As of the afternoon of April 18, the Office of Student Engagement (OSE) had distributed a little over half of the available tickets for Pete Davidson’s performance on campus. Davidson, 24, is a popular actor, stand-up comedian and cast member of Saturday Night Live. He will be performing on April 21 in Rosse Hall.
The excitement surrounding Davidson’s performance has escalated in part from the OSE’s advertising and marketing tactics.
Kim Wallace, associate director of student engagement, said the OSE has used a variety of methods to advertise ticket giveaways, including student-info emails, fliers and posts on Facebook and Instagram. There are still 289 tickets to give out, according to Wallace.
“What we didn’t want was everyone to line up at our office door on Monday morning at 7 a.m. for hours to wait in line for a ticket and miss class,” Laura Kane, director of student engagement and assistant dean of students, said.
The event was originally supposed to take place in the Great Hall in Peirce Dining Hall, which would fit 300 people. On April 13, the OSE announced on their Facebook page that the event would be moved to Rosse Hall after the Jazz Ensemble changed the time of their concert. Ted Buehrer, professor of music, decided to move the jazz concert to 6:30 p.m. on April 21 to accommodate Davidson’s performance, according to Kane. This decision increased the capacity of the event to 600 seats.
Davidson grew up in Staten Island, N.Y. and performed stand-up comedy for the first time when he was 16. He was first featured on MTV in 2013 and joined the cast of Saturday Night Live in 2014.
The first ticket giveaway occurred in Peirce Dining Hall on April 9, when they gave away 20 pairs of tickets during common hour. Since then, the OSE has sponsored ticket giveaways at the bookstore and Wiggin Street Coffee as well as Chat with the Chaplains and Kenyon Kudos. A Campus Safety golf cart even drove through campus giving out tickets and candy “guerilla style,” Wallace said.
At times, the giveaways caused chaos on campus.
5At the Wiggin Street Coffee event, the OSE paid for roughly 600 dollars worth of drinks and tips. Maddie Farr ’18 was working as a barista when the event took place. Farr described the crowd as an “endless line of students … it was truly mayhem.”
Both Farr and the Wiggin Street Coffee manager did not know the event was occurring until they showed up to work that day.
The OSE hopes that increased social media presence will be an “offshoot” of the promotion for Pete Davidson.
“We can continue to promote other cool opportunities to come up,” Kane said.