Turbocharged Takeoffs: The Why and How of Fast Event Launches 💥
Dahlia El Gazzar 🧿
Empowering #Eventprofs 🎉 | Helping event forward thinkers navigate #eventtech waters
Like fast food, fast cash, fast fashion and every other fast product, fast events (exhibitions, conferences, brand activations or fan-based events launched in six months or less) serve a valuable purpose. There are lessons in the fast-launch world that even traditional, business-to-business organizations can learn from.
Why launch an event quickly?
Organizers who drink the fast event Kool-Aid® have their reasons. Lance Fensterman, former vice president at Reed Exhibitions, past president of ReedPop, and now CEO at Fanatics Events, finds himself in a completely different event culture.
At an event company, “there’s an accepted rule of thumb that it takes about a year plus to build a show,” he says. But running the event arm of a brand that can “design, manufacture, sell and ship a product in 24 hours” obliged him to challenge past assumptions.
“We’ll apply firsthand learnings [from fast launches] to the larger events we’re building, as opposed to forming a hypothesis, building an event over 12 months and hoping all goes well,” he explains.
Fast launches help smaller, more nimble organizations exploit the white space that other companies can’t quickly act upon or justify the investment in because their profitability and sustainability bar is too high. Moreover, being first to market can give organizers a significant advantage.
Fast launches can also help organizers take more calculated risks later by allowing them to develop reusable tools and skill sets to respond to trends and conditions in the moment. “Otherwise, we might sit on the sidelines and say, ‘yeah, we can't move that fast,’” Fensterman admits.
Fast launches are the kinds of things entrepreneurs do, asserts Marty Glynn, CEO and partner at MAD Event Management LLC. But rather than being part of a predesigned blueprint, they’re more like “seeds,” he says. “Once you plant them, you have to wait and see what grows,” he says.
Recently, Glynn and his partner Martha (Scheidegger) Donato launched Thriv in Atlantic City. MAD aimed the event at people with interests and aspirations that differ from those in the earlier stages of their lives and careers.
“We were trying to create a new paradigm for consumer shows for a particular age group that's not targeted and instead it turned into something completely different in the process,” Glynn says.
Sometimes, a fast launch is an opportunity that’s too good to pass up. Emerald signed a deal with the National Basketball Association (NBA) for the first NBA Con in April of 2023 and launched the event in July to coincide with the NBA Summer League, a ten-day convergence of the NBA ecosystem featuring the newly drafted rookies, veteran players, coaches, recruiters, scouts and brands.
The icing on the cake for Summer League 2023 was that the top NBA draft pick, Victor Wembanyama, was scheduled to appear, and the league was going to announce a new tournament. “The timing was right,” says Ron Walden, senior vice president of strategic partnerships and DEI executive-level advocate at Emerald.