Private Live Streaming & Selling Virtual Tickets

The year is 2017, and it’s a hazy day in Los Angeles, California. Top YouTuber Derral Eves is working with his team to host the 4th annual Vidsummit conference. Vidsummit is a highly anticipated video marketing event, where the world’s top influencers, marketers and brands get together each year for a weekend of learning and networking. This year Gary Vaynerchuk has been hired to provide the keynote speech, and Derral is planning to sell virtual tickets for the first time. After three successful annual events, Derral is confident that this year he can increase profits with virtual ticket sales. The event is already sold out. There is an incredible buzz on social media and the countdown until showtime has officially begun.

The Westin Los Angeles Airport Hotel is absolutely packed with young YouTubers from all over the world. Video enthusiasts are filming videos in the lobby and making memories with friends. In the main ballroom, Derral has agreed to make time for a brief interview. “You can only fit so many people in a room” Derral says as he looks over the 500 or so chairs setup in the ballroom. “We knew that we had to extend this conference online... We have sold replays in the past and it has been quite profitable. But the problem is getting the excitement delivered to the customer with a live event like this. We want people to feel like they are actually part of the event.” Derral looks over the shoulders of a staff member who oversees social media. His social media team will be live streaming certain portions of the conference to his YouTube channel which has well over half a million subscribers. Part of the virtual ticket sales strategy is live streaming short sessions throughout the conference to YouTube and Facebook. Derral’s team is preparing a live streaming backpack which will be used to transport audiences behind the scenes to various areas of the conference.

In total, the event features three live streaming systems used to capture content from the main ballroom, a 125-seat theater and a large meeting space. Each space will be running a separate track of speakers, giving attendees plenty of educational opportunities to choose from throughout the three-day event. A normal ticket to the conference costs $795 and any attendee can purchase access to the video replay and live stream for an additional $149. Now that the in-person tickets have sold out, the conference is only able to sell virtual tickets and on-demand replays.

It was my job to help transport the live viewers into VidSummit. I would do so by delivering the live stream to a content delivery network who in turn provides the paywall service used to grant access to paying customers. This is a process you will learn all about in this book.

Before the conference had even begun, excited virtual ticket holders were actively commenting about the event on Facebook. Many of these people sounded just as excited to be part of VidSummit’s live stream as the actual in-person attendees at the hotel. Along with the live stream access, most attendees had also paid for the on-demand video access knowing that they couldn’t possibly watch every presentation in real-time. The live stream was an exciting bonus Derral had announced only a couple of weeks ago.

Virtual tickets can be sold through almost any event ticketing platform. As an event planner, you know the value of a ticket sold is only as good as the event that you host and deliver. In order to deliver a live event experience to online viewers, you must live stream your event in a way that engages viewers’ senses. Today, you can live stream directly from a smartphone to social media networks like Facebook and YouTube. Depending on the ticket price and the value you are attempting to deliver, properly transporting audiences into your event may take an experienced video production team and a thoughtful plan of delivery.

Virtual ticket holder expectations will continue to rise over time. Consumers value the experience of “time well spent” in relation to other experiences they consider normal. The Experience Economy calls this valuation the “money value of time,” which is generally broken down into dollars per minute. For example, most consumers in the United States are used to paying on average $12 for a two-hour experience at the movies. This is a simple baseline for how much consumers are willing to pay for an action-packed Hollywood experience. At $6 per hour, moviegoers are paying on average 10 cents per minute. This experience can be compared to a trip to Disney World which averages out to 23 cents per minute for a vacation. Here is a list of experiences your event may be able to compare with.

If you have ever attended an event that was professionally planned and executed, chances are you didn’t realize how much work went into making it a success. Events, regardless of their size, are complex things to manage. In every event, something goes wrong, and if you are lucky the only people who notice are on the event management team. An issue can be something minor like forgetting to bring the right color socks, or a major catastrophe, like leaving the wedding ring behind at the hotel. Whatever it is, events and uncertainty go together like two peas in a pod. This may be why so many amazing events are unable to add a live streaming element. It’s very common for event planners to become overwhelmed and unable to add another layer of complexity that is live streaming. Selling virtual tickets is one thing, accommodating a live online audience is another.

Therefore, whether you are a professional event manager or a one-time event planner, having a framework that introduces order into the messy process of event-planning is crucial. A systematic approach allows you to deliver excellent results even when you do not have the help of a professional event planning team. An event planning system saves cost, reduces work, removes uncertainty, and makes your success repeatable.

Event management software solutions can give multiple teams in your organization access to critical information during the event planning process. Having a single online dashboard for sales, marketing, human resources, sponsors and affiliates helps to simplify the complex job of event planning. New cloud-based tools now allow event managers to streamline an efficient workflow that keeps internal and external parties involved in the planning process. Effectively streamlining an event management workflow requires integration with existing systems your organization already uses such as Salesforce, Marketo, Eventbrite, Wordpress and Cvent. When you are choosing an event management platform, draw out a plan that starts with the promotion of your event. It’s ideal if your event management software makes relevant information readily available to all members of your team and at the same time passes the data to the primary systems your organization already uses. For example, your event management software should be able to pass usable data directly to your sales team for immediate follow up. If your marketing team is using a platform like Marketo to nurture new leads, the information collected by the event management system should pass back and forth naturally. In this way, you can make intelligent decisions about how you are communicating with your event attendees. Perhaps you only want to offer attendees who have purchased virtual tickets a discount for in-person tickets or vice versa. With the right amount of information passing through your streamlined workflow, sales and marketing teams especially can make educated decisions about your event.

In this book, you will learn the basics of applying a project management approach to event planning in order to properly add a virtual attendee experience to your event. A project is typically described as an endeavor that is temporary and undertaken with specific objectives in mind. Projects have a time element and they require resources in order to produce the desired outcome. Managing a virtual attendee experience will leverage similar types of knowledge, skills, and tools event planners are used to managing already. The goal of event planning is to remove or reduce uncertainty and to make sure the event is executed on schedule, within budgets and on target for intended goals (“What is project management?,” 2017).

By applying project management knowledge and skills to event planning, you can more easily add live streaming and virtual ticket sales to your event. Even if you do not consider yourself an event planner, this book can still help you learn about new ways to monetize events. Almost every profession involves events at some point and this book will teach you how to successfully plan and execute them. The “Experience Economy” is a #1 bestselling book that outlines how changing consumer demands now require any competitive business to create experiences for their customers. All businesses are now “competing for customer time, attention and money” where the ROI (Return on Investment) of traditional marketing methods continue to become less valuable. By understanding both the in-person and online sides of meetups, summits, concerts and conferences you will start to see the advantages of event streaming for marketing any type of business product, service or experience. If you are only thinking about the people who can attend your event physically, it will become clear in short order that this audience is only a small segment of the total accessible market. In the following chapters, you will learn how to identify and market your event to online audiences around the world. Depending on your event, the online audience may surprise you in its size and willingness to pay for virtual access (Pine, 2020).

Basic economics tells us that a perfect product price does exist. The perfect price is found when supply and demand meet in a place economists call the “equilibrium.” For an event, this would mean that you sell out of all your tickets and your price was high enough that you did not undercut any potential profits. Observing the law of supply and demand, in-person and virtual tickets have one fundamental difference. In-person tickets have a limited supply and virtual tickets have an unlimited supply. Each ticket type will have its own “price elasticity” which describes the product’s responsiveness to changes in price. A prime example of this would be to look at a change of in-person ticket prices versus a change of the price for virtual tickets. Because in-person tickets have a limited supply, you can assume that this will drive up prices. You can also assume that the limited supply will make consumers less sensitive to price changes for this product.

Increased profits can be achieved when ticket price and demand rise together. If the ticket prices are too high, demand for the product will go down. The goal for ticket pricing is to reach an equilibrium between price and demand. Products that are inelastic do not have customer demand that changes based on price. An example of an inelastic product would be a medicine that is needed for survival. Products that are elastic can feature large changes in consumer demand based on price. Elastic products generally not unique and have substitutes available for consumers to choose that are less expensive.

Even though virtual tickets have an unlimited supply, suppliers still must find the perfect price to reach equilibrium and therefore maximize profits. To do this consider the highest price you can charge to the largest set of potential customers. Virtual tickets have cost and therefore supply does not have to be unlimited. As you can see from the example table below, a perfect price for in-person tickets is $50. A perfect price for virtual tickets is $5. If the tickets are priced higher or lower than these equilibrium prices there is a loss in revenue.

Attending an event is always more exciting than the process of planning it. Nobody minds going to a party, but who wants to deal with all the little details about cleaning the venue, making sure there is good parking or proofreading invitations before they are sent out. However, even though the activities that take place before an event are not exciting, they lay the groundwork for how enjoyable the actual event will be. As an event planner, if you want to enjoy the event, you must pay attention to planning it. And no aspect of planning is more important than the pre-planning. This is when you decide why you want to have the event, who the audience will be, and if you can pull it off with the resources you have available to you.

Event Feasibility

Event Goals & Objectives: Why Is The Event Important?

There is nothing worse than an ill-conceived event. It is not uncommon for individuals and businesses to decide on a spur of the moment to have an event. When you are planning an event it’s all about asking the right questions and defining your expectations. It’s important to understand during the pre-planning stages that the event objective will likely change over time. You may even decide to abandon the project for various reasons along the way. Think critically about your event because the first time will likely be the hardest. Future events will be much easier to host once you have established the event framework. Some things will only become clear to you during the planning process. Others may not become clear until after your event is over. The goal of pre-planning is to uncover as much information as possible to steer your event toward a successful future.

Determine the business problem your event will solve. This is the most important step of any event because it will help to secure the event’s success for yourself and the attendees. The business problem or the need which an event aims to satisfy helps to confine your efforts during the planning stage to only what is valuable for fulfilling that outcome. Think about your online audience during this process. Will you be able to give online viewers access to an experience that fulfills their expected outcomes? You can assume online viewers understand they will not have access to in-person experiences such as networking. But can you compensate them in some ways by providing behind the scenes access to the keynote speaker? Perhaps your virtual ticket holders can ask questions during the presentation’s Q&A session. Are there ways that you can give your virtual ticket holders a private online group for networking with attendees online? After all, LinkedIn has over 660 million members. Perhaps you can create a LinkedIn networking group to help encourage collaboration for members of your event. To determine if the event will become a successful business, ask the following questions (unless the event is something personal, like a wedding, retirement party or a hangout for family and friends):

· Who needs what the event offers?

· Are there enough of these people to justify holding the event?

· How many in-person attendees do you estimate versus virtual attendees?

· Do you have the means to reach these people?

· Will the outcome justify the effort and cost of creating the event?

· Do you have the capacity to hold such an event?

· Should you have the event?

The more painstaking and exact the answers to these questions are, the greater clarity the project will have, and the more guided future decisions and actions will be (Spradlin, 2012). During the research for writing this book, I was fixated on hosting an event in New York City where the virtual ticket experience would come as close as possible to the in-person experience. While the event was a massive successful for all parties involved, I realized only after the event that an all online approach could cost one fifth the price and potentially reach more people. Four months later, the StreamGeeks hosted the 2020 Worship Summit which sold more virtual tickets than the StreamGeeks Summit in less time with a much lower budget. It was interesting to see the highest ROI came from catering directly to an online audience.

Write down your answers to the questions about the event. The next step is to crystalize your ideas by making them more specific in terms of time, budget and other resources. What are the things you need to successfully hold this event and are they readily available? If they are not available, can they be obtained?

Event Budget

In establishing a budget, remember that everything has a cost, even if you will use volunteers. The list of your costs should be comprehensive. It’s better to overestimate than underestimate. However, if costs get too high, the event may stop being feasible. Adding live streaming equipment, operators, and virtual ticket processing to your costs early on is a good idea. You will have to come up with a balance between your expected virtual ticket sales and the cost of adding live streaming to your event. Some events now add live streaming as a free promotional tool and absorb the costs for live streaming the event. Proper costing involves a detailed breakdown of all that is needed for the event, attaching a monetary value, and then making room for contingencies. Having access to someone experienced at creating such events will ensure you are moving in the right direction. Later, in this book you will review various DIY video production systems and ballpark pricing estimates from production companies (Colston, 2018). If you are unsure about the budget for live streaming, reach out to the venues’ recommended rental/staging and AV company vendor. Below are the costs for the audio visuals from the 2019 StreamGeeks Summit.