Thursday 4 December 2014

The Life & Times of an Event Promoter – a light-hearted look at a promoter’s musings: On advertising ……………

Part One – signs! 


So, what is the major part of an event promoter’s job? 

 The clue is in the name – we promote!  Anyone can hire a hall, hire tables and chairs and set it out, phone around and sell some space to exhibitors and create a show. The most difficult part, is how do you let people know about it and how do you entice them to come along. 

This is where a promoter needs their skill, to promote the show to the public and get them through the door and into the show. I was fortunate to have some advertising and marketing experience in my background, but even so, finding what works for creating show attendance has been a long learning curve and is still an ongoing process. 

I freely admit to being a ‘stats junkie’!  I will spend hours poring over statistics and number crunching, working out ‘cost per head’ of various advertising experiments and generally trying to find out the most cost effective way of spending the advertising budget and bringing in people. People often say, why don’t you do this or have you thought of that?  We always welcome any suggestions, but chances are by now, we have tried it and discounted it if we are not doing it. 

In the early days, it was easy.  When I first started shows fourteen years ago, we went around the local area asking shops, salons, cafes, libraries and so on to take flyers and posters and topped this up with advertising boards around the area wherever people walked or vehicles either drove slowly or stopped – approaching a roundabout for example.  This worked well and is still in my opinion, the very best way to get a new show started.  The problem is, we can no longer do much of it for various reasons. 

What has happened in the intervening fourteen years, is that many small, independent shops have gone out of business and chain shops are usually not allowed to take the posters and flyers.  More and more empty shops are appearing in towns, but also in the little parades of local shops in housing developments, which used to be some of the best to get material into. 

The major development throwing a spanner in the works however, was the Government urging local councils to implement fly posting legislation!  It has been illegal to fly-post for years, but historically, local authorities were slow to enforce it.  However, because of the eyesore created by Circus posters still up months after the event, music event posters pasted on empty shop windows and so on, around 2005/2006 the government encouraged local authorities to begin to actively enforce these laws.  

The result is that many now adopting a ‘zero tolerance’ to the activity.  At best, they will remove the signs you have spent hundreds of pounds having made and taken ages putting up and destroy them – at worst, they issue fines per sign! 

We were always very good about retrieving signs having no wish to affect the environment. We drew maps of where they were and on the Monday following a show, sometimes even on the Sunday evening in the summer months, someone was dispatched to retrieve them all and count them in so none were missed. Unfortunately however, there are no exceptions for ‘good fly-posters’, we are obliged to comply with the law, just like the careless ones. 

To get a bit technical, fly- posting is actually illegal under the Highway Act 1980, the Town & Country Planning Act 1990, the Anti-social Behaviour Act 2003 and the Clean Neighbourhoods and Environment Act 2005.  Legal measures to prevent fly-posting range from on-the-spot fines of up to £80 per sign to prosecution in a magistrates’ court and use of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders (ASBOs) with fines of up to £2500!   No wonder we have not dared to risk putting out signage for the past few years! 

 I mentioned this in a previous article under ‘things that go wrong’, but it is relevant here too, so perhaps worth repeating as a funny anecdote among the facts and figures.  My first experience of this new drive to reduce fly-posting when it first became law,  was at our Grimsby show.  At that point I knew nothing about it, but I quickly learned after that day!  At about noon on the Saturday, an officious little man appeared at reception asking for me.  He was a council official and his new job was to enforce the fly-posting laws that had suddenly become fashionable.  He announced that he had counted twenty signs and could fine us up to £350 per sign.  My mouth dropped open so much, it is a wonder my chin didn’t hit the desk!    He was going to give us an hour to get them removed ………… in the middle of a busy Saturday show!  Brain-freeze!  Not for long though, this was seriously going to hit my pocket – one of the quickest and surest reasons to melt brain-freeze!  He was clearly the sort of chap that loved his work and would pursue it to the fullest extent, but after some reasoning and sweet talk, I managed to melt him sufficiently to give us till 7 p.m. that evening – two hours to do it in after the show closed.  The butterflies that usually jiggle in my stomach throughout a show, were past jigging, they were now into a full samba!  I was in no doubt that regardless of it being a Saturday night, come hell or high water, at 7 p.m. he would be inspecting to see if we had complied! 

Needless to say, the minute the venue was secured, we were all off in different directions to retrieve the signs!  We actually had forty-five out, something I saw no reason to inform him of – he had only spotted twenty, but which twenty?  We had no way of knowing, so down the lot had to come.   I have known more entertaining ways of spending a Saturday evening than stumbling through wet grass verges, in the dark and cold, trying to cut down signs with one hand and hold a torch with the other!  By the time we had finished, we were too late to get dinner anywhere, so it was a quick MacDonalds – ughh!  Maybe not entertaining, but certainly memorable! 

Of course, most visitors are blissfully unaware of these laws – indeed, why should they be concerned with them?  If they do not need to advertise anything, they won’t have had reason to investigate them.  We hear the same comments often – ‘You should have put some signs out’, ‘There are no signs’, and so much more.  We would LOVE to do so;  it is not neglect or lack of care, we simply are not allowed.  

As an alternative, we started using AA direction signage.  Most councils will allow the AA, RAC and one designated private traffic management company to apply for planning permission for directional signs.  These signs can be purely directional however, no other information is allowed.  Each council has its own version of what they will allow on them, but in most cases it is simply Mind, Body Spirit and an arrow – no date, no venue name, no other information.  This has very little advertising value, particularly as the earliest they are allowed up is the Thursday before the show, often the Friday.  Even so, I used these for several years in the absence of any other signage, if only as a ‘comfort factor’ for exhibitors. It was comforting for them to see the signs as they approached the show and know something had been done, as they don’t see the mountain of other more effective promotion done in the run up time. 

Last year however, the AA almost doubled their quotation to me. To put signs out for the Elsecar show for example, was going to cost over £600 + VAT.   This was entering the ‘serious money’ zone, so out came the stats and the number crunching started.  It transpired that in the past two years, no show had ever reached double figures on the number of people that came because of the AA signs.  At the previous Elsecar show, only three people indicated that it was the AA signs had brought them to the show – at £600, that would cost me £200 per person……………. PLUS VAT!   They pay me £4.75 to come in, or less if they are a concession – the conclusion is quite obvious!   The AA signs are a nice extra, mainly for the comfort of exhibitors,  if we ever get back to the times where there is spare money in the coffers.  They are not however, a viable means of spending advertising budget! 

We always try to get a large banner on the roadside at the venue itself of course, but even this is not as easy as you might assume.  Our Chester show for example, charged £600 + VAT to have a sign outside.  We paid it, but we did not get 151 full paying customers tick that this is what brought them into the show, which is the number required to cover its cost  - it was actually less than 20!  Cleethorpes gave me the dimensions for their sign in feet this summer - the numbers were right, but it should have been in meters.  It was only when we turned up and found the sign to be almost a third of the size we could have had that the mistake was discovered,  Had we gone ahead with Uttoxeter, they would not have allowed a banner at all.  Best of all though, was our lovely Monastery, who would only allow our banner on days when they were not hosting a Corporate Event or a Wedding.  Needless to say, that banner was up and down like a yo-yo!

During this last year, we have noticed other roadside signs creeping back.  Not on the main roads, where they are removed immediately, but on byroads, in nearby villages and so on.  I now face a new dilemma - I am not entirely comfortable putting up signs knowing what I do about fly-posting laws, but if others are putting them out and we don’t, we appear negligent rather than law abiding in the eyes of those who don’t realise the issues.   One antique fair promoter told me he does it and absorbs the fines as an advertising cost – certainly a school of thought.  Maybe a few village signs might be an idea once again. 

In order to judge how effective our advertising is and what works, we operate the Prize Draw at every show.  Every visitor is given a free entry card for this to win a prize of considerable value – usually a really nice crystal piece, something visitors will be attracted to but perhaps not afford to buy for themselves.  On the bottom of the card is the question, ‘What influenced you to come to the show?'  There follows a list of options, newspaper/magazine advert, banner at venue, flyer sent by post, flyer picked up in shop, poster, BSSK website, other website, exhibitor newsletter, BSSK e-mail and so on and a tick box next to each.  We count the number of cards per show to find out what percentage of the visitors filled one in. It is always over 60%, but most often in the 70 – 80% bracket, surprisingly high!   

Of those filled in, some will ignore the question and some will tick multiple choices. This and the missing 20 – 30% means it is not an exact science, but overall, we get a good indication from these cards. Going back years and without exception, between 80 -95% of the cards completed fall into two categories. These are ‘Flyer by Post’ and ‘Word of Mouth’. The other 5-20% is made up of everything else!   The two categories are pretty near equal too – if flyer by post gets 720 hits, you can be sure word of mouth will be getting somewhere between 670 and 750!   It runs that close every time, no matter what the door figures . In the early days when we didn’t  have a mailing list, 'Advertising Boards' and 'Word of Mouth' worked in tandem in the same way.  Gradually as the mailing list grew, Flyer by Post took over from Advertising Boards, but boards still brought in the most new people. 

Hmm, maybe I should follow in the footsteps of that Antique Fair promoter after all! 


Next instalment: Advertising Part Two – ‘Flyer by post’ and Media advertising.