009: How to Sell 50,000 Tickets in One Hour with Jessica Ducrou

How can we turn a creative concept into an authentic product that thousands of people are hungry to invest their hard earned money into, months before they get to experience it, and which relies on relatively limited marketing? 

Jess Ducrou is co-CEO of Secret Sounds, a Live Nation partner, and producer of Australia’s premier festivals including Splendour In The Grass and Falls Music and Arts Festival along with its portfolio of companies including Secret Sounds Touring, Secret Service Artist Management, Village Sounds (promotions), Dew Process (record label), Dew Process Publishing and Secret Sounds Connect (brand agency).

 Here Jess talks passion, perseverance and presenting ideas, as she pulls back the curtain on how remarkable experiences are everything when it comes to engaging audiences and nurturing a truly valuable community year after year.

Takeaway points:

• With live experiences especially, energy, aspiration and the unexpected are important traits that can help a consumer transcend functional product benefits and move them towards advocacy and heightened lifetime value. 
• Even with large audiences, the relevance of sub communities shouldn’t be overlooked – the more individuals and groups that feel their unique interests are understood and acted upon, the more value they extract from their interactions, compelling them to share positive stories. 
• If customers can be afforded a space to comfortably and confidently contribute, fertile ground for inspiration can be found, which can birth a suite of ideas to distill into new angles which will maintain relevance and interest over extended cycles. 
• Exposing customers to new things involves some degree of risk, but the potential rewards of uncovering something that really cuts through can outweigh these, especially when innovation is a core component of why customers trust a company. 
• In the partnerships and sponsorship space, brands are becoming increasingly savvy about the need to craft meaningful experiences which go deeper than mass awareness branding in highly stimulating, activity abundant environments. 
• New ways of connecting and communicating fast-tracked by the COVID-19 pandemic will stay with us, both in terms of internal processes and external consumer touchpoints. However, without foresight as to how these can be honed to enhance what went before, rather than implemented ‘just because’, they could prove a distraction in some cases. 

Remarkable Quotes:

[06:15] “I was very aware that to be successful in what you do the books need to balance, you need to be able to make financial sense of what you’re doing. So passion, for sure, as your driver, but having a good understanding of financials…was incredibly important, to understand how money worked, how deals worked, how to cut things in a way that everyone feels good about what the outcome is, bringing people to the table.” 

[33:31] “Even though we’re now feeling positive and certainly working to have a very busy year next year, it’s going to be a long tail to recovery for us. I think probably psychologically, when your job, your industry suddenly disappears, it’s pretty confronting…we couldn’t have been in a worse industry for a pandemic.” 

[47:08] “Create an experience where they’re going to be engaged, where they’re going to get into a space and have the time of their lives. Think about what you want to experience when you go out and try and create that for other people. Create the ultimate festival for ourselves and invite everyone along with us.” 

Get connected with Jess and her team:

Visit their website: www.secretsounds.com.au  

Follow them on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/secretsounds