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Fair Smashes Records; GWL Basks in Sunshine

4 min read

Every day at the Arkansas State Fair is a fair day, in a manner of speaking, but this year’s 10-day event in Little Rock set records for attendance and seemingly for sunshine.

The big crowds also affirmed new marketing approaches by GWL Advertising of Little Rock, the fair’s agency of record.

“It was pretty incredible that we had perfect sunshine weather, and that’s what we live by,” said the fair’s interim general manager, Anne Marie Doramus. Total attendance of 539,358 at the Oct. 15-24 fair was the highest in its 81-year history, and both sunny Saturdays drew multitudes approaching 100,000. “There were several other factors besides weather, including strong marketing,” Doramus told Arkansas Business. “Coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, people were wanting to get out, to get back to some sort of normal, and the State Fair is a longstanding tradition that we had to miss last year.”

The 2020 fair was basically canceled, without the carnival and midway, but fair food was for sale to help vendors, and the fair pageant and livestock show did go on, though socially distanced.

This year, when Saturday crowds hit 93,620 on Oct. 16 and 97,556 on Oct. 23, the midway rides by North American Midway Entertainment were back, “and people wanted to get out and enjoy it,” Doramus said. The previous total attendance record at the fair was 473,106 in 2015. The previous daily attendance mark was 88,769 on the first Saturday in 2012.

Doramus, 30, is a member of the Arkansas Game & Fish Commission and the Hastings family of Little Rock, owners of Arkansas Bolt Co. and other enterprises. As a member of the Arkansas Livestock Association board since 2015 and a “big fair supporter” since she was little, Doramus stepped up to run the fair “just on an interim basis” in September after the unexplained departure of Doug White, who had been the Livestock Association’s GM since December 2018.

One priority for the new GM, Doramus said, will be promoting the Arkansas State Fairgrounds as an attractive venue year-round. The fair will always be the big event, but Doramus sees great potential in making the fairgrounds, its buildings and Barton Coliseum into a bigger general draw.

Doramus, speaking for the Livestock Association, declined to go into detail about White’s departure. It wasn’t long-planned, judging from his exit just weeks before the fair. “I’m just proud to serve, on an interim basis, while we look for a new full-time general manager,” Doramus said. The fair staff includes 10 full-time employees, she said.

GWL’s marketing approach “played a huge part” in this year’s record attendance, Doramus said. “We kicked off with our new advertising marketing agency, and this time we shifted our focus to more social media. That did very well for us, and we were constantly in contact with people, whether it was TikTok, Instagram, Facebook or of course the TV ads we ran. I think it made people excited and ready to go out and have fun.” To the virus-wary, it helped that the fair is a largely outdoor event.

Marketing the fair meant all hands on deck, said GWL partner and Creative Director Christy Vandergriff. Vandergriff and Julie Barnett bought the agency from founder Gary W. Lay in 2019.

“We had traditional TV and radio, and we had some OTT [ads delivered with online video streaming], but we had a big emphasis on digital media, both paid digital and social media,” Vandergriff said. “Our social and digital team was in on the planning from the beginning, and brainstorming started eight or 10 months ago, and we were ready to roll.”

She and Dan Sawyer, a former assistant manager of the fair who joined GWL last year as senior director of accounts and new business, said every member of GWL’s 30-worker staff contributed to the fair’s success.

“One of the big differences this year was that we added new things like influencers and then having a fresh look to the creative, which lent itself very well to breaking through like I don’t think the marketing’s ever done before,” Vandergriff said. GWL had a social media team at the fair for the duration, giving potential fairgoers countless glimpses of the fun.

Sawyer noted that Vandergriff was a 4-H Club member as a teenager and said several members of the GWL team have lifelong associations with the fair.

“We love it, and it’s our plan to have a long relationship with the fairgrounds,” Sawyer said. “The idea is not to promote just the fair, but helping them to promote off-season events at the fairgrounds year-round as we move forward. We have the strategies.”

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