International events: How French Kissing, A Super Location and the Right Tech Could Set You Up For Success.
Last week Isle of Media, the public private partnership driving inward investment to the Isle of Man within the digital media industry, hosted an event at MIPTV in Cannes, France. The idea of hosting the event at a large international festival was to ensure the message engaged with the right audience, and with thousands of media businesses professionals descending to the town made famous by the classic Cannes Film Festival where better to host an industry event. Events, especially international ones, are never without their stresses and a successful one that looks as though everything is as stress free as possible (even if it’s not). If you’re hosting outside of your home country you might consider the below.
Super Locale
Choose the location that suits your event, ideally one which is stand out and unusual but balanced with serving your purpose functionally. (Remember if you need to get caterers in and the venue doesn’t usually do catering then you’ll have extra costs and complications, same goes with the facilities). At MIPTV this year, Isle of Media hired a classical Riviera villa (built c.1910) with management team experienced in formal and semi-formal cocktail functions.
A more unusual type of location for a MIP event, as it’s about 10 mins away from the Palais de Festivals, but it is a breath of fresh air compared to the hustle of the Croisette promenade. To ensure it was as convenient as possible for the guests, a shuttle taxi was organised to run backwards and forwards from the promenade to the event in the hills throughout the evening.
French KISSing
With complications to consider, aim to keep it simple stupid (KISS). The villa was such a beautiful a venue with fantastic fresh food and chilled out ambience, it was worth the extra complication of organising the shuttle taxi. There is a lot to be said for ensuring that you have minimal amount of risk to mitigate especially when you’re in a foreign country, so keeping to elegant and simple events can sometimes be more effective than lots of intricate details to manage, especially if you only have a small team (and you can just about order a salad in the local language). Good quality food and decent Spotify playlist can be all ‘je ne said qoui” you need if you have sourced the perfect location, a la the previous point.
Tech Savvy
Always leverage tech where you can. If you’re running your event through a platform such as Eventbrite, do yourself a huge favour and download the app to track attendance. You can scan tickets as guests enter, or if you want to keep it a little more informal and can check people off as you see them.
Of course there is much more to running an event than the above alone. When you’re planning your next event, don’t be afraid to go to where your key audience is; tag on to those events that are already successful and attract the people you need to speak to.
The next events Isle of Media are hosting, along with Barclays, and NorthInvest are in he UK. The back to back events of the Northern Media Summit at The Landing, Manchester and Platform, Leeds at the beginning of May.
