The Case For A Better ROI From Virtual Business Entertainment

When he retired from the NFL, Tiki Barber realized there was a business opportunity around business entertainment done differently. Seven years later, Thuzio, the company he co-founded, has created a new format for business entertainment. I sat down with Tiki and his Thuzio co-founder Jared Augustine to talk about the inspiration behind the business and why they believe the virtual event platform is here to stay for business entertainment. 

Dave Knox: What is the origin of Thuzio?

Tiki Barber: We started Thuzio seven years ago, more as a marketplace for athletes to engage with their communities of fans. We were doing all kinds of different events from basketball games with your favorite former player to a concert at Fenway Park for one of our clients. But it was a marketplace that required us to touch almost all the events. Scalability became a problem. We were fortunate that we were able to pivot many times over the last few years, ultimately to a product that is a standalone event company, where we have a membership based in big cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Boston, Dallas, and other cities around the world. In these cities we are doing live events with great sports icons and these live and unfiltered conversations that are intimate and engaging and our clients love it.  As a business community, you have clients that you need to entertain and asking them to go to a football game on a Sunday afternoon for five hours is not always ideal.  But if you could invite them to an event that has a legend of sport for a two hour meet and greet and conversation with cocktails, that client is probably more likely to say yes to an event like this.  At Thuzio we created an alternative, and it has really worked.

Jared Augustine: The thing that Tiki really saw early on was that there was demand for his time after he stopped playing through general appearances. It struck us that there was no real marketplace environment to be able to access celebrities and influencers for live experiences. So that’s what we built. We built the technology around that. We built a huge talent network on the supply side. We were a couple of years into the business when we recognized that two things were happening. One, many companies and brand marketing professionals were using the product to just run searches and try to identify athletes for marketing engagements. Second, along the way we started hosting live events with our business networks and we quickly found that these live experiences were so powerful that we asked ourselves,” Okay, how do we enable this?” That’s what Thuzio is today, an event and membership company.

Knox: On the note of pivots, Thuzio recently launched a virtual only event membership program. How is that evolving your approach to the business?

Augustine: In 2019 we were strictly a live event business, and we ran about 50 events across 12 US cities with activations at the Super Bowl, NBA All- Star, Masters, and a number of other highlights. The membership community would attend those events and bring their clients to them. Then COVID hits. And in March we canceled all of our events initially through June. Then we canceled through August. And now it is in question of whether live events will be back at all here in Q4. With that, we had to really reinvent the event product for our membership community. We started running virtual events and soon virtual was twice as big as the live events had been because there was such demand. For the past six months, we have been doing these custom virtual event activations for companies in our corporate membership community like JP Morgan and Verizon. 

What we learned is these virtual events can be very successful if they are run well. You cannot treat them like a Zoom call. You have to treat them like an event with a run of show and gifting and all the elements that make live events important. It also turns out they are very cost effective for companies because the cost to produce is lower and the event attendance is actually higher because it is easy. It is easier to get to a virtual event than a live event, which in turn creates a really positive return on marketing dollars for these companies.

And yet we were struck here at the end of the summer that these events were really only accessible to sales and business development teams at these major companies. Small business owners could not afford to do them on their own.  We wanted to create a product that would democratize access to this great virtual event format. Our new virtual membership is what we launched to do just that. Each week we host a virtual members only event and members are able to bring up to three guests. For $495 for the entire year, anyone can join as long as they register with a business email and their LinkedIn account so we can verify that they are using this for professional purposes. It took us six months to figure out how our Thuzio format could work for virtual events. Now that we did that through our custom event business, we are rolling out this membership oriented product that is more of a subscription for entertaining during COVID and beyond.

Knox: The very definition of business entertainment has changed during the last six months. How are you seeing your traditional clients respond to that?

Barber: We know that our client base loves these live events. They go, the events are engaging, and they just feel intimate. We always look for settings for our live events that make it feel like you are in this cocoon of conversation with a legend of sport or culinary or whatever it may be. We had to find a way to continue to service these customers because the need was there. That is what led to this virtual membership. We had a couple of clients who would say the ROI on these virtual events outpace anything that they have done before. They are asking us to find ways to do more of them. On some days, we’ll do five bespoke custom events for clients so we see the need there for sure.

Knox: What have you learned about how to do a virtual event, and what lessons do you think other businesses can take away from the experiences you have had?

Augustine: I can tell you that you have to treat it like a live event. What that means is there’s a lot of pre-planning. You have to have a run of show. You have to think about your customer experience from the moment they get the invitation to the moment that they are exiting the event. You have to think about the format itself. You have to think about how do you bring the person on screen to life. One of the great ways of doing that is through gifting products alongside the event. As an example, we had an event with the New York Mets legend David Wright that was the kickoff of our virtual membership series. Everyone received their unique link to their Thuzio Zoom login. The show is Tiki interviewing David for about 30 minutes, and then it opened up to audience Q&A where we bring members on screen to ask David questions. Alongside that experience, David Wright has a new book coming out and we are giving all of our members the ability to purchase a book to be shipped to their guests who are attending that event that night. A book shows up at your door and it connects you back to that event and it connects you back to the business partner of yours that invited you to that experience. Another example would be that we have been doing many events with sommeliers doing wine tastings, and prior to the event, our customers will have that wine shipped to their guests so that they can actually have the bottle of wine and they can watch the show and they can participate. We think it’s really important to create a live and interactive element to really round out the virtual event experience.

Knox: As you think about each of these touch points, who do ensure you still see strong attendance in the virtual format?

Augustine: This the hardest part. It is the hardest part of client entertainment. First you have to get your contact to open the email for this invitation. And then whether it’s live or it’s virtual, it’s got to be something that touches on a passion point with them, that gets them to say yes. And again, this goes back to the founding principles of Thuzio. If you have a client who’s a foodie and you invite them to a culinary demonstration, you have got a pretty good chance of them saying yes. The next thing is it has to be relatively convenient. Everybody’s busy. So our live events we host on weekday evenings and really excellent locations in major business districts so people can attend that event right after work. You are not schlepping out to a stadium or arena or giving up an entire weekend day at a golf course. You have to hit a passion point and then it has to be convenient. And obviously virtual can check both those boxes. In fact, we think it is even more convenient. Drop-off is a concern whether it is live or virtual. It is the hardest part. You invite someone out and you hope they can make it. But what our data is showing us is that because it is virtual, it is easier to attend, and as a result, you are going to actually have a higher attendance rate.

Knox: What are the qualities that you look for in an influencer that is going to be at the center of one of your events?

Barber: It definitely goes beyond just the name. When we first started Thuzio, we knew that the retired player had a better grasp on his story. He could tell it differently because he was not actively living it. We have grown a knowledge of who is really good at engaging an audience. That is what we look for when we book for our member events, both the live ones, and now the virtual ones. We want that fun and engaging conversation. Take Lawrence Taylor, who I have done many interviews with. We know that it is going to be entertaining. He’s going to say stuff sometimes with a lot of expletives and always with a brown liquid in his hand, and it is going to get people excited and engaged. We have developed this knowledge of who is good at this, and we know that it is going to be entertaining. Part of it is the name on top of that. Obviously you want someone who people are going to recognize when they see the name. For us on the development side of these events, we know we have to deliver a great product that goes beyond the name. If someone got up there and was boring, it would be hard for the interviewer and it would be hard for the audience to stay engaged. I do not want to brag about what our expertise is, but I think we have gotten really good at finding people who are great at presenting, whether it’s in person or virtually as we are now doing.

Knox: What events are you doing to kickoff your virtual membership?

Augustine: We kicked off with David Wright in a sports roundtable Q& A format. Then we had chef Jose Garces for a culinary demonstration where we shared everything ahead of time so you could go out, purchase those ingredients, and cook alongside Jose. Then we had Amar’e Stoudemire talking not just about his playing career, but also about his wine company, which is very important to him. And then most recently, we had Gary V, where we did a business discussion and talked to him about all his great successes and where things are going.

Knox: Where do you think business entertainment goes in the future as we emerge out of COVID?

Augustine: We believe virtual business entertainment is a new category that’s here to stay. Like every event company and everyone in sports entertainment, we look forward to live events coming back. But we don’t think virtual is going away. And I think it’s fair to say that when you look at the corporate entertainment market overall, that there is share that will go to virtual going forward. And how much of that is unknown, but it will be there. It’s not going away.

Barber: I also think that the live and virtual events aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. Obviously packing a room is job number one when we have live events. But as we’ve been thinking about this, there are certain parts of the country that just don’t have access to our live events. Generally speaking, our live and unfiltered interviews are in major cities like New York and LA and Chicago. But if you are outside these cities and there is not a professional sports team there, we do not run events in those markets. But the virtual aspects and the virtual membership that we have been talking about now gives a way for people that are not local to attend these events. That is where it starts to get exciting. And that is where, as we think about the future for Thuzio and the additional technological add-ons that can enhance our product, that’s what makes us really excited about 2021 and beyond.