Marketing effort casts a wide net to draw visitors to annual
Gilroy Garlic Festival
The city of Gilroy lives with the “Garlic Capital of the World” title each day, but not everyone knows that its famous three-day festival kicks off next Friday.
Marketing the 27th annual Gilroy Garlic Festival hits its peak this week, and volunteers are working to get out the word and get garlic-lovers salivating.
Starting this weekend, radio listeners from the Monterey Bay coastline to San Francisco will start hearing reminders to come to the festival, said Promotions Chair Dawn Lath. Ads will run on 12 different stations – English and Spanish language, AM and FM, soft rock and folk.
Radio is the best way to reach a broad base of potential festival visitors, Lath said.
“We’re covering quite a few bases,” she said Wednesday. “We’ve done some printouts in the past, and we do marketing posters that get put up in stores around the area, but radio really is the best.”
Three of those radio stations will broadcast live from the festival on July 29, 30 and 31. Country station KRTY, 95.3 FM, will be doing a first-ever broadcast from the new demonstration stage outside Gourmet Alley all day on the first day of the festival. The stage will be the prime place to see chefs prepare Italian sausage sandwiches, garlic ginger chicken stir-fry, and garlic stuffed mushrooms. Two Spanish language stations – KBRG, 100.3 FM, and KLOK, 99.5 FM – will also broadcast from the festival grounds during the course of the weekend.
Marketing efforts have not been dramatically changed or stepped up following the news that the San Jose Grand Prix will be held on the same weekend, Lath said.
“Actually, at first, we were a little concerned that there was a large event going on the same weekend, because we’ve never had direct competition,” she said. “But the way it seems like it’s falling out, we definitely have our mainstay audience, and they’re pretty loyal, so there’s a lot of people out there who will come. We’re confident that we’re going to get the same numbers we’ve gotten.”
This means a crowd of about 120,000 is expected to fill Gilroy’s Christmas Hill Park from 10am Friday until 7pm Sunday.
This year’s major promotion will be realized after the festival: the winning recipe from the Great Garlic Cook-Off will be prepared daily by chefs at Mama Mia’s Ristorante Italiano. It’s the first time the festival’s amateur recipe contest will be featured year-round. The restaurant serves patrons in Morgan Hill, Gilroy, Campbell and Felton. The Food Network, which films the Cook-Off each year and later airs the program at various times, will be one of many television stations broadcasting images of the festival to viewers everywhere.
Garlic goes global this summer, with news crews from Africa, Poland, Great Britain and South Korea recording the festivities.
“It’s a cultural experience, they like to see people eating all these different garlic dishes,” Lath said. “Everybody around the world loves garlic.”
Until the festival kick-off, Lath said volunteers are fielding media inquiries and sending out glossy, fact-filled press kits when requested. Last week, a reporter from Los Angeles joined some members of the Garlic Festival Association to collect information for coverage of summer food festivals.
“Even though people from L.A. aren’t as likely to come to the festival, we still like to have it known all over the state and the world that we are the Garlic Capital,” Lath said.
For more information on the festival, visit www.gilroygarlicfestival.com.
