Let's Talk New York Toy Fair
It’s been officially a week since New York Toy Fair ended, but I’m still finding myself in recovery. Toy Fair is something that needs just that afterwards, recovery. This year, the company I work for ended up having a couple of handfuls of clients showing at Toy Fair. Just having one client at Toy Fair requires months of prep between designing press kits, media kit, contacting media, setting up media appointments, confirming press passes, getting your client prepped for the show, media training and the list goes on. Basically, it’s a lot of work, so you can image the amount of work that went into having 8 clients there this year. On top of our clients showing, our company was presenting a “PR Therapy” session open for Toy Fair attendees.
After months of prep work and late hours at the office (We all should have really just made up beds there for awhile), the time had come. Set-up for the show started on the 11th and then the show ran through the 15th. Lots of quality time at the Javits Center! Which, by the way isn’t the most fun place to get to because it is on the opposite end of the island from me.
New York Toy Fair is the largest toy and youth product trade show in the Western Hemisphere, so although it isn’t something you may have heard of before, it’s a pretty big deal, especially for some of our clients who were showing for the first time. It’s also a very interesting trade show in that it is an entire convention center filled with toys and not a child to be found. That’s right, it’s an industry and press only event and no one under the age of 18 can attend. The most important part for our clients are buyer and press meetings. This is the one time of the year that our clients are in front of buyers and are able to show of their products as well as alerting the media to what are the latest and best toy products that will hit the market this holiday season. This is where we come in to help guide the media around to our clients and let them know why their new product lines should be mentioned to a national audience so that all of us, consumers, go and buy them next year!
Anyways, it was a very long weekend and week at the Javits Center followed by networking events and after-parties. I guess you can’t really complain about having to go to parties with an open-bar though huh?! I bet you are reading this feeling really bad for me…
All and all it was a very successful week for the Media Maison team and are clients. So I am very thankful and happy for that, but also happy that we have another year to prepare for the next one!