Over the past month World in London have been running a ‘World Cup Festival’. The idea was to get people to experience the action in Brazil in the company of fans from each of the 32 nations competing. We created unique experiences for some games, sold tickets for others and wrote a guide on the best place to watch each team. Here’s what we learned.

Creating your own large scale event is laced with difficulties

Initially the idea had been to create our own ‘large’ scale event(for 200 people + on around 15 selected nights). We wanted to invite different performers, chefs and artists each night to reflect the nation competing. Sounded a lovely concept but the realities proved much harder. We soon found that

1. Finding the right venue was not easy as first thought. Each place we tried had some issue with it (eg noise restriction, late license issues, no rain cover, not ideal viewing conditions). It was quite incredible how no one place quite hit the sweet spot of all these things.
2. Logistically organising different people every night would have been a nightmare re. scheduling people’s time. Especially in the knockout phases when we didn’t know who was going to progress
3. The numbers required to make a profit just didn’t add up unless we owned the bar or got significant sponsorship. Just to cover the costs of things such as venue hire, decoration, performers, extra security, TENS licences, extra screens ETC would have required each person to pay a £10-£15 entrance fee assuming we reached capacity. Owning the bar would have been crucial to making any profit out of the event and we struggled to find a venue where this was possible.
4. Authenticity would have been difficult to achieve. One of the issues with organsing your own event like this is how to make it authentic. We wanted people to experience the action with REAL fans (eg Brazilians for Brazil games, Colombians for Colombia) not just other city boys. Convincing those people to leave their own bars they’d been going to for years and attend our event would have been a very tough challenge.
5. We didn’t leave enough time. All of the issues above could potentially have been resolved with enough time and more experience. However, doing it all for the first time with only a couple of months to go just before the World Cup start just didn’t give us enough time to act.

Thankfully with a month to go we decided to switch strategy and instead looked to create smaller scale experiences in authentic venues, sell tickets to a Brazilian promoted event which was being organised by Brazilians and produce a guide of all the AUTHENTIC places where people could watch with real fans. In hindsight this was a very good decision…

World Cup competition is fierce

As a new boy on the block, although the World Cup market in London was huge (the Evening Standard estimated Londoners would be spending an extra £500m during the tournament), it was incredibly crowded with everybody else competing with many more natural advantages. A number of events were free (eg Rich Mix’s excellent Joga Bola festival) and a number incredibly well advertised (eg Guanabara or the Clapham Grand). Lots of people with huge audiences (eg Time Out, Londonist, Evening Standard & Metro) also wrote guides on the best places to watch (although I felt non were as comprehensive or well researched as ours). A classic example of the ferocity of the competition was that the Brazilian screening and party I’d been selling tickets for at the Coronet theatre in Elephant & Castle actually stopped running after the group stages. It was a brilliant set up — live Brazilian performers for each game, Brazilian street food, a Brazilian crowd, the biggest screen in London, no noise restrictions, open til 3am and only £5 entrance. Yet they still couldn’t get the numbers to make it worth their while continuing into the second half. Thank god we didn’t try to do our own!

You can’t please everybody

Although choosing the World Cup as a theme had alot of advantages (see this blog here), there were also some drawbacks to going so heavily on this for a month. A number of ‘early adopters’ of World in London were uninterested as they didn’t like football (although I always wanted it to be about the culture rather than the football), and some of the people we attracted weren’t really interested in anything else apart from the football. Others also seemed to take exception to the fact that we had to (for logistical and resource reasons) prioritise experiences for certain countries over others. You can’t please everybody!

Getting PR is one thing, selling tickets is quite another

We got some really nice PR from an interview with London Live, our photos being featured in Time Out, our Spanish experience in the Telegraph and even a brief appearance on Sky Sports for our Support Costa Rica campaign. But did these actually lead to extra ticket sales or even any discernable increase in website hits? Not at all! In the case of the London Live I don’t think enough people were watching it, in the case of the others I don’t think it was the right audience. Actually converting the interest and good will which World in London is generating into ticket sales is one of the big challenges we face going forward..

Having a guide is not as popular as we thought/ hoped.

One of the key USPs of what we were offering with our experience package was to be accompanied by a guide/ host from that nation to the games. We’d lined up a Brazilian journalist for Brazil games, had the ex Team Operations Manager of FC Barcelona for the Spain games & a Colombian tour guide for Colombia games. But did people actually buy that premium offer? No! Well a couple did — but virtually everybody just bought the straight entrance to the match. Either the advantages of the guide weren’t explicit enough, it should have been marketed to a specifc audience (groups or corporates) or people just didn’t want it.

Giving stuff away for free is popular

We had hundreds of people sign up to receive our FREE guide and maxed out on our 30 spaces for both the Colombia walking tours and matchday experiences we offered for free. We got excellent feedback for them. So that showed people wanted what we offered. The challenge is now to either convince more people it is worth paying for or to work out how to monetise the things we offer for free.

The most efficient business model thus far is simply selling tickets for other people’s event

That’s what we did for the Brazilian parties — tickets were cheap, we got a good commission for every ticket we sold, the event was good and authentic, non Brazilian’s wouldn’t have known about it if it wasn’t for us and it involved very little resource on our side in terms of the event logistics. Choosing these types of events in the future and selling tickets to a new audience seems like a very good way to go and is a very scalable model. It is certainly going to form a part of World in London’s future.

World in London is on a mission to help Londoners ‘travel’ the world in their own city. Find out more at www.worldinlondon.co.uk