A Super Excuse For A Party

The roving reporters of BizBash The Wall Street Journal of the event planning industry have finally posted their full reports on simultaneous Super Bowl orgies in Detroit last weekend. The big four Maxim, Playboy, Sports Illustrated, and ESPN The Magazine staged a booze-fueled duel to the death for advertising pages in the backyards of their automotive advertisers, and the good folks at BizBash (who I've written for in the past) have all the salacious details. Playboy secured a hangar at Detroit's airport, declared the theme to be the "Eight Mile High Club," and packed the place with 1,600 guests. Maxim saw their 1,600 guests, and raised them 400 guests, but took a major hit when it came to cred by hosting the party at the home of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and by invoking, of all things, the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical "Starlight Express" as the inspiration for the roving packs of scantily clad "roller girls." (And Absolut built a bar themed to The Who's "Tommy." More evidence of the Manhattan media-showtunes connection.) Keith Kelly reports today that Maxim was shamed when the Freep found out about a guest-list policy of "hot girls only." ESPN took over an empty warehouse and kitted it out to reflect the theme of its "Next" issue, but that was just one big diorama hyping sponsors like Gillette's Fusion razor and Miller Lite. The party took place at the Colony Club "originally designed by Henry Ford's wife as a clubhouse for women," according to BizBash which attracted just 700 guests trying to understand the appeal of the massively hyped ESPN Mobile service. Sports Illustrated, meanwhile, nearly quadrupled that attendance at its own party held at the Emerald Theater, which included not just swimsuit models, but an appearance by the Seattle Seahawks cheerleaders an earnest attempt to trump both the Playboy bunnies and Maxim's rollergirls. Because the way into a 25-year-old media planner's 2007 plan is through his... you can guess. One of the magazine industry's saddest open secrets is that it's held hostage by twentysomethings who perform the yeoman's work for media planning agencies. The money SI spent on its party could have probably paid for the salaries of the seven employees it's seeking to jettison, but that would be counterproductive to say the least when your ad pages fell 16.8 percent last year. If you want to make your number, you have to break open a few thousand cases of Miller Lite.

Fishbowl

A Super Excuse For A Party

Greg

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Greg