Live Event Marketing: What Sing Can Teach Us About Getting People in the Room
Last week, I wrote a lot about data. Specifically, I wrote about how hearing Lutz Finger speak about Big Data changed the way I approached contest promotions. That happened at one of my favorite professional events: the Upland Second Street Conference in St. Louis, which I attended several times before the annual event ended in 2020. Years later, I'm still writing about ideas I picked up in those rooms. That got me thinking about something else: What is the value of live event marketing when almost everything about an event can now be put on a screen?
The keynote can be streamed. The concert will end up on YouTube. The best moments from a baseball game will be on Instagram before you've left the stadium. A conference presentation can become a webinar, podcast episode, LinkedIn post and six short-form videos. So why do we still bother showing up? Sing has an interesting answer.
The Screen Made People Want to Be There
Most of Sing revolves around Buster Moon desperately trying to save his struggling theater with a singing competition. Things do not go according to plan. Eventually, the theater itself is destroyed. The competition falls apart. Buster appears to have lost the thing he was trying to save.
Then Meena sings. Buster decides to put on a show anyway, using the remains of the theater as the stage. The audience starts small, but once the performances are broadcast, more people discover what's happening.
They don't respond by thinking, “Great. I can watch this from home.” They show up. The screen doesn't replace the event. It creates interest in being there.
Digital Can Create the Desire for Live
I've been experiencing a real-world version of this with the Savannah Bananas. I follow Jackson Olson on Instagram because I enjoy his videos. I've never been to a Savannah Bananas game. Everything I know about the experience has come through a screen.
The result? I think going to a game would be a lot of fun. His content hasn't replaced the live experience for me because I haven't actually had the live experience. It has made me curious enough to want one.
The same thing happened in a different way yesterday. My Facebook feed was flooded with friends attending the Buffalo Bills game at Highmark Stadium. Photos from the seats. Videos. Reactions. Friends documenting the experience as it happened. I could see plenty of it from my couch. That didn't make being there seem less valuable. It made being there look fun.
That's one of the interesting challenges of live event marketing: digital content doesn't necessarily have to compete with the in-person experience. It can create the desire to experience it yourself.
We Don't Have to Choose Between Digital and Live
Marketers can create a false competition between these two experiences.
If we livestream the keynote, will people still attend?
If we post clips from the event, are we giving too much away?
If people can learn about our product through webinars, LinkedIn and YouTube, why spend thousands of dollars sending a team to a conference?
Maybe we're asking the wrong question. Digital content can extend an experience beyond the people physically in the room. It can introduce someone to a speaker, performer, team or event they otherwise wouldn't know existed. It can keep an idea alive years after everyone packed their bags and flew home. I'm living proof of that last one. The Second Street Conference ended years ago, yet an idea I heard there in 2015 influenced how I built a Chevy Cruze promotion and eventually became two Story Behind the Strategy articles more than a decade later. That's a pretty impressive lifespan for one conference session.
What Happens in the Room?
There is also information we pick up in person that is difficult to capture on a dashboard. You hear the question someone asks from three seats away. You strike up a conversation while waiting for coffee. You notice which statement makes everyone in the room reach for their phones. Someone tells you what they're actually struggling with after the presentation ends. Those interactions create context around the information. That's where I want to spend some time this week.
Last week was about data: what we collect, what it means and what we actually do with it. This week, I'm interested in what happens when we put people in the same physical space.
What do we learn there that we wouldn't learn from a click? What makes an experience worth leaving the house for? How can live event marketing use digital content to build that desire rather than trying to replace the experience?
Sing offers one possible answer. The job of digital content isn't always to recreate the live experience. It's to make someone watching from home think: I want to be there.
