A letter to Michael Rapino at LiveNation

Live Nation is a huge concert promoter. The worlds biggest actually with a reported revenue in 2007 of more than 4 billion dollars. They produce thousands and thousands of events every year all over the world and they are the home to artists such as U2 and Madonna.
Their base station is in glamorous Beverly Hills California but of course they have offices all over the world who act sometimes a bit independently if they happened to be bought up by the giant a few years ago, but they have been forced to report to the big boss in America now.
In countries such as Spain this meant they all of a sudden had to perform well not just in peoples eyes but on paper AND filing as correct as possible tax reports.


A year and a half ago I had an interesting experience with this company. 
I was contracted to do what I do best and what I´ve always done best. Make buzz, create a social media strategy, reach out to new ambassadors and ultimately increase the appearance online. 
This was in Spain ladies and gentlemen, not in Beverly Hills but me being just a bit naive thought that these things would be interesting for the former GAMERCO who had recently turned into "Live Nation".


After 2 weeks I noticed that this wasn't interesting for them at all. Probably they liked saying "we have someone who knows social media" but I wasn't given even 5 minutes per day to do any of these things. I think another reason they hired me was because my boss didn't speak a word of english and every time someone called from another country I had to translate while he was on the speakerphone. 


Now I´m not going to tell you the details of this disgraceful workplace (I hope that word is enough for you to know it wasn't all that cool even though I was backstage with Elton John and Depeche Mode), but needless to say I stayed 2 months and left the company, pretty disappointed.


So I made them a new, better and magical freelance offer, with a 40% lower price than I usually charge just because I really wanted to create something good for them and be able to have them as a reference. 
"Nana carinyo, we will do it ourselves, we will put an intern on it, or someone already overloaded with work who can do this on their free time" was more or less their answer.


What a big misstake. How sorry I felt for these uneducated ignorant people.
But I got over it and 6 months later I gave them some examples of other jobs I had done, I showed them new jaw dropping statistics of peoples behavior online, and offered them to at least consult the intern so they could improve their crappy FB page at least a bit.
No answer.


The company now after 1,5 year has 1300 fans on their FB page. Whohey!
Live Nation America has over 300.000 fans. Live Nation Sweden have a few people exclusively dedicated for this in specific. But Spain, Gamerco? Naaa, they do their thing. As they have always done.
Michael Rapino, CEO of the company. (If you´re still there that is)
You know these things are important, how could the spanish company not spend even 0,1 percent of their budget on Online Business/Marketing and Promo? It still amazes me and it just can not understand it.

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