Untitled - September 17, 2025
00:00:00 Speaker: Hey, hey. Welcome to the event show. Today's conversation is inspired by an experience of a friend. Who. Okay, let me start here. Let me start here. Picture this. You see some marketing or advertising for an event that you're attracted to. You think? Yeah, that's me. They're my people. I think I want to go to that. The marketing is compelling. It's making all sorts of different promises, which is excellent. And this person who inspired this conversation is quite the discerning buyer. So I imagine, um, me, on the other hand, I am not I am not a discerning buyer. I like it, it's shiny. I click on it and I buy it. Please don't send me links to shiny things because I'll buy them. But this friend that I'm referring to, she is quite the discerning buyer and, um, you know, very careful with where she puts her money and is surrounded by lots of very, very clever people. So for her to purchase a ticket to a business event led by someone else would have been quite the decision for her to make. Um, not necessarily financially, but time. Um, her biggest commodity is time. That's the thing that she treasures the most. And so, uh, you know, it would have been quite the decision for her to make the commitment to purchase this ticket, uh, to go to this event, which, mind you, is interstate for her. So there's a lot more of an investment, um, in time and money. So not only is she spending money on a ticket and taking the time out to go to an event. She is flying interstate, so there's airfares obviously there. And, um, you know, even if she goes for the day, it's an extra few hours, uh, on her day. She's not though. She's she booked for a week. Um, and secondly, accommodation. So if you are going to stay overnight, there's additional costs in relation to accommodation and then meals and all of those things on top of it. Now picture this. You are my friend and you've been watching this marketing come. And so you have. Then, um. Decided that you're going to go to this event. Yes, I will invest. I'll invest the money in the time. I'm really keen to go. Uh, I like what they're saying. I like the people that they're attracting. And I'm in. Six weeks later, or maybe even less. You start to see some more promotion for the event, except now they're offering two for ones. They're publicly offering two for one tickets. Now this. This boils my blood because this has happened to me. This has happened to me at, at, uh, it was actually South by Southwest in Sydney, their first event. Um, I bought a ticket. I bought a music ticket because you could buy tickets for different streams. And I bought a music ticket expecting to be able to get into all the music events. And clearly they couldn't sell enough tickets on that first first round. And so they they did what we call papered the room. So they gave away tickets. And what they did, though is they didn't give away regular tickets or cheap tickets, or just music or technology or film tickets. They gave away platinum tickets, which was access to everything and priority access to everything. Now, the reason I know they gave these away because there was lots of families with these lanyards, with these VIP tickets on. Um, I didn't ask anyone if they got them complimentary. I would assume they wouldn't say so if they did. But you can't tell me that a, you know, eighteen hundred dollars ticket is being purchased by mum, dad and two kids to go to a conference. There were some really high, high profile speakers at that event. Um, but what it meant was I didn't get in. I didn't get to get into the likes of The Talk with Nicole Kidman, because obviously VIPs got priority access and because they papered the room with VIPs, all the VIPs got to go in, and those of us that had actually invested purchased a ticket right back when they first launched it and invested in them. We got shafted. Now back to my friend. She's now seeing this being promoted as a two for one, and she reaches out to the event owner to offer some suggestions on how they may have better promoted and sold tickets. They're clearly struggling to sell their tickets. Um, and she reached out to them to make some suggestions because that's her area of expertise. And would you believe she's essentially been shut out? The person who owns the event got angry, responded negatively, told my friend that she knows what she's doing. Um, she hasn't done anything unethical. And additionally, we don't want your kind of person at our event. So here's your money back. Please don't come. Now, that would be fine if it was a local event, but it's not. It's an interstate event. So she has paid for airfares and accommodation that are now invalid. She can't get a refund on them. Um, so now she has to come interstate for nothing. Or, you know, I don't think she can even, um, change the dates on them. Which really stinks. But the behavior of this person really stinks. And so what I want to talk to you about is how else you might be able to do this? Because the reality is, sometimes it is hard to sell tickets. And the experience for the audience won't be the same if there's not very many people in the room. So I'd like to acknowledge that sometimes you do need to fill the room because you've made a promise that, um, you know, there's going to be this high energy or this big rah rah or, you know, we're going to gather three hundred people together and we're going to give you the best experience of your life. If you can't sell three hundred tickets, well, then you can't deliver on that promise. So you need to fill the room with three hundred people. Here's what we used to do. So as I said before, it's a term used in the music industry. It's called papering the room. That is, giving away tickets to a show that maybe hasn't sold as well as you'd hoped. And we've all been to concerts that are only half full, and they feel awful, Right. We feel bad for the performer. Um, we're not getting the vibe that we expected. Um, you know, you can't you can't put a show on unless they change the layout of the room, which is pretty hard to do in a in a stadium or a, you know, a thousand person venue. It's pretty hard to change the layout of the room. If there's ten of you standing in an empty room listening to a band on stage. Um, that doesn't feel great. You're not getting the full experience, so it's advantageous to your experience to fill the room. So what we used to do back then is what we would do is we would think about what groups could we donate tickets to. So what groups would benefit greatly from this experience that we could give complimentary tickets to that no one was going to be upset about? Now think about, for example. All, um, parents of kids in hospital, you know, uh, donating them to people to raffle off, um, donating them to charitable organizations like the Carers Foundation to give out to their carers. Like there's ways that you can distribute the tickets that most people are not going to be upset about because you've done it in a social enterprise in kind of way. Now there's a couple of rules to doing this. Number one is you have to choose your audience very carefully. Like if it's school kids or or people like that, you've got to choose your audience very carefully and make sure that they're the right audience to enhance the experience of the people that have bought the ticket. Secondly, you need to make sure they're going to come because when you get something for free, we all know we sometimes don't take advantage of that free ticket. So you have to be very clear with the audience that you give it to, that the expectation is that they will come. So if you give a community group one hundred tickets to a concert, those hundred seats need to be filled, one hundred seats to a charitable event. You know, if you give, if you've got five tables left over at your charity fundraiser, it's advantageous to give those tickets away because those people will bring money with them to, um, you know, buy the raffle tickets and all that kind of thing. But still, same thing. You know, there is the ninety percent of the room have paid one hundred and eighty dollars a ticket to be there. So rule number two is you can't tell anybody you've got this ticket for free. If somebody asks you, did you get your ticket for free? Obviously we don't want you to lie. We don't expect you to lie. You can tell them that you got it for free. But don't walk around going, hey, look at me, I got a free ticket. How good is that? And so did ninety nine of my friends. That is what pisses people off. That's the thing that really, you know, annoys, uh, the full price ticket holder. And, you know, typically, we all know it happens. We all know that, um, tickets get given away, VIP tickets get given away. There's always, not always, but most of the time there's, you know, ten, twenty, thirty tickets held for the promoter, ten, twenty, thirty tickets held for the venue, that kind of thing. So there's always tickets held. So we know people always get into events and and conferences and, and um, that kind of thing for free. Now back to my friend who's had this experience with this. It's this is a retreat that she's having this experience with. Um, this person doesn't need to publicly go out to market and say two for one. So like me and my South by Southwest experience, what South by Southwest should have done is come to me and said, we're going to upgrade you to VIP. We know you've only paid for a one stream music ticket, but we're going to give you the ultimate ticket and make you a VIP. Secondly, they should have papered the room with the individual stream tickets, not VIPs, unless they truly were VIPs. That way I get an enhanced experience, I get a better experience, and I would speak so much more favorably about this event than I do, because it was an awful, awful experience. Biggest waste of money I've ever, ever had at an event. Um. And I would never go again. I think it's, uh, it. Which is a travesty because there's a lot of really cool people that present at those. But I don't think it's, um, I don't think it's done well. I don't think it's done well. My friend. Same thing. Like she had some ideas that she wanted to present to this person on how they could have increased their sales more effectively because that's the space she's in. Like, why would you say no to that? If someone who's an expert in the space you're struggling with calls you and says, hey, firstly, I'm not very happy that you have, um, essentially diluted my ticket price, I'm paying double everybody else. Not only have you done that, but you also won't take my advice on how to improve your sales like that is, I find that ludicrous that they responded in the way that they responded. But in that scenario, she could have reached out to a number of different membership groups and only offered reduced tickets to those. There's plenty of female entrepreneur business groups out there that would have jumped at the chance to be able to promote her event in their groups for fifty percent off. It would have been fantastic. And then those groups in turn could have offered some benefits to current ticket holders, such as my friend with things like thirty days free access to our membership. I mean, they might end up turning into members who knows, but don't. So here's the thing. Here's the rules. Yes, you might need to pay for your room. Yes, you might need to do two for ones. Um, yes. You might need to give away some tickets. Don't do it publicly. Choose your audience very carefully who you do it with, and make sure they understand that a they must show up, and b they cannot go around telling everybody they got a free ticket. No, please don't lie. If somebody asks you but please don't walk around promoting that you got a free ticket. And lastly, certainly don't tell people who have paid full price that you've got a free ticket either, unless you've got a great story as to why you've got a free ticket. Now we talk about these things in the eight week event plan. There's a cohort coming up soon. Go to eight week event plan com and you can find out all about it. And if you've got any questions or any stories of your own I'd love to hear from you. Drop a comment below or send me a note and tell me your two for one horror story. Okay, talk to you next time. Bye.
