Great media partnerships make marketing effective

Having truly valuable relationships with media can make the difference between marketing flying or flopping. Christine Warren, Marketing Director at the Houston Zoo talks about how their radio and television partnerships made Zoo Lights a success.

Robin: Hello and welcome to this edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies. I am Robin Tooms, Vice President of Strategy at Savage and my guest today is Christine Warren, the Marketing Director from the Houston Zoo. So Christine, welcome back to Brandonomics.

Christine: Thank you very much.

Robin: Well, we were lucky enough to talk about the Houston Zoo’s Zoo Lights program prior to it launching last year and now that you’ve successfully completed this, I want to talk about how you were able to make this such a success. So what was something that you did that you wanted to accomplish from a marketing perspective to make it successful?

Christine: One of the things we knew we needed to do from a marketing perspective was to find a strong radio partner and a strong television partner who were really going to get behind this event and help us leverage our marketing dollars to get the most bang for our buck, so we reached out to Clear Channel Radio and KPRC-TV and they came on board and helped us out a lot.

Robin: So tell me a little bit. What was the outcome of that? Tell me about the partnership itself and how you were able to measure that.

Christine: Well, they both came on with huge huge amounts of added value that they gave us. KODA in particular is known as being the holiday music station here in Houston, so we knew we wanted to align ourselves with them ’cause we also wanted to be known as the place to go for holidays in Houston. And KPRC actually created and produced a one-hour prime time special all about Zoo Lights, which was an amazing opportunity to be able to really tell the Houstonians what they were going to be able to experience at the event, since it was brand new and nobody knew what it was. It allowed us to really open that up and tell people what experience they were going to be getting, and it was overall a huge success, Zoo Lights was. We had set a goal to have 100,000 people attend the event in the first year and we actually had a little bit over 153,000 people attend so we were very pleased with the results.

Robin: Ok. Well great. Well, that shows how well the marketing worked! Thank you so much for sharing that, Christine.

Christine: Thank you.

Robin: This has been another edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies.

 

The Houston Zoo provides housing, meals, medical care and education for more than 6,000 permanent resident animals. Its mission is to provide a fun, unique and inspirational experience fostering appreciation, knowledge and care for the natural world for each of their more than 1.84 million annual guests. https://www.houstonzoo.org/