SPOT Lounge
As a part of the official SPOT program, the festival arranges talks and seminars during the weekend, focused on sharing experience and knowledge in the music business.
Hidden away behind the stages, where the main acts are busy playing and preparing their concerts, the festival delegates are mingling and talking business.
Jack Horner has been invited to talk about his company FRUKT, and how they are managing and developing brands and using their experience in music management, promoting new bands, finding new ways of marketing products.
The setting is a small cantina, which has been transformed into a Turkish coffee house, about 30 people have occupied the room, sipping tea, talking and waiting to hear what Jack has to say. It is a good mix of managers, festival officials, venue promoters, journalists and A&R people.
Frukt is a integrated communications agency /music agency that works with brands such as Nokia, Coca Cola and the British clothes company Topman, besides numeral other consumer brands and technology based companies.
Jack Horner
- FRUKT focuses on content and experience that consumers want to be happy, they want to be entertained, and the opportunity is for consumer brands to play a role in entertaining the people, and in doing that people will be more receptive to the messages that the brands want to communicate.
Jack elaborates about the different strategies and values, that FRUKT work with, one of the key words is longevity, establishing and developing a sustainable bond between the brand and the music.
Jack Horner
- Hanging banners with brand names at concerts is obsolete, the audience doesn’t mind brands, but if they have to be there, they should have a purpose, utility, have a role, which is at the core of music fans accepting a brand.
You have to think out of the box, not only to get the brand out to the consumers, but also to create a sustainable investment for the company’s. Jacks ideas are innovative and very different from the traditional approach to music and brand advertizing. One of their recent activities is the development of Topman CTRL that focuses on the young adult audiences in Britain. Topman CTRL gives the audience an opportunity to arrange concerts themselves, with bands they choose, whilst the brand connects with it current and future consumers through the events and concerts.
It’s bringing together different elements of the music business, creating opportunities for new and upcoming band, and at the same instant making it feasible for company’s to invest money in promoting and using music as advertizing.
The talk last for about 30 min, it’s short and concise, it’s followed by a Q&A, where it’s clear that many of the participants want to know more about, ‘how to do it’, ‘how do we get the companies to invest’, ‘what’s in it for the bands’, and so on.
The seminar is at the heart of the festival, sharing knowledge across boarders, bringing the business together, planting and developing new ideas, new ways of connecting music and corporations, music and technology.
