Grammy Award-Winner Robert Glasper headlines Rochester Juneteenth Festival 2025
Grammy Award-winning artist and producer, Robert Glasper, headlines 2025 Juneteenth Festival. Photo Credit: Kareem Jay Hayes
Grammy Award-winning artist and producer, Robert Glasper, brought infinite hope as he took the stage at the 2025 Rochester Juneteenth Festival. An artist at the heart of a moment – and a movement – to champion Black music, Black people and a brighter future, he headlined the festival with empowerment.
In Spring of 2025, LáLew Public Relations was commissioned by the Greater Rochester Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Commission to support the annual Rochester Juneteenth Festival for the second consecutive year.
We worked closely with the festival team to offer strategic insight and promote the event through a comprehensive media campaign.
This began by coordinating the event press conference – alerting the media, designing the agenda, formulating talking points and facilitating the event to ensure success. The press conference alone received coverage in media outlets including WROC-TV, WHEC-TV, WHAM-TV, Spectrum News and the Democrat and Chronicle.
Leading up to the event, our team executed effective earned media and social media campaigns. We created and distributed the press release, as well as coordinated numerous media interviews. In addition to traditional coverage, we orchestrated an interview between the festival team and a graduate student conducting a research project on Juneteenth, facilitated a Facebook Live interview, submitted the event to local community calendars and even collaborated with Lamar Advertising to select and place two impactful designs for a billboard campaign that garnered close to 300,000 impressions.
Our social media campaign included delivering a detailed content calendar, writing captivating copy and engaging with followers on the Greater Rochester Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Commission Facebook and Instagram pages. The weekly posts highlighted festival and parade updates, media placements, vendor information, sponsors and other key announcements. The campaign garnered over 28.1K views and reached over 8.7K accounts across all platforms.
On the day of the event, our team members provided meaningful on-site support — meeting media outlets, tracking media attendance and providing real time content creation throughout the day.
In total, we secured 22 articles with an estimated reach of 235 million unique visitors per month (UVM), 1,789,700 total engagements and a combined advertising value equivalent (AVE) of $2.17 million. Coverage appeared in key outlets including MSN, Yahoo News, Afro-Conscious Media, WXXI, WHAM, WHEC, WROC, Spectrum News and the Democrat & Chronicle, reflecting a strong local and national impact for this purposeful celebration.
Grammy Award-winning artist and producer, Robert Glasper, headlines 2025 Juneteenth Festival. Photo Credit: Kareem Jay Hayes