There’s no such thing as a free lunch, but there can be a free launch, at least when it comes to advertising.
Sharon Tallach Vogelpohl and her team at Mangan Holcomb Partners are veterans of free media, particularly in restaurant grand openings.
The Little Rock advertising and PR firm handled June’s buzzy takeoff of the Dave & Buster’s location on Bass Pro Parkway in Little Rock.
The opening was the most successful ever for D&B, the entertainment eatery and arcade-game empire that was conceived in Little Rock and now has 83 sites, according to Vogelpohl. Sales figures were unavailable, but the numbers were big, and the launch didn’t cost D&B a nickel in advertising.
“It enjoyed unprecedented engagement, buzz and media coverage,” Vogelpohl said in a recent chat at MHP, where bald eagles glided into the cottonwoods along the Arkansas River outside. “Dave & Buster’s doesn’t invest in any traditional advertising. They rely on relationships with firms like ours that can create buzz and awareness using nontraditional vehicles.”
That’s a fancy way of saying MHP succeeded in getting Arkansans to write, message and chat about the opening. And the 30,000-SF D&B site offered a lot to buzz about, all on display for a media preview a few days before the June 13 grand opening. At that event, General Manager Chuck Beyer showed off the “best of the best games,” a 360-degree sports bar, 44 high-definition TVs, two 100-inch projection screens and space to accommodate 1,500 people. The location opened with 240 employees.
“They came in with a particular demographic to target,” Vogelpohl said. “They called them PTYAs, or play-together young adults. These are young professional people who are tech savvy and kind of the bell cows in their own circles. We wanted to reach those folks, and they are largely millennials.”
So as part of its pitch for the account, MHP showcased that 51 of its 65 employees are millennials (including workers for its digital affiliate Team SI, which was recently named for the second straight year to the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies). “Pretty much everybody in our industry is trying to figure out the best way to engage with young adults, so it was helpful to have a whole stable of them,” Vogelpohl said.
All of MHP’s pitch presenters were millennials “with the exception of myself,” Vogelpohl said. “I said I was more PTA than PTYA,” but she wore a T-shirt labeled “PTYA at Heart.”
Vogelpohl, who started at Mangan Holcomb as an intern and wound up staying 22 years, has been the agency’s president for six, ever since the retirement of Steve Holcomb.
During that time, restaurants have become a bit of a specialty. “We had some experience that was relevant to the Dave & Buster’s opening,” she said, noting that MHP had handled the opening of Little Rock’s Chuy’s Tex-Mex restaurant in 2013, along with the subsequent Chuy’s launches in North Little Rock and Rogers. “Long story short, we ended up setting a sales record that stands today for the Chuy’s organization.”
That was part of the appeal to Dave & Buster’s, but a Mangan team led by Kristen Vandaveer Nicholson also played games on D&B in a standup pitch.
“Since Dave & Buster’s is a game-rich environment, we selected about 15 obscure items — a deck of cards, a kazoo, a Yoda mask mounted on a head — and asked them to choose their own adventure by picking one of the items,” Vogelpohl said. “Then we would tie that item back to one of the recommendations that we had, or thoughts on how to make their launch more successful. They really dug that.”
Vogelpohl said that while media coverage and fanfare are great, “where the rubber really meets the road is what the result is in sales, and sustaining that.”
Dave & Buster’s is based in Dallas, but the concept came from Little Rock, where Buster Corley’s Buster’s restaurant opened next door to Dave Corriveau’s Slick Willy’s World of Entertainment in 1978 at Union Station. They quickly realized that food, drinks and games mix well.
How well? Traded on Nasdaq, the company has steadily opened stores and increased its revenue in recent years, to $867 million in the fiscal year that ended Jan. 31. Its net income for the year was $59.6 million.