The X Games
Experiential Events have Taken Over — are you on their Team?
by Dave Felix | Published in January 2007 Event Currents
Once upon a time, event producers could rely on a few tricks to create a memorable night. The recipe: good food plus abundant bar equals success. If you added some ambient music, a nice take-home gift and maybe even some entertainment, well, wow! You’d really done something.
I remember early in my career, observing a large corporate event become transformed when a small group of a capella singers started winding between tables, serenading the salad course. It blew people away.
As we all know, it takes a lot more than that to raise the roof these days. Today’s meeting-goers want more than a cocktail and a pat on the back. They want shivers, thrills, laughs, tears and vivid memories to last them a lifetime.
Yep, it’s a tall order. And it’s one that every member of our industry needs to rise to meet — and soon. If you aren’t already planning experiential activities and multi-tiered touchpoints in every one of your events, you risk losing your edge in this business.
Taking it up a Notch
Here’s a little advice: next time you’re sitting down to map out a new event, force yourself to view everything from a new angle. Force yourself to come up with three new ideas for each budget line. Some will be silly. Others will be golden.
Round 1: Look at your floral budget for your finale dinner. Hmmm…never goes as far as you’d like, right?
But what if you turn that to your advantage? What if you make one of the afternoon breakout sessions a floral training exercise. You bring in local experts, your guests all come together with a room full of aterials (many of which you can get cheaply at a discount store) and they work as a team to create centerpieces. Turn it into a competition! Then gift all the resulting florals to a local nursing home the day after the event, for example. Whatever you do with them, you’ve already made them meaningful to everyone in the room by putting their thumbprint on the process.
Okay, Round 2: Off-site events. Hmmm…let’s see. Golf, tennis, winery tour. Wake me when it’s over! Force yourself to take it all up a few notches. Now, suddenly, you’re booking a dozen sports cars and creating an all-day scavenger hunt whose ultimate reward is arrival at an amazing picnic luncheon spread on the grounds of a private abbey that is seldom ever seen.
Still not convinced you can make it work? You can. At Planning the Globe, we’ve learned that it’s possible to pull off these multi-tiered, days-long events year after year. We’ve also discovered that they can often be delivered within the same budget as the ho-hum events of yore.
To be sure, they can’t be delivered simply by ticking off the same checklist you’ve used for the last six events.
Experiential events deliver huge dividends for your client and their guests, and they task each of us to work at the height of our creativity. We can only pull them off when we successfully translate our vision first to the client, and then to the vendors who help us make those visions real.
I recently had the good fortune of seeing this take place.
Last spring, the Queen Mary 2 called on the Port of Charleston. Aboard the ship were some of the nation’s top-performing finance executives. They were my clients.
I have the luxury of living in Charleston, so I knew that merely arriving here and strolling the streets might be sufficient entertainment for this group.
But I pushed myself, and my team, to take it higher — much higher. The results were astonishing: We had hundreds of worldly executives fanning out around town. Some boarded bicycles for a tour of our historic waterfront and bridges. Others took high tea at a swanky restaurant while the nation’s eminent silver expert tutored them on how to antique. And sure, a few golfed. But we made sure they did so in a place that epitomized Charleston’s beauty, and we delivered to them more than a few shiver-worthy surprises at the course.
The lesson to me was this: No matter where we are, or for whom we’re working, we need to inject fresh, creative thinking at every possible turn.
Can you pull off a higher level of experience in your next event? Absolutely. Should you? You’re doing yourself — and your clients — a disservice if you deliver anything less.
About the author: Dave Felix
Dave Felix is the director of creative and events for Charleston, S.C.-based Planning the Globe.
Contact: dfelix@planningtheglobe.com