AAA White Paper The political economy of informal events, 2030 | Page 124

APPENDIX D: FOUR CITIES THAT HAVE MADE EVENT
STRATEGIES WORK FOR THEM
Tom Hall writes: Internationally, cities have tried various ways of using
events to boost their economies. They’ve put a particular focus on
hotel room revenues and visitor numbers – in each case, covering
both consumer and business visitors. Examples of successful event
strategies include Austin, Texas; Tallinn, Estonia; Portmeirion, Wales,
and Gothenburg, Sweden. Yet even in these enlightened cities, local
events professionals have sometimes had to fight hard to be listened to.
South by Southwest (SXSW), an annual conference and festival
held at Austin, is credited with helping to double the population of that
city, as well as with helping to attract inward investment from Google.
SXSW’s impact on the Austin economy in 2017 is also reckoned to have
been worth nearly $350m. Austin-based promoter Graham Williams,
a founder of the city’s Transmission Entertainment group, says the
city wanted the creativity, tourism and culture that a festival could
bring. However, he adds: ‘They wanted new people to move here, but
getting those doors open was a lot harder than you’d expect’.
To persuade Austin’s key influencers, its local music industry
formed a lobby group to get its voice heard. ‘The manager of the
company we hired to talk to politicians was himself a former city
official’, Williams says. ‘We had to hire someone who had worked on
the inside for a decade – to have a conduit between us and the city to
get things done. There’s a lot of politics involved’.
In Tallinn, Helen Sildna, director of Tallinn Music Week, undertook
efforts that were equally Herculean. She founded Estonia’s combined
annual talent showcase, festival event and music industry conference
in 2009, but also faced significant obstacles. ‘There was no openness
at first, and it took us campaigning for years,” she recalls. ‘The tourist
board in Estonia told us, “This is music, not tourism”. They were only
interested in bringing over journalists who write about tourism – but
I am a tourist, and I don’t read any tourism magazines’.
Once the Tallinn event got the go-ahead, it grew year-on-year, and
is felt to have helped revive areas of the town that were previously
abandoned. ‘A creative centre started developing in Tallinn and
creative companies moved into an old factory house, which housed our
main film festival, and attracted bands and a nightclub as permanent
additions’. Sildna says. ‘With new restaurants and a vibrant scene,
young families started buying property in the area, and within ten
years it was rebuilt because of the influx of artists and events’.
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