Marketing Edinburgh to host European cities’ conference on the successes and failures of urban events

In one week, leading international experts, event owners and selected international showcases will deliver to European Cities Marketing Spring Meeting’s record breaking 200 attendees all the insights and inspiration they need to cultivate the event scene in their city. The compelling conference programme on “Eventful Cities” will address both the successes and failures of some urban events’ organisation. It will all take place in the world’s leading festival city: Edinburgh on February 13-16, 2019.

European Cities Marketing (ECM) chose the world heritage city of Edinburgh and Scotland’s proud capital to host its next conference on “Eventful Cities”. For longer than a lifetime, Edinburgh has made cultural, sporting and commercial events the principal ingredients in the city’s efforts to connect and communicate with the world. The Festivals have a global outreach and a massive touristic attraction that helps drive the number of visitor arrivals to outnumber the population of 500,000 friendly locals with a ratio of almost 10:1. The city was also very recently ranked the most attractive city in the UK to live and work. All of this is making it the perfect place for cities from all over Europe to talk about events and how to cultivate the event scene in their city!

About the organisation of the Meeting in Edinburgh, Dieter Hardt-Stremayr, ECM President, declared “We will learn from leading international experts, event owners and selected international showcases that will provide us with all the insights and inspiration we need to cultivate the event scene in our cities. We are confident that this meeting will give lots of inspiration to our members. The conference will present event leaders and creatives from some of the world’s leading happenings and dissect the strategies that made them successful but also it will also uncover the dark side of the moon with a “festival of failures” where brave survivors of epic disasters in event management will share their experiences and valuable learnings.

Two keynotes will be delivered: Robert Govers, International Scholar, Lead Thinker and Author, will talk about how and why cities need to stage imaginative events that appeal to audiences’ dreams and signify the stuff that people identify with and talk about, and Ulrik Ørum-Petersen, Festival Director & Promoter at Live Nation who will tell how Live Nation has become a development partner on Europe’s urban festival scene, and he will tell the story of how Heartland and Copenhell became two of Scandinavia’s most popular events.

Many presentations will be delivered during the conference: Alexander Pihlainen, President of Slush, will present the success of his world’s leading start-up event; Marina Wollheim Araoz, Managing Director of Propaganda GEM/Wanda Media, will explain how to place your city in blockbuster films and entertainment shows; Jonas Gundersen, CRO at Tames, will guide attendees through the all-in-one event planning tool that lets manage programme content, ticket sales & revenue, speakers, partners, exhibitors & suppliers, team tasks and much more; David Goodger, Managing Director Europe & Middle East of Tourism Economics, will present attendees the ECM Event Impact Calculator a tool that enable to calculate the economic impact and monetary flows of your event; Fernando Dal Re Olleros, Senior Business Developer of Transparent Intelligence, will present how they provide data intelligence for the short-term rental industry; Olivier Henry-Biabaud, CEO of TCI Research & Dr. Lidija Lalicic, Assistant Professor at MODUL University Vienna will show respectively an exclusive preview of the ground-breaking City Sentiment Barometer applied to the subject of meetings and conferences in the city as well as key findings in ECM Meetings Statistics Report 2018; Joe Bašić, Head of Ultra Europe, will demonstrate how the Ultra Europe destination music event is an event with which you can sustain a living youth culture in your city; Sergi Marcén, Representative of the Government of Catalonia to the UK and Ireland will explain how and why he helped brought GSMAs Mobile World Congress to Barcelona to prevail as Europe’s mobile capital and number one tech region and the payback in terms of foreign direct investments, localization of international HQs and additional tech congresses; Patrick Roubroeks, Founding Director of XSAGA, will prove how it’s not about entertaining people, it’s about engaging them. Patrick will list five critical success factors to make your next event a larger-than-life success.

Participants will also get the latest from experts in the Meetings Industry, Tourism and City Marketing out of cities and region such as Copenhagen, Edinburgh, Geneva, Ghent, Gothenburg, Gotland, Malmö, Munich, Rotterdam, Salzburg, San Sebastian and Valencia; from “tech festivals” to “music events” through “sport events”, “Oktoberfest”, “political festivals”, “cultural festivals” and “charity events”, attendees will hear about the successes and failures and surely go back home with many ideas and inspirations!

The conference will be co-moderated by Laura Aalto, CEO of Helsinki Marketing and Peter Rømer Hansen, Founder and CEO of Rømer Agency.

Registrations for #ECMEdinburgh2019 are still open on ECM Website: www.europeancitiesmarketing.com

 

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*European Cities Marketing is a non-profit organisation improving the competitiveness and performance of leading cities of Europe by providing a platform for convention, leisure and city marketing professionals to exchange knowledge, best practice and widen their network to build new business. European Cities Marketing is promoting and linking the interests of members from more than 110 major cities in 38 countries.

For more information and pictures, please contact:
Flavie Baudot, press@europeancitiesmarketing.com, +33 380 56 02 00