Monday, September 14, 2009

New York New York! A Day promoting Keith Urban in the city.


Deb and I had a blast yesterday. We went down to New York to promote Keith Urban's concert at Madison Square Garden on October 8.

The day started for me REALLY early at 3:30 am with a sleepy shower. We were out the door by 4:30 and headed to the train station in Stamford, CT which is only 40 miles outside New York. That's where the promoting began. We had the early morning train riders laughing on the platform as I stuck flyers everywhere I could. We handed some out to interested people and then headed into the Grand Central Station.

As soon as we arrived we went straight to Rockefeller Plaza for the taping of The Today Show. We handed out more flyers in line and met some really nice ladies from Atlanta who were in town for business. One of them said she came to New York often and was going to look into tickets for the MSG show! We also met a really nice lady from Columbus, Ohio who had seen Keith in Cincinatti. It seems Keith is popular all over.

We got a pretty good spot (or so we thought) by the Today Show barricade and waited for the show to start. We were a but worried when the crew put a table of supplies right in front of us knowing there was no way we would get on TV with that in front of us, so we decided to look for a better spot. We saw the crew setting up lights for the outside shot and positioned ourselves behind a few other people at the railing. As we held up our signs the camera man (Dave) pointed at us and motioned for us to move over a bit so he could be sure to get us on camera, and HE DID!! Deb could see on the monitor that we made it onto the show. After our 3 minutes of fame (LOL) we called Dave over to say thank you! He was very nice and we found out that his wife is a huge Keith fan. We talked a bit and he said they were definitely going to the MSG show and he even took a picture of us to show to his wife when he got home.

Next it was over to Times Square. We thought that would be a great place to maximize the flyer efforts and boy were we right. Once we got there we found out that this was the day for Broadway on Broadway, which is a huge event where a lot of the Broadway performers perform live and free for the public. It's a very popular event especially with the locals. So, after a quick breakfast to refuel we were off handing out flyers. I have a lot more respect for the people who do that every day for a living in Times Square. Its not as easy as it looks. Luckily we got a really good response from the people who would accept the flyers. Quite a few people seemed excited to see Keith was performing locally and a lot more commented on him and Nicole being at the US Open last week. LOL New Yorkers really seem to have their fingers on the pulse of what's going on.

After a while handing out flyers we decided to take another little break and we headed over to the Hershey store. Having visited the city many times in the past the store is a favorite desination and we knew that they had a live running banner that goes across over the store. Patrons can put their message on the banner and I thought that would be a fun way to get the message out there about Keith at MSG! So in the store we went. The nice clerk told me that my message "See Keith Urban at Madison Square Garden - October 8th" could be shown for 15 minutes and I could buy as many 15 minutes as I wanted. :) She also said that I could chose what times the message would show as long as the banner was on. So, I bought 60 minutes worth and picked out four different times for the message to show on the banner, the first one starting immediately. Just before I left her the clerk said she wasn't really a country music fan but she thought Keith is cute. :) We had a nice little conversation about Keith's music and his talents (other than his looks) and then it was time to go.

We headed outside to take some pictures and video of the banner and then headed off to hand out more flyers. By now the Broadway on Broadway audience was getting really big. We waded in and I was able to give out almost all of the rest of flyers to people as they waited for the next performance. Again it was fun to stop and talk to people about Keith. Most who knew who Keith is were very complimentary and it was fun to talk to others who said "who?" as I gave them a flyer.

By now it was about 1 pm and we were exhausted and hungry again so we went into the Hard Rock Cafe for a bite to eat. The waiter (JR) who brought us our food noticed the flyer and asked about Keith. He talked to us a bit and took a picture with me too.

All in all I handed out 400 flyers during the day.

Finally it was time to head home. The train was pretty packed on the way back to Stamford and so we had to share our seats with two ladies who were going home from a girl's weekend in the city. One was from South Norwalk, CT and the other from Mass. They joked with me a bit over the KU t-shirt and then seemed pretty impressed that we had spent the day promoting Keith's show.

The day ended in front of the TV where we had taped the Today Show. It was fun to see ourselves on camera and the signs looked really good!

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