Brian Kitts is the Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer for City of Denver venues such as Colorado Convention Center, Denver Coliseum, Denver Performing Arts Complex, McNichols Civic Center Building, and of course the world famous Red Rocks Amphitheatre.

The diversity of these venues and the events they hold gives Brian a unique and comprehensive perspective on the event marketing landscape.

So too does the fact that he is also a lecturer in Sports and Entertainment Marketing at the University of Denver, granting him weekly face to face contact with a new generation of gig goers, which provides a constant source of learning about new marketing trends and the most effective ways of reaching a younger audience.

We talk about it all in this interview!

Corey Topp is the Founder and Director of Sellout Digital, a digital marketing agency specializing in events.

He is well versed in the art of selling out an event. Exhibit A is his own festival Reminisce, which he grew from a backyard party into an annual 10,000 capacity event in Melbourne. And then there’s Tailgate, a 1500-capacity Superbowl party he launched and sold out in just 16 days earlier this year.

With Sellout Digital Corey has helped many other events achieve similar results, using a system he developed called the Sellout Marketing System. We talk about the different elements of that system in this interview, from crafting your event campaign messaging like a TV series through to maximizing your ROI on Meta ad campaigns.

Corey also has experience working in digital across the banking and gambling industries, and brings all of that experience into this conversation.

Randy Nichols is an artist manager and music tech startup advisor.

He also has one of those resumes that makes you question whether he’s found a few more hours in the day than the rest of us.

He's guided artists to multiple Gold records and Grammy nominations, as well as overseen record releases and sold out tours on six continents. He manages or has managed Underoath, The Starting Line, Vacationer, Aaron Gillespie, Say Anything, Bayside, Person L, The Almost, Hit The Lights, Beach Slang, Fake Problems, and Jamison Parker and The Pilfers. He is an advisor for the leading live event commerce platform atVenu, creative agency Tension Division, and artist management platform Immensity, while also serving as a board member for the International Independent Talent Organization and working with Eleven75 Collective and Fly South Music Group.

Randy is very hands on with the marketing of his artists, and with Underoath currently in the middle of a successful European and US run of shows, it was a great time to speak with him about some of the marketing techniques they’ve used to sell tickets.

We also speak about the Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Live Nation-Ticketmaster, as Randy has been very vocal about what he thinks it will and won’t achieve, and where the focus should be in order to reduce ticket prices and increase accessibility to shows for fans.

Sean Callanan is the Founder of sports digital marketing agency Sports Geek, and host of the Sports Geek podcast.

His career began in technology, but as a passionate sports fan he was always looking for a way to merge the two worlds. Hence, in 2009, Sports Geek was born.

Sean has a deep understanding of the sports marketing landscape, and includes amongst his clients the NFL, for whom he manages their channels in Australia and New Zealand.

Not surprisingly, the focus of this chat is sports marketing, but you’ll have to keep listening to find out how the Spice Girls and Taylor Swift fit into that world...

Michael Julian is the Founder of SEERS, a multifaceted company dedicated to driving innovation and fostering cultural transformation in the world of dance music, live events and festivals.

Michael, or MJ as he’s commonly known, was born in Minsk in Belarus before moving to Brooklyn with his family in the early ’90s. In the last year of high school his life changed when he attended Tunnel nightclub in New York, and it was there that he truly experienced the thrill of electronic music. It wasn’t long before he began working within that community, first as a sub promoter running guest lists in New York.

By the 2000s MJ had begun building a team around him to promote a weekly club night called Imagine Fridays, before expanding to events in other parts of the US. He was later approached to market a new festival called Electric Zoo, which went on to become one of the world’s biggest electronic music festivals.

We talk a lot about his work with Electric Zoo in this interview, from the festival’s incredible early growth to the issues and cancellations that damaged the brand in 2013 and 2014, and how MJ and his team set about repairing that damage and rebuilding Electric Zoo.

We also talk about his work with elrow as well as founding Gray Area, an event series, content creation and event discovery platform that brings together artists and fans from different parts of the global electronic music ecosystem, while also helping launch artists' careers.

Jesse Lawrence is the CEO and Co-Founder of marketing and content development platform FanIQ, and Founder of secondary ticketing platform TicketIQ.

Each company works in tandem in what Jesse calls “the circle of life in the ticketing ecosystem”, and we explore that concept in this interview.

We also look in depth at the kinds of content Jesse and his team create to help sell tickets; the most effective social platforms on which to distribute that content; innovative ways of marketing events via SMS; and the similarities and differences between marketing and selling tickets to sporting and music events.

Justin Andrews is the Director of Ticketing at Danny Wimmer Presents.

Justin’s ticketing resume is long and varied, having spent time at the Orange Bowl Committee, Live Nation, the Tampa Bay Lightning and his current role at Danny Wimmer Presents.

DWP has a typically hectic summer schedule, with some of North America’s biggest festivals such as Welcome To Rockville, Sonic Temple, Aftershock, Bourbon & Beyond and Louder Than Life, to name just a few.

Needless to say, Justin is very well versed in the art of co-ordinating high demand on sales, which we talk about in this interview. We also talk about the challenges of changing ticketing strategy midway through an onsale, trends in sales cycles, best practices for selling early bird tickets, and the fact that at a time where many festivals are struggling, Danny Wimmer Presents are on track to have a record year, and we look at what they’re getting right.

Laurie Kirby is the President and Founder of FestForums, North America’s premiere conference for the festival industry.

Each year in Santa Barbara festival producers from the music, film, and food and wine industries gather to swap ideas and network at FestForums, which Laurie founded in 2015.

Laurie herself has plenty of firsthand experience in the festival industry, having played a key role in establishing The Newport International Film Festival, as well as serving as the President and Chief Creative Officer of the International Film Festival Summit.

Her career to date has been colorful and multi-faceted, having worked as an attorney for over 20 years, as well as managing and consulting for dozens of film festivals and filmmakers and serving as a producer and consultant on many independent films.

A large part of her focus now, though, is FestForums, and throughout this interview we talk about Laurie’s approach to running a successful conference, as well as the festival trends that emerged at the most recent FestForums.