Masterclass

One thing that should never be forgotten in the event industry is that festivals are social gatherings for groups of people. Your event isn’t 50,000 individuals, it’s more like 5,000 groups of 10, with tight-knit circles making the commitment to drop big money and make the commitment to your production. Millennials are particularly social—both in the modern and traditional sense—and as they have become the cherished target market extremely successful marketing strategies have emerged to play on their nuanced characteristics. StreetTeam (formerly The Physical Network) have tapped directly into the buying habits of the millennial audience with their Ambassador program. ...

When it comes to raising awareness about the broad conversation around festival harm reduction and drug safety, few people are as well versed as the Drug Policy Alliance’s (DPA) director of audience development Stefanie Jones. Known for bringing the frank and pragmatic perspectives of Europe to the North American festival scene, Stefanie has been a vanguard of progressive festival harm reduction methods and has brought her pioneering Project #OpenTalk and #SaferPartying initiatives to major events across the United States. Being such an important conversation in the festival community, we asked Stefanie to outline the most important changes that event producers ...

Event surveillance should be near the top of every organizers priority list, and having that ubiquitous perspective is essential for managing any mass gathering nowadays. It’s a tragic reality that grave threats to the safety of your patrons have to be considered from the moment you start planning an event. Event security today is a multi-team collaboration that relies on cutting-edge technology and expert command and control. Few people know as much about this synergy as event surveillance expert Chad Ladov. Ladov is the founder of Unified Command, a wireless HD event surveillance firm. Ladov has worked in high-level security, venue, ...

For those living without a disability, the hugely important and complex task of making a major event disability-friendly might go unnoticed. It can be very easy to take accessibility for granted and to remain oblivious to the often subtle difficulties that make many events a challenge for those with disabilities. Cherie Wren is the head of Disability Services at Dragon Con, Atlanta’s premiere pop culture convention which takes place every Labor Day weekend across five connected hotels in the city’s downtown area. Being very busy and vast in size, Dragon Con can be a slog for anyone to move around, ...

There was a time when the idea of corporate sponsorship for a concert or festival would have seemed absolutely horrifying. Back when rock ‘n’ roll was still counterculture, people actually bought music, and flower crowns weren’t retro, there was no such thing as brand presence at concerts. Michael Jackson’s Bad tour in 1983 completely changed that. In an attempt to present themselves as the Choice of a New Generation™, Pepsi Co. paid an unprecedented $5m to partner with the King of Pop on a stadium tour, and thus shifted the course of integrated event marketing forever. These days brands are ...

Leon Hill and his company We Know Festivals. The Reykjavik-based Aussie founded one of the first social media marketing companies in the world back in 2007, and since then has worked with entertainment agencies like Warner Music, Paramount Pictures, and EMI, and now in the festival sphere with Secret Solstice, Lost Paradise, The Ark, Ostend Beach, Rampage, and many others. Hill’s special talent is getting unrivaled mileage out of marketing budgets while fine-tuning a festival’s brand to maximize growth and longevity. As an example of his prowess, just last year Hill's agency created the $1 million festival ticket campaign for ...

It’s not enough to have a lineup and some beer anymore. People need to be blown away. The bar has continued to move higher over the last decade and one area that has accelerated, particularly in tandem with the rise of EDM, is lighting and stage production. Having led the lighting design and production for some of the biggest US festivals, founder of SJ Lighting Steve Lieberman is arguably the most influential figure behind this shift, boasting over 20 years of lighting design experience under his belt. From the flashy festival stages of Ultra Music Festival, Electric Daisy Carnival and Coachella to ...

One crucial element that the world's most iconic and influential festivals share in common is the communities that they have built around the event. These essential bonds that are formed at the festival and endure long after the site is broken down, can't be made by just dope lineups, or top tier facilities. They exist in Facebook groups and on Reddit threads, are fueled by memes and inside jokes, and build the unique culture of your fan experience year on year. Perpetually clad in purple doubloons and brimming with an infectious zeal, Eamon Armstrong is perhaps the most active and ...

Running a festival in a city is an entirely different beast than taking over a field in a rural area. The number of potential obstacles—ranging from angry neighbors to unresponsive mayors—can seem on the surface to be unreasonable and impossible to surmount. But the civic landscape can offer incredible diversity and potential if you have the negotiating skills to keep all parties happy. And Sean Horton is someone that has exemplary negotiating skills. Horton's electronic music festival Decibel in Seattle has thrived in the city’s bustling downtown and Capitol Hill districts over the past twelve years. Using as many as ...

The idea of the VIP has become a contentious one in recent years. Driven by a souring attitude towards wealth and exclusivity, and supported by more unscrupulous promoters packaging “IP” as “VIP,” the term doesn’t mean what it used to at a festival. At many events, VIP merely means being in a slightly less crowded bar area and access to toilets that are cleaned with a little more frequency. And when you consider the price hike and the volume of VIP tickets sold, you can feel somewhat less than important. Simon Beckingham is a Sydney-based restaurateur and founder of Lost ...