How The Future Party collaborates with the world's largest brands to host events

The outlet has over 200,000 subscribers to its newsletter, but it still generates significant revenue from its events.

Over the past few years, nearly every major media outlet has ramped up its live events offerings in an effort to diversify revenues, but The Future Party has a distinct advantage over most of its competitors; it actually started as an LA events company all the way back in 2011 and only expanded into media several years later.

Today, The Future Party operates a newsletter that’s geared toward creative industry professionals and has over 200,000 subscribers, but it still generates most of its revenue from working with large brands to put on invite-only gatherings, often adjacent to much larger events like SXSW, Art Basel, and Coachella.

In an interview, co-founder Boye Akolade walked me through every aspect of The Future Party’s events strategy, including how it pitches brands, its method for curating guest lists, what KPIs clients often look for, and why the company prefers free, sponsored events instead of charging for admission:

It's always good to have a videographer and a photographer there. A videographer is not completely important. A photographer is completely important because lo-fi content is great, right? So we can take our iPhones and just put it on stories or create a reel. And that's great for video content. To me, the biggest and best asset, greater than PR, greater than IG, whatever, is being able to take those three to four key photos and put them in a deck and say we did this. As weird as it sounds, the case study is gold because we can now put it in our little archive of case studies and it's much easier now to win that money if it's a platform event, win that business if we're working with a branded company, or market to a ticketed audience because we have the proof, we have the receipts.

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Transcript

Hey, Boye, thanks for joining us.

Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here again.

So you've been on the podcast before, and in that episode, we went over the whole origin story of the Future Party. And we won't rehash that whole story here, but just to quickly get everyone up to speed, what year did you launch the company that would become the Future Party?

2012.

So it's been maybe 12 years. 

Yeah..

Yeah. And then it started out, if I remember correctly, it started out as like a series of parties in L.A. Like you all worked in creative industries. And so it was parties for people who worked as creative professionals, actors, musicians, people who worked behind the scenes. Like that was kind of how it started. It started informally.

Correct. Really, it was the events. And then we had a digital community as well that would share information about what was happening in the entertainment industry.

Yeah. And then so basically you had these really successful events. And then I think like the next iteration was it became like an event company where a brand or a company would come to you and say, hey, we want to reach these creative professionals and we want you to organize a sponsored event on our behalf. Right?

Yeah. So essentially how it had originally started was we were seeing young people who really just needed a leg up in the entertainment industry, and knowing that these people would be successful in the future we wanted to celebrate that. So it was really just networking for us even though we hated the word networking, but we just wanted to get everyone together who basically was grinding their teeth on being a young assistant coordinator, so we just started investing predominantly my own money into throwing a party. One party turned into several parties turned into ticketed events and branded activations, but from the first party we had liquor sponsors, which was really awesome. At first it was in kind and then it grew into actual sponsorship.

And then eventually you were like, okay, let's turn this into a media company. And you'd launched a newsletter. How long was it before you decided to launch an actual newsletter around it?

I feel like it was maybe six to seven years. We were just doing this on the side. We kind of went a little backwards compared to what most brands do, right? They typically start virtual and digital, and then they create events, whether it’s webinars or physical experiences.

For us, we started brand first. We just had a dope brand people liked. We started collecting emails very early and it got to a point where we were like, you know, the events are cool, but with where we're at, it's really hard to scale micro events into a full scale business. We need to layer something on top of it. And we knew deep down that media was going to be a big part of that. And so that's what we leaned into.

And then the newsletter just kind of fits within the same theme; it's news that will cater to people who work within creative industries.

Yeah, so that was the inspiration. So I started writing it weekly. I was the first writer. And in the beginning, it was really just an amalgamation of what we were already doing virtually within our network. So we were talking about really cool things happening in the entertainment industry.

We were sharing events that were happening and we were sharing jobs. And it evolved from there. And so I would say we consider ourselves the business of culture. So it's through the lens of entertainment, but you don't have to be in entertainment necessarily to read it because we do talk about tech and everything, but the whole idea is like what's happening in culture at large, call it music, film, media, fashion marketing, but what's the business behind it and how can we empower our audience to be successful with that information.

I think the publicly disclosed number you have on the sign-up page is you have about 200,000 subscribers.

Yeah around there, yep.

And then you monetize the newsletter with advertising. But for the purposes of this interview, now that we got that brief overview out of the way, I want to just drill down into your events business.  So you mentioned brand activations. Is that main kind of event you're doing, either a company comes to you or you go to a company, and they're saying, we want to reach a certain type of person and it's either centered around a bigger event like Fashion Week or Art Basel or something like that? Or do you also do events that don't have a major sponsor behind it?

So I'm glad you asked that. I'll back into answering that question by just maybe showing the landscape of experiences we offer.. And I think you have three different types of events. You have the ticketed event, right? It's the tried and true event where you pay money to experience the event, whether it's a panel, a dinner, or Coachella. Right. And there can still be sponsors in those ecosystems. But at the end of the day, it relies on the consumer purchasing a ticket to be there. There's enough value in that experience where I'm going to spend money.

Then you have the private but free event. So this is very sponsor reliant. We like to call them platform events, meaning it starts with the seed of an idea, and you are essentially trying to get brands in front of a particular audience. This was how we started. So we were selling the vision and the dream and we were saying, hey, you guys should be a part of it. 

Then we did actually have a couple events that were ticketed, right? We had built the brand enough where we could now say this type of event will be a ticketed event. There is a cousin to the platform event, which I would just say is the brand activation. And that's when a particular brand is leveraging an event for their own marketing purposes. And they'll just pay for the whole thing in order to get people to come for free to experience their particular experience. We've done and been a part of all three. 

One particular niche, which I think goes back to your question, is that along the way, one of the reasons why we went into media is the first two that I mentioned were a little trickier to build a sustainable business around Purely ticketed things, free things with sponsors. So it's a lot of work. But we knew that on the brand side, what happens is they're paying production companies to produce. So the model's there because they already have the six to seven figure budget. And they're just like, we, we just want to do our initiative. So long story short, we found a way to look at our initiatives, our platform, and also meld it with the brand activation and find what they're interested in, knowing they already have the budget to pay for most, if not all of an experience. And I think that's an opportunity that more and more people can lean into.

Looking at your own events in the last year, has it mainly been free events or do you do a lot of paid ticket events?

We don't really do ticketed anymore. Yeah, we're generally in the free realm or brand activation realm.

So the brand activation, there's only one sponsor versus the other kind could have multiple sponsors. Is that the differentiation between the two?

More or less. Sometimes it blurs, but yeah.

And so these are mainly for you to attend. What's the ideal sweet spot, the kind of brand that, you know, when you're thinking about the most likely to succeed in terms of, you know, a collaboration between a Future Party and brand X, what is that brand? Is it a fashion company? Is it a tech company? Is it a consumer company like Coca-Cola? What's kind of the sweet spot? 

It's a great question. It's a little hard to answer because we have worked with a lot of people. We've worked with big crypto companies. We've worked with a huge hotel chain. We've worked with people like Amazon and then people like Coach. Right.

The end goal is they want to be in front of people who are decision makers in the entertainment industry. And yes, one might say like, oh, so then entertainment brands work well. And we've seen that. Yes. But also that's what leads to a crypto brand working well or a hotel chain working well as well, because they have initiatives where they want to be in front of cool and cultural people.

At the end of the day, it comes down to influence. We have a mantra, this idea of the influencers that influence the influencers, right? Really just people who work at these institutions that everyone either consumes the content or uses the product.

And what's the ideal outcome for them? Like, obviously there's the brand awareness factor, but  what's the ultimate KPI they're driving for? If you’re Amazon, you want people using your servers or something like that. Is that kind of the idea? 

Yeah. So I will say everyone has an agenda, right? There is a complete agenda for every brand. Amazon's a unique, interesting situation because they have so many different departments and so many different budget lines. AWS has its own huge ecosystem of sponsoring tech events, startup type things. You might find them at South by Southwest, but you could also find Prime Video at South by Southwest marketing The Boys, right? Or we'll work with their entertainment marketing group that just wants to get in front of more people who create the content and who make the decisions in entertainment. I would say the trickiest in the event space to measure is ROI. I'll just use Amazon again. When it comes to AWS, you know, they just want more people using AWS. It's a little bit more cut and dry to say, Hey, we just want more people using the product, or more of these types of people using the product. 

It's a little trickier for launches, right? When a particular brand just wants to launch something. So, you know, we might support  big beverage brands, like let's say a big liquor brand launches. It's a little harder to measure the ROI of that launch, right? You can do PR and press, but we don't have enough advanced technology to say, this person went here, they tried the drink, so the next time they're gonna go to a party or have a barbecue or whatever, that they're going to drink it. But when a brand is big enough where they don't have to worry about that, it kind of works. So it's hard to answer the question, but I would say every brand has an agenda.

And I don't know if it's during the sales process or after the contract is already closed, but do you have a set number of questions you're asking every single brand just to make sure you understand what they're looking to get out of the event and stuff like that?

Yeah, we 100% ask what their goal is a lot, especially the ones that it might feel like they don't even really know, or it might feel like we can't measure it, because we as an agency want to make sure they're taken care of and they feel that that success was had.

There are a lot of questions around the physical production element. I mean, do you want food there? Like what about a bar, music and entertainment, lighting, sound? It kind of just depends on whether it’s a dinner, a panel, or a party. We just try to drill down ultimately to, hey, what are the brass tacks? What's your budget? That's a big one, right? A lot of times people will have these great ideas, but the budget is so not aligned. And I think it's a mistake a lot of people make early on is to be like, oh, we won the business. But then when you crunch it, it's like after all of that work and time and you only made, you know, 5,000, $10,000, right? So you have to really understand the economics of it as well.

There’s the venue. When I think about experiences, the venue is probably the most important. It literally leads to everything else. And when we're talking about a platform event, it's even hard to sell to a brand if I don't have a date and a time and a place. They want to know what's concrete because from that you're inspired by how it will look, how it will feel, the limitations. And it's the same with a branded activation that a brand's paying for. The venue is just so important. And a lot of the questions we might ask will lead to what kind of venue we can procure.

And you mentioned that when you first started doing this, they were kind of just parties. You hate to use the word networking, but that's what you were trying to create – a vibe – and then allow people to just kind of interact. Today, how much are you doing those kinds of events that are kind of a vibe party type scene versus something that's like has actual structured content, like a panel or talks or something like that?

I feel like we're not doing a lot of just parties for the sake of parties these days. If we're doing a party it's usually tied to another brand at this point. And what I was saying is we've figured out a way to kind of blend the two in a way where we might say we want a party, we might say we want a panel, we might say we want to do a dinner that's our own, but we just try to underwrite it by like at least one major brand. And we're doing a lot of that. And even when a brand will come to us and say, hey, we kind of want an agency to accomplish this, what we will do is we will attach our brand to it. One of the reasons is because it elevates their brand because one big thing about events that people often forget is that ultimately it's the people who go to the event that really make up the event. Regardless of all the cool, fancy, schmancy food, lighting, and music that I've mentioned, it's who is there, who's experiencing it. And so we found a really cool niche where not only can we produce the experience, but we can bring the people where people see us oftentimes as more than a partner, or more than like a producer, or more than a production agency, but like a partner. And so I can now take a brand's massive initiative that they were going to do anyways, and now say, well, we did this too, right? So come to big, huge Fortune 500 brand and the Future Party's dinner, right? But they provided all the budget, right? And we executed and brought the people to fulfill their needs and their desires.

So that kind of leads into my next question. Like obviously with the event, you want to make sure, A, you have the right people there, but then B, that you don't have too many people. Like if 5,000 people show up to a 500 person venue, obviously that's a huge fail. So like, how do you do that in terms of developing a guest list, finding their email  addresses? Do you make them RSVP? I'm guessing you might even have tiered lists, like you have the A list, the B list, the C list, depending on how many people are RSVPing.

I think it's an equation of attrition and once you've been doing it for a while you start to understand the different factors of how many people might fall off.  So attrition is essentially if I invite 300 people, how many showed up? Was it 280? Was it 200 people? And that's your rate. That's your rate of attrition. A couple of factors. What is the experience? Is it something that's cool and cultured and already has a ravenous audience? Is it new and unknown? What is the actual idea in the product and understanding what would a consumer naturally feel about that?   What other current events are surrounding it? Are you throwing a happy hour at South by Southwest on Saturday afternoon when literally the rest of the festival is doing the exact same thing? That's going to factor into your attrition. So when you have that, then you know how to invite. You might decide, hey, we're going to over invite by 20, 30, 40 percent because we know that there's so much going on that we want to make sure the event is full or, hey, we know most people are actually going to come to this so we're not going to really go over too much. Generally though I like to over invite. To this date it generally works out and god forbid there's a line, that's a good problem to have. I'd rather have a line and frustrated people who can't get into the event than an empty room. And the cool thing is if you have frustrated people who can't get into the event, which we've dealt with a couple of times, you pull in the VIPs, I'm giving you a little bit of the secret sauce. You pull in the people that you know that are really important to the experience, right? Because you burn a bridge if you can't get those people in that you're really connected to.

But the people who you don't know, They're just more excited to go to the next event because they saw that they couldn't get in, right? It's the FOMO effect. So in essence, your event now becomes marketing. The line becomes marketing, right? For your brand and the desire to go to the experience. So when in doubt, I over invite. Obviously, if you have a 200 person room, don't invite 2,000 people. But then I kind of go back to what I was saying. It honestly really depends. Are you in the middle of a big festival? Then I would say, honestly, maybe invite 2,000 people.

A lot of them are going to not come because they're doing other things or something.

Exactly.

Yeah. So what about like the actual invite list itself? Do you have a CRM or spreadsheet where you're like crypto or a FinTech company wants to reach finance people in New York and here's our segmented list of people who work in finance in New York. Because you don't want to get somebody who works in some other form of tech who lives in Silicon Valley who could not even attend your event. How do you do that list building?

Yeah, we used to do that a lot more. And it's something that I would encourage if you're doing multiple events. We did it mainly because we had campaigns for several years to work in different industries and remarket to those different industries from crypto to fashion to VR or whatever.

So we actually had a very sophisticated email system where it worked really well for us to use MailChimp for email invites for a couple of reasons. One, it protected our main email list a little bit better because it was just on completely different platforms. And two, it was just an easier platform at the time to segment the different behaviors and the different types of people. So we would say, okay, we're going to Art Basel. We're going to email our Miami list. our festival lists, and our crypto list and just throw that out there. And they're going to get the invitation to this.

And then they would click into an RSVP platform, whether it was Eventbrite, Splash. And what we started to do – this didn't happen to COVID really – is we started to just put a notice that’s like, hey, if you go to this event you're gonna be on the list, like that's the price for coming to a free event of ours. You're gonna be on the email list. If you unsubscribe you unsubscribe, but generally what we saw is people who went to these experiences immediately understood our brand more, it was very very palpable maybe in the back of their mind. They're like, I want to come to more of these so they were engaged on the list. And what we would do is follow up after that experience now with the people who attended. So we invited on MailChimp, they RSVP'd on whatever preferred event RSVP platform, take the confirmed attendees, put them on your email list, thank them for coming and rinse and repeat.

So now let's say a company comes to you and says, we want to sponsor an event at a bar venue somewhere around Art Basel. And you say, OK, cool. And there's a file somewhere on your cloud that says Art Basel. And you click on that file and that's a list of everybody that's gone to your Art Basel events in the past. Is that kind of like a kind of rough estimation of what's happening there?

Yes, there is an additional added layer that not every brand necessarily does but we actually  directly invite our people as well. Our team will take the time to invite hundreds of people directly ,and I think it's those two strategies combined along with maybe your occasional social post depending on the event that really help with getting people to go.

So obviously you want super targeted invite lists and stuff like that. So you have this main newsletter with 200,000 people. What does that do? Like, are you ever advertising events within that, or is that just too broad of an audience?

It's honestly too broad, but it also depends, right? So this is where we kind of think through what is the event and where is the event? Sometimes a brand will be like, hey, we're doing this thing at –  I'll just use Coachella as an example – but we know the capacity of that thing is like a thousand people every day, open format. So we'll put that on our main email newsletter because we know we want the biggest amount of juice. But a lot of the stuff we're doing is private, specific niche. And so we have channels that we leverage to invite those people. And it's kind of like a layered effect. And honestly, it makes sense, right? It's like the 20-80 rule. You know what I mean? Like there's a core group of people that we really know, by marketing to those people, it's going to create the 80% effect that we need.

Do you try to create web content out of that event? Do you have a professional photographer that's going there and then posting photos to Instagram and stuff to try to create FOMO or something like that so that people will want to go to future events? How do you think strategically about the content that can be created out of these events?

Yeah content is king. It's always good to have a videographer and a photographer there. A videographer is not completely important. A photographer is completely important because lo-fi content is great, right? So we can take our iPhones and just put it on stories or create a reel. And that's great for video content. To me, the biggest and best asset, greater than PR, greater than IG, whatever, is being able to take those three to four key photos and put them in a deck and say we did this. As weird as it sounds, the case study is gold because we can now put it in our little archive of case studies and it's much easier now to win that money if it's a platform event, win that business if we're working with a branded company, or market to a ticketed audience because we have the proof, we have the receipts.

So when you say case study, that's not necessarily something you're publishing to the web. That's like a deck you're sending to a potential client being like, here's cool shit we did before.

Thousand percent. Yeah. 

And what kind of reporting are you doing to the client after the fact? Is there some kind of follow up that happens? Are there any KPIs or anything like that that you're trying to highlight?

Again, it depends. When we do a dinner, maybe sometimes panels, a lot of them will want to know who's in the room. Can we get their emails so we can market to those people, so we can tell our bosses what a success set experience was, right? And it's a little easier to track down the 60 to 100 awesome names. But at the end of the day, people want to know who went, how many people went, any notable invites or posts on social. You might get some people who care a ton about the social reach and how many people posted, blah blah blah. But at least in my experience, I've found that it's really more about who was there and why were they important. You want to create experiences so good that people are excited to share experiences. and brag about where they are and what they're doing.

And is the Future Party, is your staff doing all the logistics? Like, you're contacting the venue, you're negotiating with the venue, you're contacting the caterers, you're designing whatever merch – are you handling all aspects of that yourself?

Yeah, yeah. Luckily we have a lot of established relationships in this world. So whether it's our parent company or another vendor, we can work with people, but we're, at the end of the day, the creative directors and the producers and have our hands in the production to some extent.

And do you have staff that's just dedicated to the event stuff?

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I will say over time, we've just become more opportunistic about our events and experiences. So we went from being event first to, I would argue, to media first. But events are still a huge part of the ecosystem and the flywheel. So sometimes we staff up if we need, but we have those capabilities, so we can take RFPs day in and day out. We can scale as big or as small as we need, which I think is really good and efficient. But we do have people who are more focused on the IRL aspect of what we do.