Giving Away Your Own Experience
David Rabin Dishes on Creating A Vacation Giveaway Around His Club Lotus

    David Rabin, an owner of Lotus and Double Seven in New York City, keeps his clubs sexy in design, attendance and old-fashioned word-of-mouth. The press can be viewed as an ally or an enemy for every type of club, and cultivating good relationships is something Rabin excels at in one of the nation’s largest cities, on one of the nation’s grandest scales.
    In 2005, Rabin held a vacation promotion at Lotus that covered every base, from utilizing his glowing relationships with the businesses around his clubs to keeping his venue’s name in the press to bringing in untold added revenue and patronage at minimal cost.
    In 2005, and according to Rabin hopefully again soon, the club worked out a promotional giveaway for a lucky US Weekly reader to win an extravagant stay in New York City. The prize included a night of VIP bottle service for the winner and 10 friends at Lotus, two nights at the neighboring Hotel Gansevoort and two tickets to one event during Olympus Fashion Week. While many clubs out there run a promotion centered around sending their patrons somewhere else for a weekend, Rabin’s idea brought America’s attention towards Lotus as a focal point.

The Event
    The promotion began with a phone call to the editors of US Weekly. The celebrity-soaked pages of this magazine are filled with news on the nightlife choices of the in-crowd, and Lotus’ name graces photo captions and articles more than most clubs in New York. This is not simply due to Rabin’s celebrity clientele alone, however. It is largely due to his careful cultivation of trust from both the clientele side and the magazine side.
    “We do provide them with plenty of content about where celebrities are and what they are doing,” he says of US Weekly. “But we never divulge negative press on celebrities if at all possible.”
    US Weekly agreed to run an ad in a few issues about the prize giveaway. To enter, readers were instructed to log on at the magazines Web site, www.tellusmagazine.com.
    The Hotel Gansevoort’s close proximity, long friendship with Rabin and high-occupancy during Fashion Week made it an obvious choice for additional sponsorship in the promotion, and finally, the two tickets to one of Fashion Week’s shows gave the promotion another added pull for readers of the stylish US Weekly.
    The cost and effort for everything to Rabin? Minimal.
    “All of this was relatively low cost to all parties involved,” he says. “The mileage is so much greater public relations-wise than the cost. The Gansevoort lost maybe two nights of revenue, but I doubt it. The bottle for us cost maybe $30 to $40 dollars. So maybe we lost the bottle service table we could have sold for $400, but that is miniscule in comparison to having the name Lotus in front of millions of readers.”         NCB