Big interview :
Jim King
On the back of selling 165,000 tickets for the All Points East festival , which this year included Broadwick Live ’ s Field Day , AEG Presents CEO of European Festivals Jim King tells Access about the challenges and learnings involved in staging the shows at East London ’ s Victoria Park
Words : Christopher Barrett
How well did the event go from a commercial perspective ? We sold out three nights from the four we ran , selling 165,000 tickets in the process .
While that was a solid financial performance , it pales into insignificance when compared to the financial impact the company and industry has experienced in the last 18 months .
I ’ m very happy though that a significant financial boost was able to be invested into the supply chain for the benefit of staff , crew , suppliers , traders and artists . to this level . On site , our operations teams led by Loud Sound , delivered a stunning event that ran very well .
We had one issue in that in spite of more entrances and more entry lanes , we did have congestion at the entrance for around 90 minutes on the Saturday , but this was more down to the sheer numbers arriving at the same time .
We were processing 20,000 people an hour at the peak period , which by any measure shows how robust the process was , but gives us an important piece to fix next year where a new third
confirmed . This naturally increased our risk because if the show was unable to take place then , with no insurance , AEG ’ s loss would have been greater .
What impact did the Covid mitigation measures have in terms of staff provision and cost – are you satisfied that it is all manageable and affordable going forward ? Increases in costs were inevitable and thus accepted . Living with Covid and mitigating its impact at our events is something that is now the new normal and we have to get on with it .
“ We were processing 20,000 people an hour at the peak period , which by any measure shows how robust the process was .”
How well did the event go from an operational perspective ? I think our AEG festival division delivered a great bill that was curated brilliantly every day . Our marketing team produced a great campaign and we had positive buy-in from the artist community to actually promote the shows through their own channels . It demonstrated the positive effect that this collaboration offers when executed entrance is being installed to alleviate one-off ingress spikes of this scale .
The supply chain has been battered , how much of a challenge did that present you and what areas were the most difficult in terms of supply of services , staff , infrastructure and materials ? We took a decision early that certain parts of the supply chain had to be
Our industry is one where we face operating and budget challenges every day . We have to put this into the same category , embrace it , and provide solutions that are upgraded with new efficiencies as we get better at it and more systems and processes develop .
What was your personal highlight for you at the event this year ? The highlight was seeing a team who had
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