The Silent Room

“I wanna do things people won’t do, like running ACG events ’cause nobody wants to take the shit. So I think it’s our role to do it and take the shit.”
- Edo

I guess in a way that’s what event management is all about. Creating avenues where people can attend, have fun and celebrate their true selves. I haven’t been in the ACG scene for that long (compared to others), but having been around CF for the past few years, I’ve come to understand what it truly means to be passionate about something.

A lot of the events I’ve ever been to has been about profit. It’s all about working around different ways to generate money. Whether it’s by collecting and selling information (like a certain youth event) or by forcing visitors through a maze of tightly packed vendors (like a certain IT fair) or some other creative means. It’s always been about ‘how much money can we generate by running this event?’

I mean, if you look at it objectively, it makes perfect sense doesn’t it? Imagine if your event is attended by over 80,000 people. What if you made each of them pay a RM1 entrance fee? That’s already RM80,000 in cold, hard cash. On top of that, what if you made each of them fill up a form with all their personal information?

You’d have a database of 80,000 sets of names, personal details (age, gender, location etc.), contact information, and preferences. That kind of information is worth a LOT of money. I can already picture myself selling that information to sponsors, like, say FnB corporations, or telco providers, heck I think even banks would be interested to tap into that massive pool of information.

To put it in perspective, let’s say you spam 80,000 people with emails and SMSes, if you’re lucky, you’d get a 5% response. That’s 4,000 potential customers. Out of those 4,000, maybe another 5% would make a purchase/subscribe, that’s 200 units of sales. That’s practically 0.25%, a logical estimate, no?

Let’s say I am operating a private college, and one student can generate somewhere around RM 50,000 worth of tuition fees for a 3-year course. What if by tapping into that 80,000 names, and I can bring in 200 new students – that’s RM 10 million in gross revenue! That kind of potential isn’t something any business can turn a blind eye to. No, I’m not exaggerating. In fact, I think the numbers I’ve presented here are quite modest.

Mind you, this kind of exploitation (lol, I didn’t think I’d actually use this word) is just ONE way of profiteering from events. There are so many other ways, many of which I have yet to discover.

That’s why it’s truly encouraging for me to see how independent ACG projects are almost always run without a profit motive (and sometimes even running losses!). Yet, whenever third parties show up and attempt to capitalise from that crowd, they’d come up with some half-assed event, or even trick passionate ACG groups into giving them what they want. Heck, I’ve heard stories of how some were outright deceived, and had their entire proposals (even their posters!) stolen right under their noses. Seeing and hearing such things truly disgust me.

All we want to do is to have a special event that celebrates our passion and our spirit. It might sound corny and childish to speak like this, but I believe that sincere like these are ones worth pursuing and fighting for. We just want a nice event where we can all gather and spread the love.

It’s such a shame that spreading our love demands that we spread our wallets out, too.