Creating best-in-class events with less-than-zero lead time

Whether it’s a quick response to a national event or simply a last-minute opportunity, too often marketers have to create a major event or tour with, well, almost no lead time.

Forget a six-month planning cycle. How do event teams do it when they’ve got six weeks, or even six days, to pull it together? “A short amount of time can actually be a good thing because it disciplines you,” says Linda Boff, GE Healthcare’s promotions team coleader, which created a Times Square event with only five weeks’ lead time earlier this year. “There’s not a lot of time for talking about why something won’t work. You’ve really got to focus on the idea and how to positively execute it.”

But creating a quality event in a time crunch requires a little luck and a lot of planning—in addition to the requisite long days, be prepared for your team, as well as your agencies and vendors, to feel the pinch. Three tips for putting together an event on a short lead time:

1. Get with the Program. When the planning schedule is compressed into mere weeks to arrange an event that would normally take at least eight to 10 months to plan, there’s little room to rehash even the biggest decisions.

When Anheuser-Busch decided to launch its Clydesdales Across America tour, for example, it only had five weeks to bring the tour from ideation to completion. “The biggest challenge was making final decisions among all of the groups involved,” says Jeff Knapper, special event marketing manager at A-B. “When it comes to narrowing down what we actually want to do, and then getting approvals, it can be challenging within a big corporation.” To keep the process going, the company made sure that all participating parties could drop everything and be at the ready when it came time to make decisions.

2. Stick to What You Do Best. If you and your event team are used to checking and rechecking the work of other internal departments and agencies working on the event program, this is the time to let those partners excel at what they do best while the event team stays focused on the big stuff. When GE Healthcare took over Times Square in April for its Picture a Healthy World event—which offered consumers the opportunity to get photos taken in sidewalk kiosks and then watch as they were displayed on digital billboards—the company had mere weeks to put the event together from start to finish. The key to success, Boff says, was allowing each department to take control of separate elements of the program, and then meet for only short collaborative meetings. “We tried to come together and we did come together when we needed to, but I think we also let ourselves work at what we work best at—and there was still this very collaborative nature to the whole thing.”

3. Recycle. If it’s a real time crunch, look to other recently completed tours and programs for assets that can be reskinned and reused for the new program. Everything from an already-trained team of ambassadors (even if they were working for another brand) to a mobile vehicle that can be layered with new graphics can help brand marketers pull the trigger quickly on an event campaign that absolutely, positively has to launch overnight.