Can Old Pasadena Handle Halloween? And Howl!

Yes, this year Old Pasadena is not just out to celebrate Halloween, but to make this year’s Halloween celebration the best ever. For kids of course, that’s a simple task indeed. It’s one of the highest of the high holy days in kid-dom: The day of candyCandyCANDYCANDY CANDY! But for parents, especially in this economy, it can be a bit of a trial. Especially this year when Halloween falls on a weekend. How do you handle keeping the kids entertained, for two days, on a budget? That’s where Old Pasadena comes in. First create an event that makes both days really special, then let everyone know about it – with an advertising budget that is tiny at best.

Old Pasadena Home Page featuring the Halloween Celebration

First, and most important, to make any event work you have to make it special.

Kershona Mayo, our Director of Event Marketing & Production, worked hard to organize a district wide, Halloween celebration filled with treats on both Saturday and Sunday. And it’s Free! The focus is on fun and safe, with the emphasis on fun, encompassing activities throughout Old Pasadena.

On Saturday, October 30, Old Pasadena takes over Central Park, 260 S. Raymond Avenue. There’ll be Free caramel apples for the first 200 people to arrive, then a pumpkin hunt (little pumpkins filled with candy) from 1:00-2:00 pm, and from 1:00-5:00– There’s a Halloween moon bounce accompanied by live “ghoulish” music. At the Armory Center for the Arts, just a few blocks north, they’re holding a Halloween crafts center from 1:00-5:00 pm complete with a scary animal-and-bug show and tell.

The Old Town Haunt joins in the fun with a little kid-friendly tour.

On Sunday, October 31, Old Pasadena partners with One Colorado for free store-to-store trick-or-treating along with a special Meet-and-Greet with favorite Halloween characters from 4:00-9:00 pm.  There will be free haunted photos of the kids and free screenings of Halloween cartoons in the Courtyard from 5:00-9:00. And to make even the littlest kids feel big, there will be a special youngster-friendly tour of the popular Old Town Haunt, with all the lights on and no scary screaming from12:00-4:00pm.
Pretty impressive, huh? But now that the event is in place, how do you promote it?

First of all, it’s newsworthy. So Kershona, even with limited print and absolutely no broadcast budget whatsoever, can generate millions of dollars in free airtime on TV and radio. She also fully exploits an array of social network sites from Twitter and Facebook to Yelp to generate buzz. Partnerships with our local Pasadena City College radio station KPCC, an NPR affiliate, further magnify the reach to parents.

Every participating merchant received a poster and matching postcards to hand out to customers.

Add to that select local newspaper advertising, posters all over town and free postcards for our merchants to hand out, and you have a powerful campaign indeed. Reinforcing that effort is the OPMD website. Janet Schwartz, OMPD’s Director of PR & Destination Marketing, has put not only the Old Pasadena website to work, she follows up with regular email blasts to merchants, visitors and friends of Old Pasadena. Last year, the Halloween celebration marketing effort resulted in an additional 2000 page views in the days leading up to the event.

So that’s the secret. A great event. Enthusiastic social marketing promotion. Partnerships with merchants and media outlets. And an audience of parents hungry for fun, free and safe entertainment, and of course, kids just hungry for candyCandyCANDYCANDY CANDY!

Happy Halloween everyone.

Never use Translations in Your Advertising

And, on the other hand, ALWAYS translate your advertising.
Lemme splain.
The most effective kind of communication is idiomatic. Hence, the most effective advertising is idiomatic. Idioms are the connections that link a culture together, and they don't translate between cultures well. If you have a message that works well in English, you have to remember that it is working well in American English, not British English, Australian English or even Canadian English, eh? Or as George Bernhard Shaw so eloquently put it, "The English and the Americans are two peoples separated by a common language." What that means to an advertiser is: If you want to reach an new audience that speaks a different language, it is not enough to just translate the words of your message.  Even if you get all the words right, the message itself will suffer mightily.

A couple of idioms from another culture, Max and Moritz. Read more and see original image: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Max_und_Moritz.JPG

One of the more amusing ways to demonstrate this is to take a common expression such as, "You can't teach an old dog new tricks." and use Bablefish to translate that into say German, which translates to: "Sie können einem alten Hund neue Tricks nicht unterrichten." Those words are basically correct, "hund" is dog, "underrichten" is teach, and "Tricks" is tricks. However if you try to translate that "German expression" back into English, you get, "They can an old dog new cheat not to inform." Um Gotteswillen! In fact, if you wanted to express that concept idiomatically to a German audience that grew up on Max and Moritz, you would say, "Was Hänschen nicht lernt, lernt Hans nimmermehr," which means, "What little Hans doesn't learn, grown up Hans will never learn." That might have absolutely nothing to do with dogs, but the idiom carries the same exact meaning to an entirely different culture. It is reminiscent of a tale told in intelligence circles about early attempts to use the super computers of the cold-war 60’s to translate Russian into English. When they put in “Out of sight, out of mind” using their algorithm, what they got back was: “invisible idiot.”
That said.
Always translate your product essentials (such as the NAME) into the language of your target audience to avoid embarrassment. If for instance you want to introduce your automobile into a new country south of our border, it would be instructive to know that the name NOVA is a colloquialism for “doesn’t run.” Then there’s Vicks cough drops which became popular in Germany, but before introducing them there, they had to change the name to “Wicks,” because they discovered that “vicks” is a rude name for a sex act. Much more recently Osco Drug Stores bought out Sav-On drugs in the predominantly Hispanic Southern California market. They were so proud of the name they had created for themselves over the decades, that they changed their store names, stationary, and advertising from Sav-On to Osco and watched their sales plummet, especially in predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods. Osco, it turned out, was an idiom usually associated with vomiting. When you’re sick, the last place anyone wants to go is Vomit Drugs.
After all is said and done, no matter what language it is said and done in, the most basic tenant of advertising applies. Know your audience. Speak their language.  Whether your audience are juniors looking for fashion or governments looking for engineers, learn their jargon, their idioms and you can talk to them in their language, no matter what language they speak.

How do you choose a person of the Century?

Well if you're developing a fund raiser to celebrate the first century of Scouting, then first and foremost, you need an outstanding Scout.  No problem there.  You have an incredible abundance of folks to choose from. Eagle Scouts alone have become presidents, governors, war heroes, Supreme Court Justices, and astronauts including 11 of the 12 men who walked on the moon. 

So the Boy Scouts Los Angeles Area Council tried to find a person who exemplified the spirit of scouting.  Someone with a wide breadth of knowledge and experience in a variety of fields.  How better to represent the many areas of achievement rewarded by Scouting with merit badges and advancement in rank. 

The person they decided on was University of Southern California president Steven B. Sample.  As our CEO and Boy Scouts Los Angeles Area Council Board member, Suzanne Marks explained, "He best personified the variety of skills that Scouting has taught for over a hundred years.  Steven Sample is an inventor, an educator, a business leader, an author and a Boy Scout.” 

To develop her campaign, a mix of traditional and electronic media, Suzanne relied on two of her own Scouts at Pasadena Advertising, Life Scout and V.P. Creative Tony Nino, and Eagle Scout, Creative Director, David Ensz.  “I wanted a design a basic look with a balanced focus to honor Dr. Sample and also pay homage to the first century of Scouting,” explained David Ensz, “the muted earth tones were a reminder that camping is an essential part of the Scouting experience.”  “Although crimson and gold seemed to be more prominently displayed among the USC alumni,” laughed Tony Nino.

Dr. Sample is the esteemed author of the Los Angeles Times Best selling book, “The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership,” and a highly regarded professor of “The Art and Adventure of Leadership,” His extraordinary efforts in propelling academics at the University of Southern California are world-renowned; his incredible ability to generate contributions to that fine institution of higher learning has resulted in one of the most successful fundraising campaigns in the history of higher education.

Fittingly Dr. Sample’s Person of the Century celebration raised over $600,000 for Scouting in Los Angeles. In this economy, that was an achievement that more than exceeded expectations.  The Los Angeles Area Council is honored and grateful for the contributions of all our supporters.