It started with a one-line e-mail a PR executive sent to a buddy of his who happens to be to a television producer in Los Angeles. It culminated two weeks later with the entire
audience of NBC's "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" piling onto a jumbo jet for a one-day, round-trip excursion to Las Vegas.
Clearly, Rene Mack knows how to work the magic.
Mack, president of travel PR at Weber Shandwick, was asked by client American Airlines in the fall of 2002 to give the airliner a less button-down image.
Yet Mack had a lot of obstacles to overcome. This is a tough time in the travel biz. One of American's largest competitors, US Airways, filed for bankruptcy in August 2002,
and United Airlines was about to do the same in December 2002. American itself has been in difficult financial straits: Its parent company, AMR Corp., has seen its stock price
fall from a high of almost $30 in March 2002 to under $5 a share in October. The only bright spot is the airline's claim of "More Room Throughout Coach," a product enhancement
that took more than 9,500 seats out of the company's fleet to create additional legroom.
Which brings us back to Mack's e-mail, fired off to a friend who produces a segment for the "The Tonight Show." Mack would not divulge the name of his contact for fear that he
would be inundated with PR pitches. "What if I were to give you a plane to take the entire studio someplace fun?" Mack asked. It was a big risk. Mack's client did not know about
the pitch, "but it is better to ask forgiveness than permission," he says. "If you want to get the big hits, then when everybody tells you it can't be done, that is exactly when
you have to do it."
Perhaps Mack's colleague put it best. "He doesn't let the real world or reality hinder his brilliant thinking at all," says Jody Venturoni, an executive VP and GM of the
agency's southwest region, who heads up the American account and did most of the legwork to turn Mack's idea a reality.
And there was plenty of legwork to do, once the producer agreed to fly the entire "Tonight Show" audience out to Vegas to catch Howie Mandel's comedy show on the Strip.
"It's not as simple as just pulling a plane out of service," Venturoni explains. "You have to work with their charter service. You have to make sure there is a plane available.
You have to make sure the plane is big enough. And of course security is a huge issue: How do you accelerate the screening process for passengers to get them on the plane in time
to meet the production schedules?"
The role of the PR team on these issues was to act as liaison between the show's producers and American, helping each party to see what was needed and then putting the plan
into practice.
At the same time, the PR pros were eager to make this event a win not just for Jay Leno, but also for their client. American Airlines was hoping to get some decent exposure out
of the event, and that required a lot of finesse during negotiations. "Their show is notoriously noncommercial," Mack says. "You don't see them hawking specific products or
brands. They are very cautious not to be very commercial, yet if American Airlines was going to take the time and effort to get the crews and move these people, we had to make
sure that American would receive verbal and visual mentions that would help to define the brand."
As for giving the airline a plug, "there were no formal documents, no memos, no letters of agreement," Mack says. In the end, the airliner's logo got a visual and the increased
legroom got a mention.
Venturoni worked to get maximum visual identity into the shoot. She created gift bags branded with the airline logo and filled with foam rubber planes, collateral literature
and promotional buttons. (Leno vetoed her plan for branded T-shirts.)
In the end, the PR team got more than they bargained for. Besides shots of the logo and an on-air mention of the airlines' name Mandel took the legroom theme to extremes,
asking passengers to put their feet up on the headrest in front of their seats to demonstrate how far one could stretch out.
Results? The airline got 12 minutes of network airtime, and it was happy airtime too, with passengers enjoying themselves in a humorous and upbeat light. As to ROI, the PR team
estimates an advertising equivalency of $1.5 million, compared with less than $100,000 in operational costs to the company. In addition, NBC ran numerous "Tonight Show" promos
designed to bring viewers to the special segment, while marketing and television writers from The Wall Street Journal and other publications and various entertainment-industry Web
sites covered the unusual event.
Contacts: Rene Mack, 212.445.8123, [email protected] ; Jay Pearson, 817.967.2607, [email protected] ; Jody Venturoni, 972.830.2244, [email protected]
Leno's Liftoff
Want Jay Leno's chin to share the screen with your client's name or image? Here are some tips from Rene Mack, president of travel PR at Weber Shandwick, on how to pitch "The
Tonight Show."
Think big - Mack insists that no idea is ever too far-fetched for television.
Think visual - It's a visual medium, after all. Mack suggested an entire aircraft as an eye-catcher, and Leno's people agreed.
Think simple - Mack's rule for PR campaigns ought to hang in a shiny gold frame in every workplace in America. "If you can't write down your idea on a post-it sticker," he
says, "you don't know what your idea is."