As the 2010 hurricane season came to a close, Peter Mayer’s public relations team helped to open the largest hurricane exhibit in the world, Living with Hurricanes: Katrina and Beyond, at the Louisiana State Museum’s Presbytere in New Orleans on October 26. The agency led a comprehensive grand opening PR campaign that included national, regional, and local media relations, special events for the local hospitality and digital communities, and social media management. The grand opening media relations campaign generated coverage worldwide, creating more than 120 million impressions.

The agency helped the museum announce the project with a major PR push on June 1, the first day of hurricane season, that netted extensive coverage, including a national Associated Press entertainment blurb. Nearly three months later, on the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, Peter Mayer coordinated a special media preview for the exhibit that helped garner local, national and international media attention from networks such as ABC News, FOX News and CNN.

As the exhibit neared completion, the agency secured an exclusive advance feature article by the Associated Press that described the exhibit as “stunning” and was picked up worldwide (see a sample). The AP’s travel editor repackaged the news article as a travel feature and distributed it to major print media travel sections around the U.S.

The official grand opening took place October 26 with a press conference at the museum featuring New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu and National Hurricane Center Director Bill Read. All four local TV stations and The Times-Picayune covered the event, as did USA Today, which published an extensive news story in its print edition and had the exhibit as the top “Nation and World” story on its homepage.

Visit Living with Hurricanes: Katrina and Beyond at the Presbytere in Jackson Square, New Orleans.