An Open Letter to Tana Mongeau
On June 22, 2018, the world got to bear witness to the colossal failure that was Tanacon. Tanacon was the brainchild of YouTube creator Tana Mongeau, in response to her feeling shunned by the Youtube Creator Convention VidCon. And so, with hurt feelings in hand, she decided to run a competing event. On the same weekend. In the same town. Across the street.
This went about as well as you think it did, though not necessarily for the reasons you might expect. For starters, the venue booked for Tanacon was the Crystal Room at the Anaheim Marriott Suites. They sold 5000 tickets. The Crystal Room holds 1018 people. On top of that, there was no shade provided, no water, the "worth more than the price of the ticket" VIP bag contained condoms and stickers (most of Tana's audience is underage), and the entire convention was basically just a hallway and one room, plus a second room that holds 50 people (booked to 150 or 500 for signings).
Nobody working the event had any idea what they were doing, and so it was hardly a surprise when the Fire Marshalls had to be called to shut the event down. Tana Mongeau claimed that an additional 15,000 people showed up and started rushing the doors, and that prompted her to call the Marshalls, but the reality is that only the people who bought tickets or were waiting in line to buy tickets were there, and the hotel called the Marshalls because when the attendees realized the entire event was bullshit they got so rowdy that hotel staff were locking themselves in rooms afraid for their own safety. Tanacon was not quite Fyre Festival levels of catastrophic, but it was pretty damn close.
In the wake of this all happening, Tana tweeted that she was going to make sure everyone got a refund, and she told people to email her if they needed to talk about travel costs. Having run events myself, and knowing how complicated they are to put together, I decide to send her an email with some general advice for the next time she wants to run an event. With a couple omissions, this is that email:
Hi Tana, or whoever monitors this account,
My name is Chris. I was part of a team that ran an event in Toronto for five years, as well as two years of the event that replaced it when it shut down. Suffice it to say I have some experience with running events.
I'm not going to try to tell you which specific items need work, and I'm not going to give you some sort of checklist to follow. That likely wouldn't be beneficial anyway, since the events that I ran and the event that you want to run are not the same type of event. What I can do, though, is offer some general planning advice, which will help to prevent mistakes like what happened at Tanacon from coming up in the first place.
The first thing I'm going to say is that it takes longer than a month and a half to put on an event. I don't mean an event of the scope of Tanacon, I mean any event. Ours were relatively small, peaking at about 280 people, and even we took eight months to put it all together. One of the reasons for taking so long is so that you can properly vet the people who want to work with you. For instance, had you taken the time to vet Good Times, you would have learned that they have a well documented history of being disorganized, and that the owner Michael Weist has been accused by other creators of sexual assault and scamming them.
Next, logistics is very important. You've said that the event was a failure because 15,000 people showed up all at once, but you have overlooked the fact that you sold 5000 tickets for a venue that only holds 1200. Tanacon was never going to work with those numbers. And since you oversold the venue and people got hurt because of it (sun burns, heatstroke, potential physical injuries from overcrowding, etc), you are now criminally liable for those injuries should anyone decide to press charges.
Taking the time to work out all of the logistics of running an event like this would have prevented every problem you encountered. Before you spend any time buying supplies or advertising, you need to have a long list of everything you might need to get, and several possible suppliers for each of those things so that you can choose the best one. Before you start selling tickets, you need to have every angle covered at least two or three times over, with contingencies in place for if something falls through.
You also need to figure out as many possible scenarios as you can, and have plans in place to handle them. For instance, what do you do if someone is walking around grabbing girls' asses? It's all well and good to say "kick them out," but you need to have a specific procedure in place for how to handle that, and everyone who will be responsible for carrying it out needs to know what it is. You've said repeatedly that the event failed because 15,000 people showed up at once - proper logistics planning would have accounted for that possibility, and had a procedure in place to deal with it.
I've read that people were walking up to the registration desk, just saying who they had a M&G with without having to provide any proof, and getting a pass for it. Better logistics planning would have required attendees to provide proof of who they have a M&G with before getting the ticket. And on and on it goes.
All of these problems would have been avoided or minimized with proper planning. You prepare for everything, and then hope that you don't have to act on any of it. And you do not, under any circumstances, hold a competing event across the street from another, well established event, at the same time. Whoever told you that was a good idea should be fired.
Basically, Tanacon did not fail because 15,000 people all showed up at once. That is a dodge and a weak excuse. Tanacon failed because it was poorly planned and executed, at every level. It was thrown together without enough time to organize anything, it was oversold by more than 4x capacity, and nobody working the event had any idea what they were doing. I know that you had the best intentions when you started this event, but as the saying goes, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." I know that you really wanted everyone to have a good time, but merely wishing it does not make it so.
There's a reason Rooster Teeth only wanted 200 people at the first RTX: it's because they knew that events are hard to organize, and they wanted to start small so that they could learn what they were doing first. When they put their tickets up for sale, the ticketing system didn't turn off fast enough, and they oversold to 515 within two minutes. However, since they were selling these tickets several months before the event, they had enough time to adjust their plans to accommodate the extra people - another reason not to try to do something like this in a month and a half.
When you've never done something before, start small, so that you can learn the things you need to know before it gets to the point of what Tanacon became. There are things you can do impulsively, but as I think you've learned this weekend, organizing and running an event is not one of them.
Please understand that I am not trying to criticize you here - my goal is to provide guidance for the next time you try to do something of this scope. There are things that are impossible to know unless you've either gone through it, or someone who's been there before you tells you about them. I hope this email helps for your future endeavours.
Cheers,
Chris