Wednesday, May 10, 2017 (3:29 pm)

Kathy Kramer: Looking toward the Fair

Our 2016 OC Fair television commercial not only caught the eye of our Fairgoers, won the prestigious ADDY award given by the American Advertising Federation. It’s a great honor to be recognized in the first level of a three-tiered national contest with over 40,000 entries, so congratulations team on that accolade.

Our bill SB741 just passed the requirement to being print for 30 days prior to being heard for the policy committee. Gonsalves & Sons continue to work with key stakeholders for support of this bill.

Staff is in full production mode focusing on delivering Imaginology, which happens in less than 30 days, and the OC Fair, which opens in exactly 113 days.

I’d like to share some highlights of how our summer concert series is  shaping up for this OC Fair. We have 14 shows already on sale, including two pre-fair performances, Gabriel Iglesias, aka, Fluffy, and Steve Miller Band performing with Peter Frampton are racing towards a sellout. Kenny Loggins and the B-52s featured in the Pacific Symphony are selling very well. We have a 12 percent increase in the number of concert tickets sold year-to-date over 2016, and a 30 percent increase in gross revenue year-to-date over 2016.

One of our goals for this year’s OC Fair was to expand the Hispanic programming. I’m excited to share a couple of new initiatives to 10 support this goal. We added another performance, Mariachis Sol de Mexico on August 6. There now will be two performances in The Hangar, one at 1:30 p.m. and the other at 6:30 p.m. Sol, for short, has been performing here for the past seven years, and they generally sell out. So we felt this was a perfect opportunity to expand this entertainment.

Another new initiative this year is the 19 partnership with the organizers of the Mariachi Youth Nationals and Summer Institute. This event brings around 150 to 175 mariachi students from around the world, and I do mean “around the world,” if you go to their website, quite impressed with the countries that are interested, they come together with some of the best professional mariachis in the country.

This year the winners from the competition have been invited to perform on stage August 6th with Sol. The organizers of the Youth Mariachi Nationals and Summer Institute are thrilled to have their students be part of the OC Fair. We are going to continue to work with them to develop 8 additional programming next year to include having 9 their competition here on that Saturday before. 10 So we are very excited about that partnership and 11 connecting with them.