A Chilling Festival

Ice sculptures were the focus of a festival designed to attract shoppers and maximize visitor flows for the Christmas shopping period at CentrO Oberhausen in Germany. Next to its award winning Christmas Market and its beautiful in-mall decorations, CentrO wanted to introduce a new and fresh attraction to its established combination.
The Magic of Winter – Ice Sculptures at CentrO event was staged in an exhibition hall adjacent to the CentrO Promenade where giant cooling compressors could chill down the air to a constant minus eight degrees Celsius.
"The 75 sculptures displayed were designed by 50 artists from all over the world. They used a total of 550,000 pounds of ice and more than 660,000 pounds of snow," notes the mall. "Snow and ice production for the event started as early as the beginning of October, using special snow machines able to produce all kinds of different snow qualities. Ice machines produced a total of 170 crystal clear ice blocks, two metres in height. The exhibition area let people wander around a magical world of ice and snow, separated into four areas: Winter Wonderland’, ‘Winter Factory’, ‘Winter Village,’ and ‘Winter Town’".
To get the word out to shoppers, CentrO launched a PR campaign. A special press conference was held at the mall. The press conference featured a backdrop of artists from around the world carving their ice sculptures. According to the mall, this proved particularly effective with TV stations which were able to film and interview the artists as they actually worked. Pre-opening PR continued with further press statements and picture material being distributed to appropriate agencies. In addition, there were continuous tours for the press to discover the secrets of ice carving.
CentrO notes that PR results delivered fantastic results even before the exhibition had started: 33 articles with a media spread of over 19 million readers and three TV features with 1.1 million viewers were produced, all announcing this spectacular event happening at CentrO. Shortly after opening, a second wave of PR releases was distributed. Additional newspapers and TV reports reached another 15.6 million readers plus 1.5 million TV viewers.
When the doors opened to the festival, the public response was quite remarkable. There had been so much press that thousands of people just had to see the exhibition from themselves. Overall, the PR-driven event gave joy to over 200,000 people who had seen the exhibition, smiles to the exhibition organiser as actual figures exceeded expectations by far, and happiness for CentrO as it helped to increase its market share during the Christmas season.