Carnival Cruise Line’s World’s Biggest Balls

Carnival Cruise Line, which was NewmanPR’s second-biggest client after the Florida Keys Tourism Board (I was the lead on the Carnival account for 25 years), has long carefully crafted its corporate and product image as irrevocably tied to fun. After all, the fleet is called the “Fun Ships” and the line’s first national TV advertising campaign featured Kathie Lee Gifford singing “Ain’t We Got Fun.”

In 2008 the line was ready to launch a new campaign, “Fun for All. All for Fun,” featuring Todd Rundgren’s “Bang the Drum All Day.” They decided to preview the campaign by doing two “citywide take-over” events in Dallas, Texas, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, each surrounding an official Guinness World Record stunt. I’ll do a separate post about the Philly event.

The first was in Dallas on Sunday, Oct. 26, 2008, and involved the official World’s Largest Beach Balls at a “Fun Crowd” event on the deserted downtown streets of the city. Two giant beach balls — officially measuring 36 feet in diameter as determined by a professional surveyor in accordance with Guinness rules — were dropped from the tops of parking garages into a crowd of more than 2,500 people. The balls were inflated using leaf blowers and then topped off with helium, which made them appear to fall and bounce in slow motion.

The concept of the commercial was that regular folks are just driving down the street when they see these giant beach balls falling off buildings, so they do what anybody would do in that situation — no, not run screaming — they stop the car, get out, leaving the door ajar, and start playing with the beach balls with everyone else on the street, thereby embodying the “All for Fun. Fun for All” theme.

At approximately 1 p.m., the Guinness adjudicator officially announced that the record had been set.

Here’s news footage from the live event:

Here’s the finished 30-second commercial:

One may wonder what a PR guy was doing at what was a sales and marketing event in Dallas on a Sunday morning. I know I did.

Jon Heald, at the time Carnival’s senior cruise director, had recently started writing a blog for the line, which, because it was funny, irreverent and unfiltered had become wildly popular. At the time, the blog fell under the purview of Tim Gallagher, the vice president of public relations. Since Carnival was putting all of these resources in Dallas, it was decided to hold the inaugural “Coffee with Jon Heald” event the same day.

About 50 people showed up just to meet Jon Heald in person and have coffee and doughnuts with him — some drove four to six hours across Texas to be there. So Tim wanted a PR person on site to make sure the event went without a hitch.

It did, as did everything else that day. There were “activations” (an insider marketing word for little events supporting the larger events), including booths where you could video yourself explaining your definition of “fun” and then have it uploaded to a special Carnival website (these were simpler times before TikTok when uploading stuff to the interwebs was still shrouded in mystery), and the video shoot was an unmitigated success.

And that’s how I got a behind-the-scenes closeup look at Carnival’s World’s Biggest Balls.