As a college student, Betsy McHugh landed an internship and then a job at the Country Music Association and fell in love with working in music management. Eventually she became singer Keith Urban’s manager, a six-year stint that included seven headlining tours, numerous records, and awards including Male Vocalist of the Year and Entertainer of the Year. She followed a similar trajectory as manager for singer Hunter Hayes.
It was while living in that world that McHugh, now 37, identified a problem that would ultimately lead to the creation of her company, Hurdl.
“There was no way I could give Keith or Hunter a way to send a message to everyone who came to the show … to simply say, ‘Thank you. Hope you had a great time’ … or maybe ‘I curated this playlist for you.’ There was no way to communicate with the audience,” she says. “And I realized very quickly that it’s not a music-industry problem—it’s a live-events problem. We don’t know the people who attend live events, and we can’t communicate with them. That’s hundreds of millions of missed direct marketing opportunities every year.”
Launched in 2016 at the Country Music Association Awards in Nashville, Hurdl is based on a wearable device that holds an LED button called a Pixl. Guests receive a wristband upon arrival at an event and then activate it by texting the unique code associated with their band to a designated number, which instantly creates a one-to-one communication path from host to guest to share things like event information, discounts, and sponsor offers.
As part of the activation process, guests also respond to survey questions so the host can illuminate the LED buttons based on common characteristics. “We did a fund-raiser where we lit up everyone who knew somebody on the autism spectrum. You could see visually how many people there were in autism blue, and it was a really powerful moment,” she says.
The surveys can also be used to gather data that will be useful to hosts long after the event. For example, the Nashville Convention & Visitors Corporation distributed Hurdl’s wristbands to the thousands of people who attended the city’s 2017 New Year’s celebration. Guests were asked for their ZIP code and whether they had ever been to Nashville. Hurdl compiled data that showed 72 percent were from outside a 120-mile radius, and 36 percent had never been into the city before. “That was incredibly valuable data for the convention and visitors center to have that they would have never been able to capture at a free, non-ticketed event like that,” McHugh says. The survey also asked guests if they were veterans, and organizers illuminated the wristbands of all veterans in the crowd during a moment of thanks.
It’s that ability to create a communal experience that McHugh says differentiates Hurdl from traditional text communication strategies—and boosts opt-in rates to as high as 90 percent.
Future clients include Subway at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival and several N.B.A. teams. Meanwhile, Hurdl is refining the system to enable ongoing text conversations between brands and leads, long after an event ends.
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