Ready To Cook Up Something New

As many of you know I have been attending culinary school for the past year.  I am happy to report that I graduated.  Now what?

As I have mentioned before, the goal is to meld the live entertainment world with the world of culinary.  If you think about it, this is an easy goal to accomplish.  Food is not new to entertainment.  Actually, food has always been part of the entertainment world.  In medieval times chefs created huge banquets complete with live entertainment. 

As marketers, we need to always be on the lookout for new and exciting ways to get butts in seats.  Food is always an opportunity to draw people.  You can add culinary to anything you are promoting.  Think about it.  If you are marketing Sesame Street Live you can make cookies with Cookie Monster.  If you are selling Walking with Dinosaurs you can use those Flintstone size beef ribs.  This is the new and exciting stuff I hope to accomplish with my new business.

If we are going to add food to the live entertainment world then we need chefs who “get it”.  This is why I am also creating chef representation to the business.  Even though chefs are considered the new “rock stars” they are different from rock stars.  Putting chefs on stage in front of a live audience is a fairly new thing. Many chefs are not used to this kind of attention.  Who better to bridge this together then a live entertainment marketer who is also chef?

So let’s get hungry together and cook up new ways to fill up our venue seats and our customer’s bellies.

Post Conference Thoughts

It was a whirlwind trip to Chicago for the Event & Arena Marketing Conference last week.  If the conference didn’t create its own excitement, being ground zero for the Stanley Cup celebrations brought it over the top.

I really enjoyed Ross Bernstein’s keynote presentation on the late Herb Brooks.  Ross seemed to bring the full spirit of the 1980 Olympic hockey coach to the conference.  After hearing Ross’s speech, you can really understand how “Herbie” was able to take average college hockey players and turn them into Olympic champions.

I attended the session on viral marketing.  Wanted to hear how it is evolving or should I say “going viral”.  The session was very interesting.  When many people think viral, they think YouTube.  But viral marketing is way more than that.  Marketing on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and FourSquare is viral marketing too.  Have your Facebook fans create an “event” for your show.  Have each of them invite all of their friends to the event.  This will spread the word to thousands very quickly.

Since I have been in this business for 25 years, I don’t get overly impressed with the type of family shows that tour today.  However, I think Walking with Dinosaurs is pretty cool.  They had a Baby T at their sponsored luncheon.  Now that is what I call a really great advance costume.  Baby T is the size of an actual baby t-rex. I was also impressed with how Cirque du Soleil has grown over the past 20 years.  The brand is now worldwide with 20 plus shows and continues to grow every year. 

I was part of a panel discussion on marketing & advertising basics.  The panel took an interesting twist. Instead of talking about how to buy media or what are the right GRP’s, we discussed actually understanding our customers.  You can’t buy media if you truly don’t know your customer.  It is more than just reading the stats.  You need to ask the customer, listen to the customer, and follow through for the customer.