One of New York City’s biggest concerts takes place each December to kick off the holiday season – Z100’s Jingle Ball.  The concert regularly sells out Madison Square Garden in hours and attracts some of the country’s hottest artists.  This year’s roster certainly didn’t disappoint – the lineup included Taylor Swift, John Mayer, Justin Bieber, Jordin Sparks, Kris Allen, The Fray, Jay Sean, Boys Like Girls, Pitbull, Owl City and Ke$ha.

While music rang through Madison Square Garden on Friday, December 11th, several of my coworkers and I were backstage in the gifting lounge on behalf of our clients, 5 Gum and Hasbro.  The lounge served as the behind-the-scenes destination for celebs and VIPs where they could pick up goodies as an added bonus for performing.  At the 5 Gum table, guests participated in a guessing game where they estimated the number of sticks of gum held in a cookie jar.  The prize at stake was a donation made on the winner’s behalf to the Food Bank for New York City, so everyone took the game very seriously!  Isaac Slade (lead singer of The Fray) opened the calculator app on his phone to work out formulas, The Twilight Saga’s Peter Facinelli stacked packs of gum on top of each other to eyeball his estimate, and Connor Paolo of Gossip Girl inquired whether the rules of the game were like those of The Price Is Right (the closest without going over wins).  In the end, Jordin Sparks was the victor with the closest guess, beating out others such as 30 Rock’s Judah Friedlander, Dancing With the Stars champ Kym Johnson and American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert.  It was definitely a fun-filled day for everyone in the lounge – Hunter PR employees included!

Kaitlin