York to unveil plans for a 38-story luxury condominium project with only 38 units. We had to reinforce an earth ramp so media could walk down into the site. We served gourmet food and champagne and gave out hard hats and press kits at the conclusion, Front page New York Times the next day.
• Kickoff for Coca Cola Food’s (Minute Maid, Hi-C) participation in the summer Olympics—20 amateur female runners from all over the U.S. legging it cross country to Colorado Springs home of the Olympics training facility, to promote the first year of women’s distance running events in the Olympics. I got Winnebago to give me a camper, GM to give me pace cars and hotel chains to put us up for nothing. We took it through every major American city from the start at the George Washington Bridge to Colorado. At times, the route was circuitous to get there, but we had print and broadcast in every town we hit. And we raised money for the women’s distance running committee by holding running clinics at each of the hotels. We kept switching agency crews to keep everybody fresh and held nightly conferences so our media team in New York could generate fresh stories for the next day.
There are many more but I’m already running long. If anyone is interested in hearing more, let me know. Next time out maybe we can talk about event locations that don’t cost much and might be perfect for attracting attention and media coverage.