The Media Environment

The media environment used to promote events nowadays has changed, due largely to the rise of the internet in creating new forms of information exchange via computers and handheld devices. There are new powerful platforms for advertising and promotion using social-media as the marketing tool, which is becoming the ideal channel to communicate with people and build brand awareness for an event. It is an experiential source of information actively acquired by consumers, and is for this reason more persuasive, since it is based on people’s personal experiences and recommendations. It can be a trustful source of information based on word of mouth that can generate the interest that events need to succeed. (Quester 2012 p. 102,103)

Vivid Sydney is a good example of an event that uses social-media as a marketing platform to build brand awareness. They have created a social-media content hub for the event. (Vivid Sydney, 2013). It is built on a website on which people can find all information pertaining to the event and is linked with the most popular choices of social-media such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. These serve as "outposts" to enlarge the most important content and experiences of Vivid Sydney. (Cvent, Social Media Power Plays for Events 2013 p.6).

In the case of Facebook, when a user "Likes" any related material to the event, a connection is created between the persons own Facebook page and the Vivid Sydney page. This exposes many more potential consumers to the event, considering that the total number of Facebook users worldwide is 1.2 billion (Cvent, Event Management 2013 ). Consequently this creates exponential effects for brand strategy by increasing possible attendance and exposing people to information. Additionally, the potential audience can interact in a direct way before, during and after the event, thus changing the dynamic in a positive way and increasing the awareness of the event through word of mouth. By