Kristian Sonnier, Director of Public Relations: GE Capital hired us to help them with a couple of public events on April 23. We worked with Launch Media out of Baton Rouge to build out the stages and basically transformed a pretty drab, unused section of an elevator landing into a press conference location that is worthy of one of the world’s largest corporations, the governor of Louisiana and the mayor of the city.

So one of the many challenges with this thing was they wanted us to have a press conference in the morning at the World War II Museum with the chairman and CEO of GE there, Jeff Immelt, where they donated a check to the World War II Museum and the Congressional Medal Of Honor Foundation.

We got mad coverage for that event but our challenge with the afternoon event was they wanted the same amount of media coverage. For us to get the same media turnout was going to be really tricky, because all the newsrooms were saying by noon, when we’re approaching them for the 5:30 event, “We’ve already covered enough of GE today.”

But we had more people, different people attending the afternoon event. We had two VPs from GE. We had the governor of the state and we had the mayor of the city. These were new angles that the media could cover.

The client was very happy with the turnout for this event. It totaled about 54 newsprint stories and about eight TV stories and their goal was local coverage. They wanted to blanket the local market. Constant communication and constant walkthroughs are necessary for pulling off a problem-free press conference, especially when you’ve got captains of industry and elected officials like that present.