[Dixielandjazz] The New Orleans Mardi Gras Searches For Sponsors

[Steve barbone]

Mardi Gras All Set to Go, but Officials Want Help

    
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NY TIMES - GARY RIVLIN February 12, 2006

NEW ORLEANS, Feb. 11 ‹ City officials here boldly decided last fall to hold
the parades of Mardi Gras, even though the city treasury was empty and large
swaths of the town still lay in ruins. The price, though, was their demand
that the beloved party abandon tradition and seek corporate sponsors.

With the official start of festivities scheduled for next Saturday, no
corporation has come up with the $2 million the city was hoping to receive
for the naming rights to Mardi Gras, which was first celebrated here 150
years ago.

So far only a single company, the trash-bag maker Glad Products, has said it
will contribute to the cause. On Tuesday, Glad, a subsidiary of the Clorox
Company, announced an unspecified six-figure donation to the city and a gift
of 100,000 trash bags.

If no additional corporate sponsors step forward, the city will have to dig
into its nonexistent treasury to pay for the celebration, which many
officials say the city needs to raise its spirit and its economy.

"Anyone who understands the local economy here knows this is a significant
event," said Ernest Collins, the city's director of arts and entertainment.
"Yes, it will be a challenge for us to come up with money, but this is a
tourist economy, and we need to have it."

Reginald Zeno, the city's finance director, said he was "concerned" that the
extra costs of Mardi Gras would "put a further drain on a budget at a time
we're already facing a deep deficit." But like Mr. Collins, Mr. Zeno sees
Mardi Gras as an investment that the city has no choice but to make.

"The business of New Orleans is tourism, and New Orleans has got to get back
to business," said David Rubenstein, a co-owner of Rubenstein Brothers, a
clothing store on Canal Street. "There's all this talk about bringing people
back to New Orleans, but without tourism there won't be any jobs for them to
come home to." 

Officials are still optimistic that more sponsors will materialize, even at
this late date, to help cover an estimated $2.7 million in police overtime,
trash collection and other expenses. Mr. Collins says that although he
doubts a white knight will sign up as a marquee sponsor, he still hopes that
other corporations will follow Glad's example and help defray the costs of
Mardi Gras.

Not everyone here agrees with the wisdom of putting on Mardi Gras, which has
been canceled 13 times in the past, almost always because of wars, said
Arthur Hardy, who has written extensively on the celebration in New Orleans.
That sentiment is particularly true among the tens of thousands of people
who have been evacuated from the city, many of whom have said the city's
priorities are misplaced.

Only after a protracted, sometimes clamorous debate this fall did city
officials decide to host an abbreviated version of the Mardi Gras parade
season, which will last eight days this year, rather than the customary 12,
and will use shorter routes. Mardi Gras Day will be celebrated Feb. 28.

Twenty-eight of the krewes, or social clubs, that build the elaborate floats
and organize the parades will be participating this year, compared with 34
last year, Mr. Hardy said.

One early concern expressed by small-business owners and others was that a
lack of money might mean the city could not provide adequate police
protection, but those worries seem to have dissipated. Mr. Rubenstein, whose
store is on the parade route, said he was not worried "about rioting or
looting or anything like that."

The city now has 1,300 police officers on its payroll, compared with 1,600
before Hurricane Katrina, said Tami Frazier, a spokeswoman for Mayor C. Ray
Nagin. Those officers are keeping watch over a much smaller city, and Ms.
Frazier said that the National Guard troops still in town were supplementing
the efforts of the police force.

"There'll be adequate security, without a doubt," said Hans U. Wandfluh, the
general manager of the Royal Sonesta Hotel on Bourbon Street in the heart of
the French Quarter.

The real worry, then, many say, is financial. Those in the sponsorship
business say the city should have started searching for corporate donors in
August, when companies typically start thinking about their marketing budget
for the coming year.

"Corporations expect a return on investment for these kind of sponsorship
deals," said Phil Strober, the vice president for corporate alliances at
Wakeham & Associates Marketing, which has offices in New York and Los
Angeles. For their contribution, Mr. Strober said, companies typically want
to produce marketing materials that will help them "maximize their bang for
the buck" and see their logo displayed prominently in advertising campaigns
‹ efforts that require months of preparation.
Skip to next paragraph

Yet Hurricane Katrina struck on Aug. 29, and it was not until October that
city officials and others even started to debate the propriety of financing
so raucous a celebration when people had lost so much and the city faced so
many challenges. 

"We knew this would be an uphill struggle to find corporate sponsors in so
short a time frame," said Mr. Collins, the arts and entertainment director.
It was not until late December, he said, that the city enlisted the firm
MediaBuys, based in Los Angeles, to seek corporate sponsors. The goals were
to help cover the costs of the celebration and to finance a limited national
campaign related to Mardi Gras to increase tourism.

MediaBuys has approached about 75 corporations in search of sponsors, said
the company's chief executive, Chick Ciccarelli, and enlisted the services
of several large advertising firms, including Saatchi & Saatchi and Ketchum
Inc. 

"We're still in negotiations with other corporations," said Mr. Ciccarelli,
who expressed confidence that more corporations would commit money before
next weekend. 

Ideally, Mr. Collins said, the city would have started running a Mardi Gras
campaign weeks ago, but "nothing about this effort has been ideal."

There are other factors at work, too. Many image-conscious corporations may
be reluctant to lend their name to an event that often becomes a bacchanal.
"This would have been a tough sell even in the best of circumstances," said
Mr. Strober of Wakeham & Associates.

There is a chance, of course, that Mardi Gras will more than pay for itself
through a significant increase in hotel and sales tax revenue. There are
about 36,000 hotel rooms in and around the city, nearly two-thirds of which
are taking guests. The hotels are telling city officials that they will be
running at or near capacity during Mardi Gras, but that has been the case
for months with evacuees, contractors and emergency workers keeping them
busy. 

"It's impossible for me to predict what kind of revenues we'll see from
Mardi Gras," said Mr. Zeno, the finance director. "We're expecting a pretty
good turnout, but how this will all fall out is anyone's guess."