Snowballin' - Media Meditation #2

The Snowball dance at Champlain College has been a huge event for several years now. This annual event was last night, Thursday February 4th, 2010. It was placed at the Hilton Hotel and was a successful night. Over 300 people were their dancing their hearts out. The theme of this dance was 1920’s themed. I am a member of the C.H.A.M.P program on campus. It is an extra curricular that consists of planning big events just like the Snowball. So for the last two weeks, plus last night, I was apart of helping out with the planning as much as possible.

This event was a HUGE media experience for me. When a lot of people think of media experiences they think of anything that’s electronic. However, in this case, Snowball was another type of media. Everything we did was done the old fashion way as much as possible. However I realized that it is real hard to do any event without at least some electronic devices.

To break this entry down a little bit more. I am first going to talk about how we marketed this event and second I will talk about the actual night itself.

Marketing : We started with many group meetings to throw out as many ideas as possible. The ideas were based around food choice, the theme, where the event would be, who would make the tickets and the set for pictures, signups for setting and cleaning up etc. These meetings were always prioritized very well. The C.H.A.M.P team made sure to always get as much done as possible every Monday night. Every item we decided on as a group had a lot to do with the way we marketed the actual dance.

The marketing of this whole event is where the media starts to play a huge role in Snowball. In order to make the tickets we needed to laminate and use computers. Some C.H.A.M.P members worked on the tickets while others worked on advertisements for the dance. The other huge aspect of marketing that we did was the act of TABLING. All of these aspects have a lot to do with media. When it came to the tickets, using the computer made it a form of media. However the biggest media based things we did were the ads and the tabling.

ADS AND TABLING caused much word of mouth between students. It caused everyone to at least know what it was. Tabling however consisted of C.H.A.M.P members sitting by the dining hall just basically telling people to go to Snowball. We had signs in the back of us where we sat presenting the ADS. We also had music playing to draw students towards the table a little more. Some days we would have give aways such as chocolate to get people to recognize the table a little more as well. All these techniques worked just as well as the C.H.A.M.P team expected. Another marketing ploy that was used was how if you bought your tickets on campus they were only 5 dollars and at the door they were 10 dollars. ADS ARE MEDIA! The ADS for this dance created word of mouth which is what made the event such a success. I believe that anything that is spread by word of mouth is some form of media.

SNOWBALL : Now here is to the actual night. THE DJ, THE FOOD, all sponsored by people. THE FOOD not only was great but brought attention to the places that actually sold it. However the DJ was the biggest media contribution towards this event. The DJ presented music for all the dancers, using electronic devices.

ADS & DJ made this an overall media orientated experience. Every student had a great time last night, and its all because of how much work C.H.A.M.P members put into it all.

I have never been apart of an actual media event physically. I have always just been on the receiving end of it all. For example, watching a concert, playing on the internet, watching a movie, whatever it may be I am never the one setting the media experience up for others to enjoy. The feeling of the night being a huge success made me want to write about this for my media entry for this month. My overall point of this entry is to state that without the use of ADS this event would have never happened, no one would have known about it. Which is what shows it was a media experience.