 BEST EVENTS: What changes is the challenged economy creating
in the event space?
JOE WAGNER: For one, the turnaround
time on the execution has become very tight. And two, there
is a much stronger tie-in to return on investment or measurement
coming back—even with very tight budgets.
BEST EVENTS: What are event professionals focused
on these days?
JOE WAGNER: We’re focused
on leveraging interactive capabilities for our clients,
a subset of direct interactive elements we can tie into
our live events. It provides enhanced measurement tracking
features and the ability to generate a database that we
can go back and market to depending on the brand or category.
BEST EVENTS: Budgets? What budgets?
JOE WAGNER: Well it’s certainly
challenging these days. Things like food and beverage and
a/v are under downward pricing pressure right now and you
can certainly work with trusted vendors and suppliers to
try to accommodate a lower budget. But at some point you
reach a base level where there really isn’t much
you can do in those fundamental factors; venue, food and
beverage, etc. But again, I think that the ability to come
back to an interactive component can provide additional
bandwidth to a client. [Technology helps us] will either
[generate] measurement features with events or actually
get the event attendance up if it’s marketed the
right way. Many kinds of technological components can provide
you with the ability to bring more to an event and get
more bandwidth or a longer timeframe out of it. By leveraging
the Internet or in an on-demand format, attendees of an
event can come back and actually get some benefit from
that, where they can access that material or that content.
It also provides the brand with that ability to track repeat
customers. Many clients are leveraging virtual] and eLearning
events again by providing a [post-event] interactive component
that allows brands to extend the value of that event and
extend the timeframe, to provide that content to a retail
facing consumer audience or an internal corporate audience.
You can provide that content to them over time with very
little additional expense.
Are there any recent programs that XA has worked
on recently that come to mind when we talk about trying
to do more with less?
JOE WAGNER: One that was very successful
for us was a program called the Character Project for USA Networks.
It was a very unique way to provide some bandwidth to USA
during the upfront sales cycle. We created a series of photographs
and a trailing exhibition. It provided the client with a
lot of bandwidth in terms of getting a reach across many
markets. So we toured it across several markets, providing
more of an exhibition type format that allowed them to touch
a number of different markets while at the same time building
brand. |
