HARPO PRODUCTIONS: OPRAH DANCE STUNT

Credits & Description:

Category: Best Use of Special Events and Stunt/Live Advertising

Advertiser: HARPO PRODUCTIONS

Product/Service: OPRAH WINFREY SHOW

Agency: PARTIZAN US

Date of First Appearance: Sep 8 2009 12:00AM

Entrant Company: PARTIZAN US, Los Angeles, USA

Director: Michael Gracey (Partizan US)

Executive Producer: Sheila Stepanek (Partizan US)

Choreographer: Ashely Wallen

Media placement: Televised Live Dance Stunt - The Oprah Winfrey Show - 08/09/2009



Results and Effectiveness



The Oprah Winfrey Show had its biggest premiere in three seasons.
The 24th Season Launch scored an 8.0 rating/12 share in Nielsen’s overnight ratings, the highest single-day rating for the show in almost two years. The premiere week continued to be a strong success. Video of the unique dance stunt was broadcast around the world and has gotten millions of views on YouTube and across the Internet that continue to promote Oprah and her show. Because this orchestrated stunt is the biggest of its kind, it's become a viral spectacle that people continue to watch and get inspired by.



Creative Execution

It was a multi-seeded, week-long process of audition casting, choreography, rehearsing and a repeating of the process to define the perfect routine. The process involved days of redefining choreography to find the right balance of moves that were simple enough to learn and were also going to look great on this mass scale.

We pulled 800 dancers to form the core group who were going to take this routine to the streets of Chicago and make it work. Overnight the predicted number attending the event jumped into double figured thousands. Our team planted tiers of dancers throughout the audience, so they could grab members of the public and teach them while they were standing and waiting for the start of the show. We had just a few hours when the gates opened to get the dancers in place and get them feeding the right energy into the thousands of people.



Insights, Strategy & the Idea

The 8th of September 2009 saw the launch of a staggering 24th season of the Oprah Winfrey show. To celebrate the event Oprah and her production team took the party to the impressive setting of Michigan Avenue, Chicago. The team behind Oprah wanted to take the event to a whole other level and more importantly do it as a surprise for Oprah.

They asked us to create a “Dance Stunt” with a daunting 21,000 people in attendance and have the entire audience join in on a synchronised dance routine, the biggest of its kind, set to an epic opening musical performance.

What we did takes its reference from old musicals and classic scenes like the impressive Grand Central Station dance in the Fisher King. We wanted to capture that magic that every good musical has, that endearing, cinematic quality and surprise and make it look effortless and real.