Kimberly Kriss doesn’t mince words. The Senior VP of Marketing for AEG Europe brought the Rolling Stones and Bon Jovi to Hyde Park this summer with the Barclaycard British Summer Time (BST) event. Alongside winning this five year tender with the Royal Parks via AEG Live last year, AEG Facilities closed its successful bid on Wembley Arena last month. This leaves further expansion into markets including Italy and Spain not a question of “if”, but “when”.
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How has she done it? Kriss’ interview with Marketing Week, published this week, discusses three tech aggregators that are changing events marketing:
Digital Database
Kriss says AEG Europe is polishing a 2014 digital strategy that will help venues learn more about the people who attend their events. Kriss explains how AEG Europe’s digital database will help the brand’s expansion from both customer service and sponsorship perspectives.
“We’re going to understand who our visitors are and what their needs and preferences are”, Kriss proclaimed. “Not only does that help us when we’re marketing a live event, but it also helps our brands and sponsors market to them too,”
The merge between web analytics and database marketing means that events marketing is fast becoming quantitative. Clients already expect events marketing services to be driven by data, specifically targeted listings that will gain them the niche audiences that their events need.
Uniform Analytics
With brands ranging from Wembley Arena to the Qatar National Convention Centre, AEG owns and operates more than 100 global venues. Their clientele is diverse, but Kriss is adamant that the brand’s analytics will stay consistent.
“Whether a sports team or a venue, we want them to be utilising the same tools and analysis, so that it’s easy to compare things”, says Kriss. “From that global database we aim to develop online marketing dashboards so that we can automate a lot of what we’re doing”.
It’s no accident that Yahoo’s digital expansion last year included offering integrated marketing dashboards to small businesses. Their strategy proved itself when Yahoo’s display-ad sales fell 11% in Q1 2013. Metrics from site traffic analysis to reputation management inform Yahoo’s SMB offerings-and are part of the event marketing tech wave at large.
Loyal Partnerships
Kriss has ambitious plans to turn BST into London’s Coachella. But rather than considering the AEG Live event a rival, Kriss is focused on how to drive the latter festival’s digital marketing success for BST. To do this, she has chosen to keep BST’s sponsor-Barclaycard-the same across its five-year tenor. She says the tendency for live events to switch sponsors confuses the audience that matters most-the millenials who, beyond sharing and creating unprecedented data, are poised to drive future purchasing power.
“By 2017, millennials are going to have more spending power than any other generation”, says Kriss. “Whether it’s our blogging, tweets or Facebook, we’re really letting them drive that”.
Lauren Maffeo serves as Corporate Content Specialist for evvnt, a genre-specific online events marketing platform. An MSc graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science, Lauren has worked as a media consultant for the Global Poverty Project’s “The End of Polio” Campaign, Content Lead at GlobalWebIndex, and contributes regularly to the Guardian and The Next Web
