How to use experimental marketing to build a festival business.

In this episode, we're going to speak with serial entrepreneur, Ed Vincent who is the Founder and CEO of festivalPass, and he explores the concept of experiential marketing and how it can help businesses stand out in a crowded marketplace.

We also discuss the importance of physical activations and creating memorable experiences for consumers to interact with brands in real life. We also delve into the idea of starting locally to grow globally, and how building a strong fan base in one vertical can lead to successful replication in other markets. Join us as we uncover the secrets to unleashing the power of experiential marketing and taking your brand to new heights.

The UnNoticed Entrepreneur podcast is sponsored by Prowly, the all-in-one software for leveraging PR activities. Boost the media relations game for your business - get more coverage while saving time and money on everyday tasks


Post-production, transcript and show notes by XCD Virtual Assistants

AWeber - free email marketing
Grow, sell, and engage with your audience—simple email marketing in one place. Free trial.

Turn your ideas into unique products
Create custom products with your own design!

LinkedIn Engagement using AI
Engage AI use AI to write insightful and relevant comments on LinkedIn™

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

Prowly: 0:00

The Unnoticed Entrepreneur Podcast is sponsored by Prowly. The All in one tool for PR experts.

Jim James: 0:08

Welcome to this episode of The UnNoticed Entrepreneur with me here in the UK, Jim James and we're going to Austin, Texas to meet Ed Vincent. Ed, welcome to the show.

Ed Vincent: 0:19

Hey Jim, how are you? Glad to be here.

Jim James: 0:21

Mate, I'm delighted to have you on the show'cause you know you are a multiple time entrepreneur. Serial entrepreneur over five businesses already under your belt. You're working for 25 years doing that and today we're gonna talk about a number of topics, including your"festivalPass" idea with NFTs, which about your mobile content studio, which you're doing with a famous music magazine in America and much more. So let's start off, Ed. And just tell us a little bit about you so that everyone knows who we're talking about today.

Ed Vincent: 0:53

Sure. So, I think you opened with a little bit about it. I'm a 25 year entrepreneur. Actually, was an"Investment Banker" prior to that. Jumped in 1999 to start my first e-commerce company. And that was in the early days of the internet. The internet 1.0. Had that company for a couple years. We sold things that made cities famous. So if anybody's been to New York City, we would ship New York City Pizza and bagels, overnight. We'd ship, you know, ribs from Chicago or Boston. Lobsters and seafoods from Boston. It was a lot of fun. But we built that company, sold it a couple years later. And then, I moved into a service-based business, which was a experiential marketing firm. It was about a 70 person, and we had a lot of fun. it was one of my, most fun businesses. I had ran up for about eight years through the two thousands and we'd bring a lot of big major brands to a lot of live events. Those live events were concerts or festivals. We helped build a couple festivals. We owned a film festival in the Dominican Republic, down in the Caribbean. And then, in that process, during that time, I think the folks in the UK know about Maxim Magazine. You probably heard of Maxim. The Men's LAD magazine. So a good friend of mine was a CEO here in the US back then, and we created a branded hotel in the Dominican Republic called the "Maxim Bungalows". So we brought all the excitement of Maxim Magazine into a hotel. So those are just some fun antidotes along the way. I think I shared with you earlier, there's a few projects we worked on during that timeframe that were a lot of fun.

Jim James: 2:18

Yeah, look, you know, Ed, you've got a wealth of experience and I'll put your details in the show notes anyway so people can find out more about you when they want to. But let's just talk about your latest project because you are using NFTs to create a lifetime membership. And you know, this show's all about getting noticed, but a membership business model we haven't really covered before on The UnNoticed Entrepreneur. Do you want to just tell us how are you using NFTs and how do you, if you like, overcome people's anxieties around the new tech? Just tell us about the NFTs and what you're doing to build a membership.

Ed Vincent: 2:51

Sure, Sure. So initially, you know, what's interesting about NFT is they, it's a Web3 product that happens to be built on the blockchain, but as you know, it's not, a lot of people mix up Crypto, "Crypto and Web3". Web3 is more the overall protocol of using the blockchain for business. And Crypto is obviously related mostly to DeFi, which is "Decentralized Finance". But what we did is we've created a NFT. And all that really means is it's something unique to us and it's something that if you own it, you get benefits. It's that simple. And for us, if you buy and own an NFT, you get a lifetime membership to our platform. And what that means is once you buy it once and pay for it once you get $1,200 worth of credits on our platform to be able to use for live events and hotels anywhere you want. So we have over 80,000 live events on our platform. So everything from concerts to sporting events, to broadway theaters to comedy shows. And you can use those credits in order to go to all those shows, as well as hotels, throughout the world.

Jim James: 3:55

So that's fun. So what's the name of the platform?

Ed Vincent: 3:58

Yeah, so"festivalPass" is the name of the platform. So people go to"festivalpass.com", which was mostly a Web2 business. And the traditional model is people pay a monthly subscription or an annual subscription, and they receive credits and they can redeem those credits to go all these amazing things. When we decided to bring the NFT onboard, we created a lifetime membership. So if you buy it once, forever in perpetuity, every single year you get $1,200 more of credits to go to these events. And what's cool about NFTs, and when you talking about the way your show is about, you know, marketing, right? So, by creating the NFT and creating this lifetime value, the perceived value is very great for people. Anybody that owns it is like,"Oh my God, this is amazing. For the rest of my life, I get $1,200 to go to events?" And the answer is"Yes, absolutely". And on top of it, what happens is they can always sell it whenever they want in the future. They can sell it on OpenSea or some other marketplace. But what's cool about it is it's a limited amount. So we're only gonna sell 10,000 of these NFTs, but we'll have hundreds of thousands and hopefully, millions of regular subscribers on the platform. So we're taking a small subset that will be cash flow positive for us for about four or five years, and then may incur a marketing expense thereafter. In doing so in order to create like, 10,000 super loyal customers for our brand.

Jim James: 5:18

I was gonna say, so what's the risk though, that by giving $1,200 worth of value in perpetuity for a fixed amount up front, you know that you're not losing money after years, you know, 4, 5, 6, and so on, because conceivably, you've got a long tail of consumption, but you've already spent the money you've taken.

Ed Vincent: 5:38

Yeah, so this is where some of my finance and banking comes into play. So there's a very deep financial model on how that all works, in terms of estimated credit usage. Estimated, you know, activity that's happening. So at the end of the day, the way we've kind of estimated it is for the one time fee, we should cover anywhere, depending upon the usage. Anywhere from four to six years of usage. And thereafter it will become a marketing expense. So it will be kind of a lost leader for the company, but if you can put it in perspective is, this is where you can get a lot more with your marketing dollars. Instead of spending a ton of money upfront today, we're able to have people provide us capital upfront that which we make sure we manage for that future liability, and it's really four to six years out before we start taking expense against our marketing. And by that time, we've already received a ton of value for these very passionate fans that are getting, you know, tons of events to go.

Jim James: 6:35

Interesting, it's almost like a "Devonshire" for a club, isn't it? Where people pay and have some access rights to the club for the long term. Ed, from a sort of marketing perspective and a sort of what you've learned with "festivalPass". You were talking earlier on about content and about, you know, getting people interested in an event. Can you share with us how have you been doing that? Because experiential marketing is great. I've launched some events myself in China, like the"British Motorsport Festival", and if you build it, they don't necessarily come. So how have you overcome that problem?

Ed Vincent: 7:10

Yeah, so a couple things on that is, one, you're doing it right here with content on a podcast. we also have a podcast called"festivalPass Stories", which we have about 75 episodes now, where we go behind the scenes. So we interview people that have created festivals, famous artists, musicians, celebrities, celebrity chefs, professional athletes. So that's a content spin. So it's a relatively low-cost for us to get behind the scenes of these events. And then it also provides business development opportunities for us to be able to bring those events on board and also work with some of those personalities. That's just one. The other one I think you're referring to is, we're building a digital content studio from a physical activation standpoint. So we've partnered with one of the premier music magazines here in the US called "Spin Magazine". So, you know, for the last 25, 30 years, you know, every major rockstar has been on the cover of Spin Magazine. So they have a lot of credibility in being able to access who to interview, et cetera. So we're building a bus, so we took an old city bus and we've wrapped it on the outside with "Spin" and"festivalPass" branding. So the entire 40 foot bus is just a huge billboard going through Austin, Texas. And then inside we've, split it in half. In the back half we've created a soundproof studio. So we've made it so that there's a nice big leather couch in the back and there's all the camera equipment and the soundproofing in the bus. So we're bringing that"South by Southwest", which is a, you know, a huge festival that brings hundreds of thousands of people to Austin, next month. And we're gonna use it to interview all of the rock stars that come through and utilize that content for many things.

Jim James: 8:50

I love that idea of sort of taking the bus and so that you've got a mobile studio. And I guess in a way, Ed, you're becoming a mobile broadcaster, aren't you? Like the CBS, CNN, Bloomberg, aren't you? You're really taking content production into the field. Is that very expensive and prohibitive?

Ed Vincent: 9:06

Well, if you do it right, it's not, right? So, I mean, the value of the impact. So if you're asking kind of the structure is, the good news is I have a friend that owns a bus company here in Austin, Texas. So that was leveraging friends first. I'm part of an entrepreneur organization that's global called "EO". And my friend is also part of the organization and he has 30 or 40 buses that usually is rented out for party buses. So he'll buy an old data service city bus and he'll retrofit it inside and then use it for a party bus. That's his business. So what I've done is I've gone to him and said,"Hey, I tell you what. I'll pay X amount of dollars to wrap it with branding. And I'll pay another X amount of dollars to upgrade the inside to make it this digital content studio. So when we need it, we'll use it for the digital content studio and when we don't need it, you can use it for a party bus and you can make money with it because I've now invested tens of thousands of dollars to upgrade your bus. And now you can make more money renting it out."

Jim James: 10:03

I love that idea and I really love the idea of getting out of people's couches 'cause social media is sort of telling to remove people, isn't it? And, EO, I know. I actually, from my past, I started "EO" in Beijing. I was the Founding President with a guy, Rich Robinson. Yeah. So big fan of "EO". I know in your line of business with these big events, influencers are a big part of this business. You know, people go to shows. Tell us how does it work with an influencer for an event, and what should people look for?

Ed Vincent: 10:33

Yeah, so typically, and I think you know this pretty well, as influencers that have millions of followers. You know, tend to like to be paid to reach them from a sponsorship perspective. And they should be paid, right? They've taken the time to build this media. Extension is just another form of advertising. However, you know, with us, because we're lucky enough to have a pretty cool product, and by cool, I mean, who doesn't want to go to live events, right? Whether that's, you know, major festivals like in the US like "Coachella" or "ACL Live" or "Rolling Loud". There's all these great, amazing festivals that people like to go. So because we have all those on our platform, in addition to all the concerts and sporting events, we've offered to a bunch of influencers that,"Hey, I tell you what, as long as you talk about our product, we will give you some free tickets to some events." And it's like a symbiotic experience because for them being at an event is content, right? So they're able to create content without having to pay for it for themselves. And in so doing, they're also then, you know, talking about us along the way and why we're an amazing opportunity. So I'll give you one example is coming up in the next month or so, there's Coachella is a big festival, right? So that's gonna happen, I think, you know, April. And we're gonna have a lot of influencers that all want to go to Coachella, and they're gonna talk about our lifetime membership. So they're gonna talk about it and say like,"Hey, you know what? I was looking for my ticket to Coachella. I didn't know where to go. And I stumbled across this thing called 'festivalPass', and I got a life hack for you. If you buy their lifetime membership, you get your ticket to Coachella this year, and then every year for the rest of your life, you get a free ticket to Coachella." So it's a great spin and a great way for them to promote it.

Jim James: 12:11

Yes. That's lovely. So you really, well, I guess in traditional terms, you're doing a barter, aren't you? Ed, now, over 25 years, you've had five companies, you've exited them successfully. Can you share any, if you like, recurring thoughts or recurring examples of things that have worked for you in terms of sort of getting those businesses noticed? Or are they all entirely different businesses and different strategies in terms of getting them noticed?

Ed Vincent: 12:36

Yeah, so, they all have a common theme because I think marketing is important across the board. You know, my first business was an E-Commerce business and what was funny is, because if you think about it, and a lot of people forget that back then there was a lot of the tools that didn't exist. So this is 1999 through 2001. So in order to get noticed, we couldn't just go on a search engine and buy AdWords. It didn't exist. Google didn't exist. Facebook didn't exist. So it was funny 'cause back then we would do barter deals with magazines to get ad pages and stuff like that because that was really the only way to get your brand out. We'd also do silly things like, stand in front of a big morning show window in New York City with big signs, you know, with our brand on it, even just in case the camera passed over it and saw it. But usually those are the things you had to do back in the day. So a lot of just grassroots, just do whatever's about necessary to get it done. But, I think what I learned across the way and going into my marketing business after that, the agency, is we would apply a lot of experiential tactics. So the thing about experiential marketing, especially on a local level is you can leverage kind of a relatively low-cost activation into known public relations, right? So as long as you're doing something, there's something to talk about. When there's something to talk about, that's when the news likes to write about you. So that's kind of very much what we're even applying today with the "Content Studio Bus", you know, of course, our PR team's gonna reach out and tell everybody that, "You know, we've partnered with a major magazine to create this amazing content studio that we're gonna take all over the country." And that's the exact kind of thing people want to write about and learn about.

Jim James: 14:12

I love that. And so just, you used the term"Experiential Marketing" obviously with fluency. For those of us that are not so familiar, just maybe just explain when you say"Experiential Marketing", maybe I'm just asking a silly question here, but for the uninitiated, what does that mean?

Ed Vincent: 14:29

Yeah, all it actually means is taking your brand and doing something with it live in market. So it's a physical activation of something, whether you're showing up to an event and, you know, just having you like a branded bar or you're coming to bringing a car to a mall and, you know, doing a sweepstakes around that car. Just any kind of physical activity where the consumer is experiencing something in real life with your brand.

Jim James: 14:57

Okay. And I think that's a really good point in this day and age that we do need to get the brand into the marketplace. Ed Vincent over there in Austin, Texas, just tell us then a little bit about, you know, your view. If you've got a view of what has worked consistently. We talked a bit about experiential marketing, but if you were to say to a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur like me, you know, what can they do to get noticed? What would that be?

Ed Vincent: 15:23

Yeah, I think one of the things, and I'm just begrudgingly learning it again now, which I should have remembered from the old days, but the idea that, starting locally in order to grow globally is super important for almost all brands. Meaning that, sometimes when people launch something, they think it's just easier to let everybody get to it whether that's nationally or globally or whatever it is. And when you do that, what's hard is that you're not deep on anything, right? So even if you're using paid advertising or anything, what's happening is you're getting a little bit to up depth across a wide scale. And usually the best way to launch any brand, especially from a cost effective standpoint, is to go deep with whether it's a specific geography, whether it's a specific audience, whether it's a specific vertical. Just a simple idea that if you can get it right, and you have a fan base in one vertical, then it's much easier to replicate that elsewhere. And I'm learning that again myself because we launched"festivalPass" nationally. So we have events in every state and city throughout the US and hotels globally. But what happens, right, is when we have members join, we have, you know, a few thousand from one city, a few thousand from another city, a few thousand from another city, and it doesn't give us that leverage of membership in a concentrated environment. So for us, we're doubling down now on local. So that's what the "Content Studio Bus" will help us do is to have a massive presence locally and if it works, we're gonna take that experience elsewhere. And once you have a physical thing locally, you can add public relations to it. You can add paid media to it, and you can do it on a geographic level or a target audience level.

Jim James: 17:01

You know, there's a really interesting point. Do you think that we are going global too quickly just because we can because of technology? Or do you think, is there ego? Why do you think people are going global before they're going local?

Ed Vincent: 17:13

I think every entrepreneur likes to think that everything's gonna go faster than it does. So the simple concept that,"Hey, I have a product that anybody can buy. Let me make it available to everybody to see who starts buying it.", right? That's a simple concept that you know, is not a negative context, but it's just the reality of life. You know, word of mouth, something that goes deeper into a certain vertical just works better. It just always gets more traction.

Jim James: 17:38

That's fantastic. And, you know, interesting enough though, I'm local here in the UK, but I'm able to go global with this show and connect with, you know, wonderful minds like yourself, Ed. Thank you very much indeed for sharing about "festivalPass" and NFTs, and about influencers, and content buses you covered a lot in 20 minutes. Ed Vincent, if people want to find out more about you and connect with you, how can they do that?

Ed Vincent: 18:00

Yeah, so first the brand. So, "festivalpass.com" on any of the socials, it's "@festivalpass." So that's across, you know, Instagram, TikTok, you know, Facebook, et cetera. Me personally, I'm mostly on a business side on LinkedIn. So you can just search me on LinkedIn and I'll pop up. And then, I don't actively personally, do a lot on social in terms of like Instagram and et cetera, but I'm just Ed Vincent NYC is, where I'm at?

Jim James: 18:24

Okay, so Brazilian, New York City, but now you're based in Austin.

Ed Vincent: 18:28

Yes. That was a pandemic move. I've been here for about three years.

Jim James: 18:31

Okay. Sounds like Austin's the place now in America where a lot of people have gravitated. Ed Vincent, thanks so much for joining me today on The UnNoticed Entrepreneur Show. It's been a real pleasure to learn so much across, really a new area for me and some great guidance about getting local before going global, and experiential plus what NFTs are. Thank you so much.

Ed Vincent: 18:52

Awesome. Thanks Jim.

Jim James: 18:53

You've been listening to Ed Vincent, from "festivalPass" over there in Austin, Texas, and I'll include his details. And hope you've enjoyed this show. If you have, please do share it with a fellow entrepreneur. Rate it on your player if you can, and look out for the new book, "The Unnoticed Entrepreneur", which is now launched and is available on all your bookstores. And my mission is to help The UnNoticed Entrepreneur meet and find out from great minds like Ed Vincent, how to get noticed. I hope we've done that today. Thank you for joining me on The UnNoticed Entrepreneur Show.

Prowly: 19:22

Now I'd just like to mention our sponsor for this show. The Unnoticed Entrepreneur Podcast is sponsored by a company called "Prowly." Prowly is an all in one software for leveraging your public relations activities. You can boost the media relations game for your business. Find media contacts, send out press releases, and get more coverage while saving time and money on everyday tasks. Check it out prowly.com.