The Event Leadership Institute recently spoke with Colja Dams, president of Vok Dams, one of the largest event agencies in the world.
Here are some highlights from the interview. You can watch a video of the full conversation here.
On charging for proposals: "In Europe, it's commonplace that if you have big accounts in the Fortune 100 companies, for pitching events they do pay a pitching fee. It can be [from] $3,000 up to $25,000, depending on what is being requested, from 3-D to models being built for the presentation. It really depends on the negotiation, but really we are working for the pitching fee and not for the creative concept fee, and then we offer how much it would be to buy out the concept as it is. We actually had this happen before [where the client wants to buy our concept but have another agency produce it], that they would like to have certain parts and usually you would negotiate about it and the clients sometimes are very generous with that. Some others just don't care, so they pitch to five agencies and then give it to the best agency they like the most and tell them, 'Now get this into your concept.'"
On producing events in China: "There's so much energy in this country and in the people, and it's lots of fun working on events over there, but there are certain risks. The first risk is the cultural risk. You have different meanings for anything from colors to figures to all kinds of elements. For example, inviting a journalist—you hand a journalist a red envelope giving him some money as a way to come to attend a press conference. Imagine if you hand $20 to a Washington Post journalist coming to your press conference. That wouldn't work out too well. So you really need to know what your target group is and how to approach it and work in China.
"Another challenge is to find the right vendors. Here in the U.S., you have vendors for everything, and you have a choice of good vendors no matter which part of special events you're looking for. In China, its difficult to find good vendors, and over the last 10 years we've built up several vendors in different parts of special events to come up to the level that we need for our international clients. But then when coming up to this level, they don't stop there, and so they overtake this level. We just had a road show in Spain, Greece, and Beijing, and the production quality was by far the highest in Beijing because the quality and dedication of the Chinese vendors is impressive."
On the risks of user-generated event details: "At the event, you have involvement possibilities that are endless—starting from iPhone apps, or possibilities where people can Twitter and interact with what is happening up onstage, where you can do surveys right away, and you can help create user-generated events. Half the people pick the food being served at night, and half the people pick what music is going to be played. Just make sure that the wisdom of many doesn't necessarily lead to a very cool freestyle dinner or the best music choice. Just make sure you still have a professional still on site, because if everyone chooses hamburgers and you all have hamburgers and nothing else because everyone loves it, then all the vegetarians are lost. So make sure you take the wisdom of many, but make sure you still have a professional on site, because user-generated events only go up to a certain step."
On launching a Lamborghini near an active volcano: "There's one event that was 10 years ago and it was the launch of the new Lamborghini on Mount Etna in Sicily, Italy. The volcano erupted two weeks before the event. So now usually what you do is say, 'OK, let's choose another destination, take in a different venue,' but especially launching a car as special as a Lamborghini, it somehow fit in to an erupting volcano. As soon as this volcano erupted, more and more journalists called up our management and said, 'We'd like to come.' People were being evacuated in little towns around the volcano while we were setting up for the event, so this was tricky.
"We had a plan B. We actually had an entire second setup at the factory in upstate Italy so that in case of an emergency we could move the entire event up 24 hours to a different destination. A volcano is not something you're used to, and I remember the client always calling me up and asking, 'Is the airport going to be open tomorrow? Is it going to be more dangerous?' and I was discussing this a lot with special scientists on volcanoes and they said, 'Maybe.' So you didn't have any clue what was happening."
