Press Event

What I’m going to tell you this week may be considered a trade secret. There’s a chance that my editor will black out half of this article like those letters sent during WWII and it will read something like you don’t wants l ovin yoursnight it’sasooosadfindfboringdisusscharmingfe. I am talking, of course, about Press Events, or, as they are often referred to, The Best Thing Ever.

Press Events are usually held once a week—more around the holidays—when a certain hotel/bar/restaurant wants to promote something. Said venue sends out fliers and invites the media out to come see it, with media in Hong Kong being defined by the cliques of the SCMP, Tatler, Asia Cities, and specialty trade publications du jour. Everyone drinks wine, mingles, and tells polite stories until there’s an announcement about the product/promotion. That’s basically it.

So why is this the best thing ever? One word: Freedom. Sorry, I meant two words: Free Stuff. Now this “stuff” is generally food and drink and it is limitless. To update an old adage, there’s no such thing as a free lunch unless you write about it and then the lunch is immediately free. It’s open bar with good drinks. Holla. All it requires is that you give somebody your business card and slowly nod and space out when they say things to you. So do the exact same thing you do when someone tells you a story about how cute their weird-looking kid is.

The basic protocol I follow is like this:

1. I show up at the event 20 minutes late. Nobody in Hong Kong is on time for anything except movies.
2. Give my business card to the PR people on the desk. Prepare to be barraged with marketing emails.
3. Receive a name tag from them. I don’t wear it but put in my pocket to later pin on the back of the biggest tool I can find at Dragon-i. I continue to call him by my name as he stares confused at me in his fedora and sunglasses at night.
4. Get an introduction to the party organizer. This is almost always someone who sees writers as a necessary evil but evil nonetheless. They tell me a story on autopilot about their promotion. I hope it’s a good one!
5. It’s not.
6. But sometimes it is! (as far as you know)
7. Eat free pizza and drink wine. If no pizza I stand by the kitchen until the waiter comes out with a tray of meatballs, which I promptly and shamelessly steal. Score.
8. Repeat #7 until I’m full of drink and staggering around like Robert Benchley. Be honest. You have no idea who Robert Benchley is. You thought about Googling him but then were like “nah, I’m good, I have better things to do like think about expensive bags.”

And this repeats. And it works because people who work in media are very poor and they’re also looking for something to write about. Dude, words are hard and if you work in lifestyle then you want to know these things. That is literally the justification I tell myself as I’m eating free meatballs and being chased by a waiter who wants his tray his back.