A trap a lot of festivals, conventions, and just events fall into over and over again is the pursuit of bigger, bigger, bigger. We are trained by the large, corporate conventions and shows to think that if we overstuff our shows then they’ll be successful.
We book more guests, we create more things to take part in, and we treat guests as if they are children who must be ever-asmused, lest they declare “I’M BORED.”
And I’ve been there.
We did a convention that was in October and someone complained that we didn’t decorate things for Halloween, as if we were a hunted attraction.
I learned then, and over and over again that you’ll never make everyone happy.
You’ll never capture everyone’s hearts or interests.
A guest doesn’t care about how expensive things are, and how hard it is to put a show together, they want what they want, and that’s all.
I get it, I have gone to enough shows and have had that same attitude. When our big regional comic announces its guest for the year I always look to see who is going to be there that I’d want to meet. Not that I go anymore, but it’s that window-shopping mentality that fills me because MAYBE…
Given the way we are built, we’d rather support a corporate event that seems to offer more than we could want, over a smaller show that has enough for us to see and do in one visit. And I love the big shows because they do offer so much that it’s great to see all that there is. Those shows come at a high cost, though- a cost that other shows are starting to adopt in turn. In an era where most of us are struggling with finances, the cost to go to shows is outrageous.
Many times, you are paying for parking, the show costs a lot to get into, the guests cost a lot to get anything from them, and by the time you reach the vendors, you don’t have money to spend.
And if that’s the big show you go to every year, you can plan for it, but often that also means that you can’t afford to go to other, smaller events.
Regionally, someone who runs a horror convention decided to do an outdoor camping event with guests and activities, only to cancel it. And it all sounded fun…until you realize that they were complicating something that was pretty straight forward.
At its heart, the idea of a horror campout is great, but to me, you need to keep it simple. Once you start adding too much to an event like that you are opening a LOT of doors to chaos.
My wife covered an overnight event put on by a local haunt, and it was disastrous. I wrote about it at the time, but it went about as bad as you can expect, and part of that was that they were doing too much. It was haunt-themed, so you were supposed to be harassed all night by people, but that didn’t happen until well after midnight. When it did, people were over it, and the performers took things too far. For me, with a camping haunt, you focus on creating a fun, adult camping experience with a cookout, campfire tales, outdoor movies, and capturing the feeling of being a kid. WITH that, you can add a haunt element, but for me, you want to have it in a space you can control and that people can opt in or out of. What you do with the haunt is up to you, maybe even having two different stories or experiences so people can check it out more than once.
Just like conventions, the more you add, the more bloated it is, weighing down what can be a straightforward experience.
Again, on paper, reading a laundry list of all the things you can see and do is great, but the more you add, the more it costs, and the more complicated it is to pull off. And with those add-ons, you also raise unreasonable expectations in fans. Fans do this to themselves, really, but the more you promise, the more they’ll want.
None of this is to say that the big events and the ambitious events will or do fail, as many give you exactly what they promise, but most don’t. My wife and I went to another camping haunt that was put on by a bigger organization, and it was a blast. They had the people power and experience, and they knew what to deliver without overpromising.
Big shows and big events aren’t something to undertake unless you have the money, people. And logistics. They are a lot of work. They can be, and should be rare and special. We forget, though, that the smaller shows keep the scene together. They give vendors a chance to support their art and themselves, and retailers an opportunity to connect with new customers. In an ideal scenario, the two types of events work as part of a whole, but now the big events are becoming the focus, with small ones dying off.
And the bigger, more complicated, and more expensive shows get, the fewer people can go to them, often being turned off of shows in general instead of looking for smaller ones. When my friends and I attended conventions, we often dealt with disappointed fans who wanted big-name guests, not understanding the costs that come with them. In the same way that we want to give our kids every last thing under the sun, so they feel loved and fulfilled, we try to drown fans in things to keep them busy, and at the show, it should be more about creating something memorable and less about making it packed.
Fans want what they want, whether reasonable, affordable, or even doable by them; they just want to feel like they got bang for their buck. Fair. But perhaps by creating sincere, fun events that are thoughtfully created and with care. These shows are what they are, and instead of trying to create an unending circus that costs everyone so much money every other day of the year.
Festivals are great, sure, but they don’t keep food on everyone’s plates, or fun throughout the rest of the year.
Finding balance is up to those of us who put events on, understanding that even while you can’t always do something big, you can do what you do well, and that’s what matters.
…c…
