EDITOR — As part of the team promoting the recent Bryan Adams show, I have decided to write to you in regards the outrageous article published in your newspaper early this year by Maxwell Sibanda.
The article is deeply flawed with inaccuracies, demonstrates a complete lack of any form of research on the matter and is a catastrophic failure of journalistic ethic and code.
The content was insulting to local government institutions, inflammatory to the public and unjustifiably racially fuelled.
Herewith the facts: We, the promoters, made a very clear and educated decision to formally and contractually engage with official media partners for this show.
The basis for this decision was to ensure that the show be announced and marketed through official and transparent channels and to cover the broadest possible demographic of Zimbabweans in a fair and completely unselective manner.
We selected AMH as our print media partner and ZiFM as our radio media partner and their logos were included in all official artwork.
The breaking of this story and the announcement of box office details were contractually conveyed to both media partners and they accrued these exclusive rights.
The marketing campaign was rolled out as follows: On Thursday, November 14, 2013 a teaser was placed in the Newsday in the form of an advert
while on Friday, November 15 the story was broken at 07.00 am by ZiFM, live on air.
On the same Friday the story was broken by the Independent consisting of a full page advert plus editorial.
The box office details were released in this editorial and on ZiFM. On Sunday, November 17, a further full page with advert and update on box office details was released.
The tickets were sold from a specially-constructed public box office, conveniently located in Borrowdale.
Once they story broke, eager fans made their way to the box office and people queued for hours to get their hands on tickets which were being sold manually.
A maximum of 6 tickets per person was enforced so as to ensure that a fair distribution of tickets took place and no one person could secure a block booking.
The ticketing process was open, transparent and very professionally organised.
The tickets were all sold out by lunch time on Saturday November 15, and this was communicated in the Standard the following day.
Gabriel Ettlin
Event Organiser
The Zimbabwe Motor Show
We sincerely regret any inconvenience caused by the opinion article on Bryan Adams to Adams’ promoters, management and the singer himself.
The Daily News remains committed to publishing factual articles.
EDITOR