It’s a long time since Becky Dillon was a kid running around the pubs of Leitrim and Carlow on Sunday afternoons when her only involvement in music was ignoring it. Her parents liked to participate in music sessions, which Dillon says “would go on for hours” while Becky and her cousins guzzled TK Lemonade and Tayto crisps and ran around the place.
Dillon didn’t have the patience for singing or playing an instrument back then. But years later, she knew it was music she wanted to work in. Dillon took a HDip in Public Relations and Event Management at Dublin’s Fitzwilliam Institute, eying up a work experience with MCD Productions that would potentially come at the end of it.
She was proactive about securing the placement. She wrote a letter to MCD’s Justin Green and when 80 per cent of her course went for an interview with the promoter shortly afterwards, it was her initiative that was rewarded. Her lecturer at the time told her she got the job because of her “gritty personality,” which Dillon now recognises as a compliment.
If grit equals determination, then Dillon has it in spades. Now living in New York, Dillion is the senior director of media and sponsorship with one of the biggest promoters in the world, Live Nation.
London calling
After a period of working in production, as a talent booking assistant and brand activation for Live Nation in London in 2008 (at events and festivals such as Hard Rock Calling, Download Festival, T In The Park and Latitude Festival), Dillon project-managed 66 gigs – featuring Dizzee Rascal, The Wanted, Mark Ronson, Katy B among others – in 66 UK towns, based around the Olympic Torch relay circuit in the lead-up to the 2011 games for a company called FRUKT.
“I managed all the artist relationships so I coined a role for myself doing talent booking and experiential, and that lead to becoming the expert in that for the company,” she recalls.
FRUKT asked her to help open its New York office, which is how she ended up producing branded events with Pharrell and Justin Timberlake performing. Dillon’s gritty persona found a gritty start in a one-room bedsit in the Lower East Side when she first moved in 2013. “It didn’t have a cooker, it just had a toaster. but it had big windows and a fire escape,” she says. “It was so expensive but I loved it all the same as it was so New York. My parents came over and were mortified. They were worried for a while.”
With Live Nation, Dillon is the person overseeing the production and liaising with the client, the creative team, the production team, the artist team, the planning department. A lot of her work involves pitching to potential clients and managing existing client relationships, with the likes of Budweiser, Jaegermeister and Skype.
Brand sponsorship in music is nothing new but Dillon says brands come to Live Nation because of the assets the company has. While Live Nation has invested in the 3Arena and Festival Republic (with partner MCD) in the Irish market, Live Nation is a brand in itself in the US, which has built its own ecosystem around live music events: ownership of ticket agent Ticketmaster, venues, festivals, concert production, tours, merchandising, websites like Setlist.FM, artist management and recording deals with Madonna, U2 and Jay Z.
When you consider the data collection generated across these businesses with very different audiences and ages, from pop to EDM to country to indie to rap, then it’s easy to see that brands want to work with Live Nation.
“We can help target who they want to advertise to. That’s invaluable to any brand who wants to work in live music.”
Audience-behaviour data
Live Nation's approach is helped by the difference in laws around marketing and data collection - US law has an opt-out clause where Europe has an opt-in clause.
“We’re able to know that I bought a ticket for a country festival and I also bought one for the xx show,” says Dillon. “Where I bought it and how frequent I buy tickets, what genres I like. And then, on site at festivals, we can tell if we’re using RFID wristbands, what areas people visited, what they bought, how many visited the merch stand, what brand activations they went to and how long they spent there. We take all this data and we make insights that tell us about our ticketholders. That tells us what the people that go to our festivals are like. We can then make a plan about how to market to these people for brands.
“Brands have the opportunity to solve pain points for people. People appreciate free bottled water, wifi, free stuff, bandanas to keep away the dust in the desert at Coachella, transport like free pedicab or taxi rides, and everyone loves free food.”
And in the current political climate, brands “will have to care more about what’s going on to help solve specific problems. That will resonate more with the younger generation. Brand managers are younger now. They want to make changes and they want to be more socially responsible as opposed to just selling to consumers.”
Secondary ticketing
Live Nation also owns Seatwave, the organisation that has come under fire recently for exorbitant resale prices on U2's upcoming Croke Park gig. It's the same in the US, where a lack of regulation enables ticketing companies to sell tickets direct to the secondary-ticket market and sell those tickets on for high prices. Everyone wins except the fans.
Dillon acknowledges the problem of secondary ticketing. “I think it has been a problem for consumers and fans. It’s something that’s been looked at the moment. I think there will be changes this year. I don’t know too much about it, but I’m not close to the actual ticket sales part of the business.”
Day-to-day
In her role, Dillon has a lot of late nights, and is often in the office until 11pm, working on pitches and planning. When she has events on, that often means a lot of travel. Last summer, a project for Bud Light featured 13 shows in 13 cities with a lot of planning, travelling and set-ups to do around the shows.
Despite long hours and being away from home a lot, Dillon displays clear enthusiasm for her work and plans to stay in the U.S for the foreseeable future, though she admits, Trump’s border policies are a concern, even to an Irish immigrant on a working visa. She worries it will be more difficult to secure in future.
“It’s making a lot of people nervous. Then again, if I came back to the UK to work, with Brexit, I might end up needing a visa there now too.”
