Events: 9 Common Mistakes
-By David Isaac
The author is Head of Experiential Production at Sid Lee. After spending a few years in our Amsterdam office gulping fresh herring, he is now based in New York where he enjoys big-ass pretzels sold from carts on the street.
It’s always humbling to look at our past mistakes. We usually prefer to do this in the privacy of a conference room with our team or with very strong drinks. But, we’ve learned so much from the mistakes listed below that I felt a moral obligation to share them with you. The hope is that these insights might help avoid a train wreck or two in your not-so-distant future.
In experiential, mistakes hit hard. An ad campaign that doesn’t deliver is worrisome, but attending an event that you put your heart and soul into and watching it veer off the rails is embarrassing and heartbreaking. It’s like inviting your friends to your wedding only to have the person you’re marrying ditch you at the altar.
Despite our best efforts, powerful forces and endless details seem to conspire to put perfectly orchestrated plans in peril. The good news is that having a clear understanding of these classic mistakes works wonders when you’re trying to steer clear of complications or poor performance.
On with the list…
Mistake 1
Creating events vs. platforms
Some clients make the mistake in seeing events as one-offs. We believe clients should try to develop experiential platforms and stay away from one-off events unless they’re absolutely necessary to mark a special occasion. Hollywood loves serial “franchises” and sequels for very legitimate business reasons: you get a better return on investment, you have prior knowledge vs. doing everything from scratch, & you can develop an audience over time. The goal should be to build a “property”, not flash-in-the-pan events.
Mistake 2
Create now, scope later
This cardinal sin is mostly committed on the agency side. Creative and Strategy people fall in love with a wonderful idea, keep it high-level and get the client over-excited with anticipation. Then they bring in the production pros and find out it doesn’t respect one of the fundamental constraints inherent to every project (money, time or technical/legal feasibility). To avoid this mistake, always have producers at the table from the get-go when the creative is being created. Any time after that, you’re asking for headaches.
Mistake 3
Build it and they will come (maybe)
Too often, the energy and excitement of producing an event clouds the importance of defining a proper amplification strategy to maximize your ROI. Relying solely on word-of-mouth or uncontrollable viral phenomena is risky at best. In our experience, paid media and PR professionals are essential if you want to build both the number of people who go and the number of eyeballs that wish they were there. In a nutshell: crossing your fingers and hoping for the best is not a strategy.
Mistake 4
Capturing content instead of creating content
Like most televised sporting events, great video content can be “captured” as your event unfolds. Of course, without the athletic prowess of Lionel Messi to rely on, you’ll need a lot more meat to generate compelling content. A real content strategy needs to be in place. What can we film before? After? What will be scripted? Or done documentary style? What is the content distribution strategy? Can we have some UGC? Do we have media partners? If you just show up with a videographer and a photographer you’ll get content with no legs, 99% of the time.
Mistake 5
Think of the objectives first
Many marketers end up so enthralled by their objectives that they forget their audience’s objectives: to socialize and be entertained. It’s a common mistake to create an event that “meets the objective of a brand” without meeting the expectations of the audience. I’m pretty sure you remember at least one crappy corporate event where organizers were perfectly happy with the outcome. We have a simple acid test to avoid that. We ask the question: “Could we sell tickets for this branded event”? If the answer is yes, then we know we’ve done our job.
Note the use of the word “audience” instead of consumers. That helps too.
Mistake 6
Obsess over details
We’ve seen events go down the drain because the organizers underestimated the number of toilets required. There is no such thing as a micro-manager in experiential marketing. No subject is too small. No worry too big. Check everything. Imagine all the things that can go wrong. Be paranoid.
Trust us: It’s not God that’s in the details, it’s the Devil.
Mistake 7
Have no local partners
Some producers think they know everything, everywhere. Big mistake. In the end, they may pocket a few more bucks but they put their client at risk.
Even Cirque du Soleil, who has produced more live entertainment gigs in more cities than anybody in the world, will recruit local partners when taking events on the road.
Mistake 8
Do not have a buffer
In general, having a buffer is the golden rule of production. In experiential production, however, we’re dealing with high levels of complexity by mixing the actual event with the production of content, the integration of technology, etc. It’s hard to be 100% accurate when surprises abound. Plus, when you have thousands of people heading to your site, you’ll spend whatever you need to in order to address a problem. You just have to.
Take-away: we need a cushion. And not a tiny one. A good rule of thumb is 10% at the beginning of the project and about 5% further down the road.
Mistake 9
Panic when something goes wrong
When the captain of Apollo 13 calmly said “Houston, we have a problem”, he unknowingly set the bar for how experiential professionals need to behave when things become dicey in the middle of a production. We’ve seen clients or producers go ape shit when an issue is encountered. It doesn’t help. At all. When things get scary (and they will), tap into your inner Tom Hanks. Nobody will die (most of the time).
For more insights from Sid Lee on experiential marketing, take a look at « What we’ve learned spending $80M on events in the past few years ».
