By NANETTE LoBIONDO GALLOWAY
MARGATE – What do Lucy the Elephant, the Goodyear Blimp, Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, Barbie’s Malibu Playhouse and a giant Idaho potato have in common? They are all recipients of an international Airbnb campaign to expand access to exotic and iconic landmarks all over the world.
According to Save Lucy Committee Executive Director Richard Helfant, the idea of turning the National Historic Landmark into a three-night Airbnb rental was a simultaneous marketing collaboration between the online vacation rental platform and local volunteers responsible for maintenance and support of the 138-year-old beachfront structure.
“Our two ideas collided,” Helfant said. “Airbnb has an ongoing promotion offering overnights in exotic places and they were looking at making Lucy their next promotion. At the same time, our board’s vice president is an Airbnb host and gets their magazine. Flipping through it, I saw the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile and the Goodyear Blimp and thought Lucy would be perfect for this. So, I reached out to them at the same time they were reaching out to us.”
The result of the campaign was about $5 million worth of marketing, “and it didn’t cost us one red cent,” Helfant said.
An online campaign to find three couples to spend one night in Lucy went viral and the press release announcing the campaign was published in news sources all over the world, including on the front page of the New York Times, Helfant said. The story was on CNN, Good Morning America, the Today Show, and ABC World News with David Muir.
Margate Commissioner John Amodeo said he was vacationing in Florida when a local television news station ran a clip about the promotion.
“It’s been everywhere,” Helfant said. “We weren’t expecting to see this level of interest, but what’s more important is that during a week of sadness and ugliness in the media, Lucy brought a smile to millions of peoples’ faces. There’s value to that too.”
Airbnb spokesperson Liz DeBold Fusco, who resides at the Jersey shore and is familiar with the iconic structure, said it was important for Airbnb to help with Lucy’s much needed preservation. The vacation rental platform has made a substantial contribution to the Save Lucy Committee for her upkeep. The amount was not disclosed but could be enough to cover the first phase of Lucy’s planned restoration.
Fusco said the marketing campaign involved a “meeting of the minds.” Airbnb knew a collaboration with the “oldest example of zoomorphic architecture in the world” would provide an “amazing” opportunity to increase Lucy’s reach and access.
Unique properties come onto the website “organically,” when property owners who have unique places to share post their properties on the platform, she said. Other unique listings include a giant hollowed-out potato that serves as a hotel room in Idaho, a giant shoe, covered wagon, and mirror house, as well as numerous treehouses, houseboats and farms.
“We know there’s a lot of interest in those properties, but for us having Lucy as a listing, it was important to us that we were giving back to the local community. We wanted to assure this idea of investing in tourism to Margate and to the shore in the off-season really threaded through this entire activation,” she said.
According to Lucy’s education director and COO Jeremy Bingaman, Lucy looks lovely from a distance, but up close you can see underlayers of paint bubbling up.
“One of her recurring issues is rust,” Bingaman said.
Although she has been repainted every several years, the entire structure needs to be stripped down to the metal underneath, treated and repainted.
A restoration architect and paint specialist recommended a two-phase project over the next two years, which will cost about $500,000, Helfant said. The committee has been awarded a $20,000 historic preservation grant to fund a portion of the project, but the Airbnb donation is enough to cover the experimental first phase of the restoration project according to scientific methods.
Lucy will have her belly and legs stripped later this year to test the best metal treatments to accept a new coating of paint. Her stainless-steel belly will remain bare for a year and her legs coated to find the best protection product. A one-gallon pail of the undercoating costs $400, Bingaman said.
Phase 2 will be much more expensive, he said.
Helfant said although the rental fee per stay was only $138 – the number of years Lucy has been hanging out in Margate – the Airbnb donation is just the start of the organization’s fundraising efforts to pay for her restoration.
“The donation helps, but it’s not the end all,” for the self-funded non-profit group, and the committee has a long way to go, Helfant said.
“But we have seen an uptick in donations and online shopping since the promotion started,” he said.
Helfant said more than 100,000 people around the world went to the Airbnb website to try to be the first to get a chance to sleep inside Lucy’s belly, which was offered on a first-come, first-serve basis.
“It was like people waiting in queue for hours to get tickets to a Springsteen concert,” he said. “Their algorithm was off the charts. Airbnb told us this was the largest single campaign in their 10-year history.”
The three couples who were able to get a reservation were not identified, but of all the people around the world clamoring to get a reservation, one was from Egg Harbor Township, another from another town in New Jersey, and the third was from Pennsylvania, he said.
Airbnb hired a Chicago design firm to furnish the elephant-shaped building in a turn-of-the-20th century abode, just like it was furnished in 1902 when an English doctor and his family spent the summer there.
Helfant said the Gertzen family, who purchased Lucy from land speculator James V. Lafferty Jr., who built the 65-foot-tall pachyderm as an attraction to bring investors to what was then South Atlantic City, had turned the tourist attraction into a four-bedroom residence. The residence remained inside Lucy until she was moved in 1970 from her former stomping grounds two blocks away to her current location at Lucy Park on Decatur Avenue at the beach.
The plumbing has been removed, so Airbnb is providing a bathroom trailer, which will be in the park for the use of the guests for their overnight stays, March 17, 18 and 19.
In addition, Airbnb will provide each couple with breakfast, and dinners at local restaurants, including Steve & Cookies by the Bay on March 17, Sophia’s on March 18 and Ventura’s Greenhouse on March 19, and swag bags filled with giveaways and souvenirs.
“We were pleased to expand access to Lucy all over the world, including Canada, France and Italy,” Fusco said. “Lucy is now a global superstar.”
Fusco said it will be up to Helfant and the Save Lucy Committee to decide if they will conduct another promotional campaign in the future.
“This is a one-time thing,” Helfant said. “My job is to promote Lucy. But if something comes up that makes sense, we’ll evaluate it on its own merit.”
The promotion generated a lot of good will for Airbnb as well.
“It’s been a win-win for everybody,” Helfant said.
The Save Lucy Committee will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Lucy’s historic move to her current location with a three-day celebration in August, which will include a benefit concert in Atlantic City and the “shortest parade in NJ history,” from her former location on Cedar Grove Avenue to her home on Decatur Avenue.
Copyright Mediawize, LLC 2020
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