The value of the campaign could far exceed that amount. Following the 2000 Republican convention in his city, Philadelphia Mayor John Street told the Philadelphia Inquirer that 19,000 print articles had mentioned his city in coverage about the convention. He said that multiplying that number by the circulation figures associated with the publications yielded 128 billion “impressions.”
“It was estimated that it would have cost $75 [million] to $100 million to buy that publicity,” Street said at the time.
While those kinds of computations tend to be based more in art than in science, Kathy Tunheim, CEO of Tunheim Partners in Bloomington, agrees with the sentiment. (Tunheim, Mona, and Tom Jollie of Minneapolis-based Padilla Speer Beardsley were key figures in launching “More to Life.”) “I personally could not come up with a calculation” of what the exposure is worth, she says. “It is almost immeasurable. However anyone might want to value it, I can tell you this: It will be higher than that. We will accrue the benefit of [this convention] for years.”
Mona says, “The lesson we learned from the Super Bowl and the Final Four and other big events is what happens when you get a large, large number of media. While their primary job is to cover the attraction, they will also have significant downtime to write background stories and explore the community.
“An old rule in this business is that intercepting a crowd is much easier than building one,” he adds. “And this intercepts one of the largest crowds of qualified people you could ever hope to find.”
