With strong backgrounds in the music and live events industries, Versa co-founders Jace Cohen and Toby Benson were well positioned to help brands and other clients continue to engage their audiences digitally throughout last year’s industry-wide pivot to virtual.
They recently joined forces with G7 Entertainment to head the company’s new presence in Los Angeles and take their entertainment marketing efforts to the next level on the West Coast. While in-person events are returning, Cohen and Benson are confident that virtual and hybrid events will continue to play a role moving forward.
They sat down with XLIVE to discuss how they were able to adapt their business to digital activations, trends they’ve been noticing in the virtual space, and their biggest learnings from the pandemic.
XLIVE: How did your recent partnership with G7 come about?
JC: We've been doing brand related work for a long time and have been friends with the leadership team at G7 for almost a decade. We've worked together on several projects over the years, and when it came time for G7 to expand its operations to the West Coast, it made a lot of sense for Toby and I to fully join forces and expand our total reach together as a team. We've always felt that we shared a lot of the same values, so it just felt natural when the opportunity presented itself to help expand G7’s reach to the West Coast.
XL: What has the past year and a half now looked like for you? How have you adapted?
TB: It has certainly been a rollercoaster ride, with ups and downs, but it’s also been a fun ride — there have been challenges, but those challenges create opportunities to adapt, to learn, and to really dig in and collaborate.
We adapted initially by learning as much as possible about our clients’ adjusted needs and goals, and then worked to ideate solutions to match those goals. At the beginning of the pandemic, we together with some friends created our own virtual nightclub experience. This was in March 2020, so there was absolutely nothing going on. The initial idea was simply just to connect with our friends and enjoy music together, but that quickly expanded into a full-scale immersive event series with multiple virtual rooms, acrobats, a comedy room, curated bar, DJ performances and more. Aside from being really fun and giving us all something to do at the beginning of lockdown, it actually gave us a great hands-on experience digging deep into platforms like Zoom, OBS and StreamYard, which in turn enabled us to speak to those services and share our learnings with our clients. We feel very honored and lucky that the clients we work with have seen the challenges ahead, but also know the importance of connecting people, especially through entertainment, and have given us the opportunity to help them with their campaigns.
XL: Had you experimented with these types of virtual and digital activations at all in the past, or was this completely new territory?
TB: It was a bit of both. Like a lot of people, it was definitely a steep learning curve, because everybody was tipped into a virtual-only world. It’s been really fun learning all about that. Our background has primarily been live, in-person events, so virtual hadn't been the core focus prior to the pandemic. But it's a big piece of our strategy and business today, and I believe it'll continue to be moving forward.
XL: Due to the nature of virtual, were you able to organize some different types of experiences using that medium?
JC: With some of the virtual events we did, we noticed a new trend with our clients. We began early in the pandemic booking bands to perform from their homes and livestream for different clients’ events. The appeal of those types of events started to wane a bit — people started to get a little tired of just seeing the same things over and over again. We noticed this trend with our clients and as we progressed further into the virtual event space, we wanted to bring them new concepts and ideas to combat this streaming fatigue.
We started with more micro event ideas, which focused on anywhere from 10 to 50 guests at a time. These events were aimed at raising the level of excitement and engagement with our clients and their guests. We produced all kinds of interesting engagements, but some of the highlights were a poker tournament with a Professional World Series of Poker player, which was limited to 10 clients at a time. The group would virtually sit around a poker table with the Pro, and he would teach them little tips and tricks, answer questions, tell stories and play a whole tournament of poker with them. Another one was creating a live cupcake baking and decorating session with a few former NFL players that opened a bake shop during the pandemic. We even organized a session with a celebrity mentalist who came on to entertain and interact with an intimate crowd for one of our client’s events.
XL: As live events start to come back, are you pivoting back? Or are you still doing a mix of in person and virtual and looking at hybrid experiences?
TB: It's a really great time right now as we are getting back to live and it's certainly a welcome return. Just in the past week or so, we had Portugal. The Man and Brittany Howard perform at the grand opening of the new Public Lands store in Pittsburgh. It was a really great moment for the team to be back on site in a safe way, and have that visceral connection where music meets people in person. That said, virtual is still an important component for some projects and is currently still in. For some clients, it might make the most sense even after the pandemic has passed.
For example, a client that has employees distributed across the country or is now full-time work from home, it might not make sense to fly everyone to Las Vegas for a big internal company tentpole event. Instead, we're seeing those types of clients look into a more hybrid model with an in-person performance at their headquarters, and then livestreamed to all their other employees located elsewhere. For us, it ultimately depends on what the client’s purpose for the event is. If it's for employees, it can probably stay virtual or hybrid. If it's for customer retention and appreciation, it might make sense to do those big tentpole in-person events. If it's for customer acquisition, then smaller in-person events targeted to key client geos might make the most sense. But at the end of the day, each client's goals are different, and it's our job to collaborate with them and deliver and present ideas that match those goals.
XL: What is the biggest thing that you've learned throughout the pandemic that you plan to continue enacting in your strategy moving forward?
TB: I think that keeping an ear to the ground and recognizing what you don't know has been a good takeaway. There are always new platforms, new trends, and new ways of doing things, and the pandemic certainly showed us that it's important to always be a student. I will certainly take that with me moving forward. I think it's driven us in a great way to increase the scope of our offerings into the digital space, whether it's for event production, content creation or for digital strategy. I believe that hybrid events are going to stay forevermore, in some way, shape, or form. The last thing that I've learned is to always just be humble, and appreciate that even in the toughest times, we had some great colleagues and partners and clients who stood by us, took risks, and wanted to continue working with us. And that's definitely never to be taken for granted.
JC: To add to what Toby mentioned, I feel that staying flexible through this whole experience was very important, instead of just digging our heels in and saying ‘well, this is what our company does, and we're not going to change.’ As Toby said, it was all about learning as much as possible about a lot of new technologies and constantly presenting new opportunities to our clients. Even if 95% of the time it didn't work out, we've always wanted to be very proactive in helping guide our clients through this space and to always be there for them. Eventually, we’ll get back to doing more live events again, and we wanted to be there for our partners all along the way.