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Is Whistler any good for event producers?

Part II of our look into Whistler's events industry
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So it begins

It's really just the beginning. According to marketing and communications expert extraordinaire Maureen Douglas, the Resort Municipality of Whistler is simply finding its footing as event producers through the Festival Events and Animation program (FE&A). It's in its baby stage of development and there's a whole lot more learning still to come.

"They (RMOW) are in a process," says Douglas, former director of communications for VANOC and someone who has extensive experience producing events in Whistler for over 20 years. "There's a new foundation of how things can be produced and paid for and that's the RMI (Resort Municipality Initiative funds). Last year wasn't even a foundation year. It was a test year. It was getting things into that venue, seeing how it filled the space."

There has been some community concern within Whistler about how the RMI funds were being spent, and whether Whistler would see a return on investment with the FE&A program. Mayor Nancy Wilhelm-Morden openly criticized the program in her campaign for office. With the creation of the FE&A and RMI Oversight Committee, some of these concerns have been laid to rest but there are still some who wonder whether FE&A is the right course of action for Whistler — and whether municipal staff are the right people for the job.

"The people running municipal hall are not adequately considering the community's interests. They're too interested in self-congratulation, being concert promoters and controlling everyone and everything," says Arnold Schwisberg, creator and producer of the Jazz on the Mountain at Whistler festival. The festival was cancelled after only one year due to a sizable $700,000 deficit and what Schwisberg perceives as low support from within the municipality.

Since the commercial failure of JOMAW 2011 on Labour Day, Schwisberg has turned from invested part-time resident to perhaps Whistler's most outspoken critic. In short, he says the FE&A program, the free Whistler Presents concert series and the oversight committee and its working groups are little more than an "opaque black box" because, he says, all deliberations and voting by these groups are behind closed doors.

"I want the FE&A department to end. I think that would be a great benefit to Whistler, if the municipality did what Nancy Wilhelm-Morden said in her campaign, (that) it's back to business for Whistler. Well, I don't see it. I see the exact opposite," he says.

For its part, the RMOW is trying to shift the thinking around FE&A this year so it's not all about the free concerts. It will be allocating funds equally to initiatives that are both room-night driving and experience enhancing, as per the Resort Municipality Initiative guidelines laid out by the province (the RMI being a provincial funding program directed to enhance the resort sector in British Columbia). At least one of the driving ideas is to make visitors trying to decide where to go for a getaway choose Whistler because they will learn that it doesn't really matter when you come; there will always be something to do, see and enjoy.

According to a spokesperson for the B.C. Ministry of Jobs, Tourism and Innovation, the RMI funding is designated to support programs and projects that will both provide a better tourism experience for visitors and help to increase tourism. The two facets, ideally, will encourage visitors to stay longer and visit more often. The RMOW says that FE&A is merely one facet of a larger RMI-funded initiative aimed at increasing hotel occupancy and the health of Whistler's economy year-round.

This year the RMOW will invest the bulk of the funds in free outdoor programming with a total $485,000 for the Whistler Presents concert series, including a $215,000, three-night run of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra from July 20-22.

The 2011 program was essentially a test year, where they spent $932,000 — roughly half on artist fees, the other half on producer fees and operational costs — bringing in big name acts in an attempt to drive hotel room nights. Only the artists the RMOW attracted, the Barenaked Ladies, Sam Roberts, K'naan, among others, did little to drive tourists into the hotels, much to the admitted surprise of the RMOW.

Doug Perry, founder of the World Ski and Snowboard Festival, who now runs his event production company W1 out of Vancouver after relocating from Whistler, says that $932,000 is an "insane amount of money," especially when it was ineffective in driving room nights.

"You can't tell me that a million-dollar free concert series, if properly packaged and marketed, can't be structured to drive incremental room nights!" he wrote to Pique in an email.

"With the right bands, I'll guarantee if you unleash the right marketing/communication strategy — assemble the right media partners, build the right incentives, and power-up the media relations machine you could put a dent in room nights."

He says that the $485,000 budgeted for the 2012 program is a far more reasonable amount, but without adequate marketing, the program will fall short in driving room nights.

A keen observer of the media in Vancouver, he says he's seen very little "noise" being made regarding the RMOW's programming. There should be a distinct difference between event production and event marketing, he says, and equal effort should be given to both. He says Whistler could be using the many media outlets in and around Vancouver to create genuine buzz around its product. He doesn't see this happening.

Louise Walker, Tourism Whistler's vice president of marketing strategy, says $185,000 ($85,000 from the RMOW through RMI; $100,000 from within TW) will be spent on marketing the FE&A program this summer. This will include in-market advertisements in Vancouver and Seattle, targetting the major publications in both areas to drive visitors, along with some in-resort marketing to educate locals about the program.

"We're going to try to make sure it's aligned with our arts summer campaign. It will have the same overall feel, the same sort of brand message," Walker says. "We are also, in addition to the traditional media buys side, supporting it through all our Tourism Whistler channels, so we'll make sure that we include it in our email blasts and social media and so on."

Perry says it's not just about the marketing, though. Above all, Whistler needs "strong, CEO-calibre leadership" to direct the events in industry — someone who's job it is to lose sleep over it every night. At present, this position, or personality, does not exist.

"It can't be a part-time portfolio for people who have other jobs in the resort, an embedded position, nor can it be run by a committee," Perry writes. "Committees have their place but it needs full-time leadership, someone to make the tough decisions at the speed of business. Until the resort gets serious about it — I mean really serious — I believe the true economic potential of the event industry may well elude the resort."

He says that Jazz on the Mountain at Whistler had serious economic potential for Whistler, had it decided to return.

As far as JOMAW is concerned, Mayor Wilhelm-Morden says that if Schwisberg decides to revive it this year or in future years, the municipality would do everything it could to support him.

"Certainly we would cooperate with him..." she says. "The programming that we would be doing would be conducive to the jazz festival, and complimentary to the jazz festival."

But Schwisberg says he's had zero engagement from the RMOW, despite stating from the outset — as early as 2009 — that he had a five-year commitment to hosting the event. He says he's tried to initiate conversations, or at least to gain some level of support, since last September.

"There was no attempt to discuss with me what the community's needs were, how we could adapt the brand to better serve the community," he says.

When asked if this was the case, the mayor says, "I think there's two sides to every story."

The failure of JOMAW, and the potential success of the Wanderlust festival, will offer guidance for what does and doesn't work as Whistler shapes its new course as a cultural destination. In the post-Olympic void, Whistler has been eager to find programming opportunities and JOMAW, with its promise of high-income jazz fans, was the guinea pig for how new third-party festivals would be handled in this new landscape.

In the end, it had low support from within the community, practically from the outset — a fact Douglas says is often the case when event producers create events targetted at a niche market.

"It's kind of a generic market," she says. "Once an event gets too narrow a niche, producers run the risk of the community not really giving (a damn). And without local support, the event is toast."

The jazz festival may well have fallen victim to the outsider's perception of Whistler as a bastion for wealthy, sophisticated tastes. The new reality for Whistler is a visitor demographic comprised of regional visitors — though destination visitors are returning, albeit with tight budgets. The RMOW is currently turning its marketing focus on B.C. and Washington visitors, along with Ontario. Its entire FE&A strategy is designed to attract these visitors.

"There's a lot of folks who come in who don't understand the market of Whistler... the characteristics that are going to present opportunities and challenges if you don't know the place," Douglas says. "You need some strong guidance and Whistler always has to worry about its own reputation in the process (as well). It's not always the easiest thing to do. Not every event is the right partnership. Not every event is right for Whistler."

A spokesperson for the RMOW says they will never turn a producer, or an event, away. The extent to which they'll embrace them depends on the economic benefit to the community.

When a new producer comes through town, Tourism Whistler acts as the first point of contact for any producer wanting to throw an event in Whistler to ensure it's the right fit — that it fits the Whistler brand and will be benefit the economy and so on.

"We want (these events) to reflect our personality and who we are, and we want it to align with our products that we have here on a year-round basis," says TW president and CEO Barrett Fisher. "When you look at WSSF, that's a reflection of what we do all year long. When you look at Crankworx, that's a reflection of what we do all summer long. Cornucopia in November is a flagship for our food and wine experience that we do year-round."

The RMOW has purchased eight economic impact studies from Canadian Sport Tourism Alliance (CSTA) to understand how these existing festivals are benefiting Whistler, and to see where they can augment them for maximum success. Three of these were conducted in 2011 (GranFondo, Cornucopia and Whistler Film Festival) and the other five will be conducted this year (Wanderlust, WSSF, Whistler Half-Marathon, All-Star International Hockey and one more to be announced).

The studies look at the impact on the resort, the impact on the provincial economy, assessing the number of people in town at the time, number of room-nights generated by the event itself, spending in the resort, how many people were employed and what their salaries were, etc.

This, along with the FE&A oversight committee, is a sign that Whistler is getting serious about its events. The enthusiasm for cultural events is certainly growing, which Paul Runnals, senior vice president of brand.LIVE — the company behind LIVE at Squamish — says could create new possibilities for event producers.

"From a promoter's perspective we're hoping to be, and would love to be, more involved in Whistler in executing these events. But on the promoter's side in terms of wearing the risk or who's paying the bills, it's a tough one."