2 Actors Made a Business Of ‘Flash-Mobs’ In Honor Of MJ

by **Admin** Mon Dec 02, 2013 2:16 pm

Flash Mob America: How a growing dance craze became a full-fledged production company.
by Carolyn M. Brown

12/2/13

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Actors Conroe Brooks and Staci Lawrence were so moved by the memorial service held for Michael Jackson that they wanted to do something special to celebrate his music and legacy. So in August 2009 the duo staged a flash mob in Los Angeles on what would have been the King of Pop’s 51st birthday. More than 100 people gathered to dance to “Beat It.”

A month later, after being sought out on Facebook, Brooks and Lawrence were contacted by Universal Music Group, the record label for Janet Jackson. They were hired to produce a flash mob to celebrate the release of her Number Ones album. They ended up having 300 people perform their dance routine three times to a medley of Jackson’s greatest hits.

Janet showed up and was blown away by the fact that “we took choreography from her videos, put them together, and simplified it so everybody could do it,” recalls Brooks. “It became huge. It was covered in the international press. We haven’t stopped working since.”

Brooks and Lawrence officially set up their business as a limited liability company in November 2009. A pop culture phenomenon, Flash Mob America has enjoyed a quick rise thanks to social media as its main source of promotion and recruitment. Clients include ABC’s Modern Family, Rachael Ray, Dell, Oscar Mayer, Oreo, GLAAD, and the American Red Cross.

Each year since its inception, Flash Mob America has generated annual gross revenues of around $600,000. The company has grown into a full-service, national production company that handles all aspects of a flash mob, including casting, choreography, music clearance and original composition, photography, filming, editing, and social networking.

Brooks handles the creative aspects while Lawrence oversees operations. Flash Mob America employs a pre-production staff of five but works with production crews all over the country including DJs, photographers, choreographers, and camera people who are on-call on a per-project basis.

Companies are starting to capitalize on the commercial appeal of flash mobs. Originally flash mobs—staged but seemingly impromptu dance routines performed by a mass of people in public places such as shopping malls—were done purely for the fun of it. But now corporations are increasingly using flash mobs at promotional and marketing events.

“Most of the time corporations hire us to get good press,” Brooks says. For instance, when it announced in January 2010 that 1 million pounds of food was being donated to Feeding America, Oscar Mayer hired Flash Mob America to create a flash mob celebration of its Good Mood Charity Campaign America.

The average cost to stage a flash mob is $2,000 to $5,000 per event for an individual—for a marriage proposal, for example. For corporate events, which tend to be more involved, the cost ranges from $10,000 to $100,000. “Sometimes we create original music because licensing songs can be so expensive,” notes Brooks, whose firm gets paid a fee out of the event’s budget.

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