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| Last day of the TV spot (#4) shoot-- actors in the kitchen. |
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7 hours into a very hot day, spent in the car
from meeting to meeting. So glamorous! |
This week we hired an event planner—admittedly about 3 months too late, as our launch event is less than a month away, but alors, if anyone can do it this team can! We need to fill the Palais de Culture, one of the most impressive and massive buildings in Abidjan, and it seats 4,000. We hired a guy named Jazz and his colleague Ferdinan who have promoted and planned some pretty big acts at the same venue. They came up with some great suggestions for stage design and lighting for our miniscule budget. As it will be 2-4 in the afternoon on a Monday, there are limited things we can do with lighting, but we’ll do the best we can. Next, how do we fill the venue with our target audience? They came up with the idea of going to the private Universities (the public ones are closed because of the recent conflict) and the high schools to engage the principals and directors and convince them that the event will be a good reason for 300 of their students to leave school early. Issouf, Fernand and I went to 5 schools near the Palais de Culture and all but one were run by a woman – Issouf would get through three paragraphs on who the IRC is, what we are doing etc. and the principals would reach for their official stamps and sign our letter on the spot. Issouf truly has a gift of gab—he is soft spoken but very convincing! At one of the universities—University Voltaire, we were immediately greeted at the entrance by a man in a suit named Joseph, who took us directly to the director of the Marketing Program for the school. It was really eye-opening to see what these schools do with so little money. None of the directors had computers at their desks, rather the old rolodex and day planners, but the students had an air-conditioned computer room. They even made their own desks there—with someone welding together chairs on the spot. I felt like I had been transported back in time, to my years in the Peace Corps (ugh, 20 years ago!)
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| The buses, non of which have advertising on them! |
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Orange, the telecom company, has already completely
taken over the South station of Abidjan.
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Issouf and I went to the Sotra, the Municipal Bus company run by the government, and spoke with them about putting our posters on the exterior and interior of their buses for a reduced price. He met with us even though we were 2 hours late. He told us he'd talk to the Chef (boss) and get back with us about our proposal. He did call back later, and we learned that because of the conflict (near civil war) last year, Sotra's contract with the company that was placing ads on its buses was suspended, and they are in dispute, so no advertising we were told could be put on the buses interior or exterior. They did offer the North and South stations though, were all the lines meet, so we took a very hot trip there yesterday and found one a possibility at the North station but the other was covered in orange paint and "Orange" advertising-- Orange is a huge European cell phone company, that unfortunately has about 1000x more $ than we do, so hard to compete. Still, we're going back tomorrow to propose using the North Station and the mini shelters around the city that aren't already covered in orange. (They also have the advantage of being the same color as the countries football team "Les Elephants") We're also going to propose that since we're non-profit, perhaps the company that is contracting the advertising will look the other way if we put ads on the buses. We would be the only advertiser, quite a coup!
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