How to succesfully produce an event : Case study: Sunset Beach Party 2009 -festival

This thesis studies the production and management of a two day music festival Sunset Beach Party, which was organized for the 20th time in the city of Karkkila on the 17th and 18th of July 2009. The theoretical part of the thesis consists of literature on project and event management and marketing. Jukka Tallgren is the main organizer of the event and the managing director of Ilmiö-tuotanto Ltd. The work conducted by him and the core team members prior, during and after the event is documented in the thesis and compared to the event management theory. Events are highly complex projects with many variants and services provided. An event manager must be able to control the entire project, to delegate and supervise different tasks. Ultimately the event manager is the person responsi-ble for the events success or failure. Sunset Beach Party festival had been organized by Tallgren and the core team in 2007 and 2008 successfully. For the 2009 event Tallgren introduced changes to the venue which proved to be successful and increased income of the event and the event gathered a record amount of customers. However the production team also met difficulties in the building stage of the event that were caused by carelessness and caused unexpected expenses for the festival. These problems could have been avoided with better planning and leadership. Marketing is a crucial part of organizing a festival, due to the competitive situa-tion and a large variety of summer events for the consumers to choose from. Sunset Beach Party has a long history and a loyal customer base. These facts have been the keys to its success. However marketing is still important for the event and this is why it is also considered in this thesis. It can be clearly seen that an event is a project that is managed by the producer or event manager and methods used in project management can and should be used in event production. These methods help the event manager to control the events production and gives direct guidelines for the production team to follow