Lance Fensterman - Pop culture fanatic

In this episode, YS Chi speaks to Lance Fensterman, pop culture fanatic, entrepreneur and global head of Reed POP.

ReedPOP celebrates pop culture around the world and runs events like New York Comic Con, EGX Berlin, the Minecraft Festival and the Star Wars Celebration to name just a few.  As a leader in an affected industry, YS asks Lance about the challenges of navigating change and unfamiliarity and finding the right balance between passion and calm. Lance shares his insights into creating community engagement and existential experiences in a digital world and his prediction for the events industry post Covid.

This podcast is brought to you by RELX.

Transcript

YS Chi: 0:00

The unique contributions podcast is brought to you by RELX. Find out more about us by visiting RELX.com.

Lance Fensterman: 0:07

What I know is that when our events come back, when ReedPOP events come back, they will come back, like bigger, the scale will come faster, the embrace and the passion for them will scale much more quickly. Because that's what we do.

YS Chi: 0:41

Hello, and welcome to unique contributions a RELX Podcast, where we bring you closer to some of the most interesting people from around our business, who are working on industry shaping issues that matter. We explore how they and we collectively as a firm create positive impact on society through our knowledge, resources and skills. This is what we call our unique contributions. Our society is facing real challenges. Our way of life as we previously knew it is currently being hampered by global pandemic. Daily transactions and business activities are moving online where fraud is on the rise. Healthcare is under scrutiny like never before and injustices are grabbing the headlines. I'll be exploring these big issues and diving deep into conversations with some of my friends and colleagues who are at the forefront of these issues. I'll be pushing them for answers and exploring the stories that have brought them to where they are today. And this week, I'm delighted to be joined by Lance Fensterman, who is the Global Head of ReedPOP at Reed Exhibitions. ReedPOP is all about celebrating pop culture around the world. It runs events like New York Comic Con, EGX Berlin, the Minecraft festival, and the Star Wars Celebration to name just a few. Obviously, face to face events have been deeply impacted in 2020, and created real challenges. And in this episode, we'll be hearing about both Lance's personal journey from .com to publisher to pop culture fanatic, and how he's addressing these Covid challenges and how he continues to bring communities together in the face of adversity. Hi, Lance, thanks for joining us. How have you been holding up these days?

Lance Fensterman: 2:25

YS it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you. I think I've been holding up as well as anyone. So you say fine is the new great, I suppose. Right?

YS Chi: 2:36

I would agree with that. Well I've known you for some time. And our path in the past had several common touch points. But I have to say your personal journey is surely one of the more unconventional ones that I know. Can you share with us a little bit about how you went from being a fresh college graduate in the .com business to eventually making your way into this exhibition sphere? What pushed you or drew you into all these different directions? And how do you how did you finally ultimately find the way to be with us?

Lance Fensterman: 3:10

Yeah, I love the term unconventional, it's a nice way of saying weird and I'm very okay with weird, I embrace my weirdness. And one may say, I've made a good career off of my weirdness. But I'll give you the brief version. I was more of a college interloper than a graduate, I would say I spent some time on college campuses, there were even some credits that I might have accrued along the way. But ultimately, I was more interested in building things and doing things than talking about them. And that led me to becoming a bit of an entrepreneur and creating a .com business in a mid sized town in the middle of America, that ultimately became, I had of vision for this cool marketing hub. And it became an alternative news source so suddenly I'm a journalist that is writing to attract eyeballs to then build into marketing and monetize it. And it was a wild journey. When I was a really young guy in I guess, gosh, it was the late 90s at that point, because I'm not a young guy anymore. On that same weird journey. I ended up buying a restaurant and running a restaurant, I'd never worked in a restaurant. Then I sold it all and I started running independent bookstores, in the Midwest and Minnesota where I'm from, which I loved. I then really kind of built up a strong community in that world and parlayed it into a bigger job on the east coast. So as a Midwestern in America, you look at you know, New York and say, Man, that's it. That's that's the mecca of media and publishing. So I started running bookstores in the East Coast thinking I'd go into your one of your professions which is the publishing world. And instead along the way, a buddy of mine that worked for a major publisher said, you know, the company that runs Book Expo America, which is the big trade show for publishing - that company, they're, they're looking for somebody to run the trade show. You should you should talk to this person call this person. So I call the individual. And I'm thinking, I've been to two trade shows in my entire life, both of them Book Expo. So I guess I'm uniquely qualified to run that trade show. But otherwise, I know nothing about trade shows, I didn't even know it was an industry or it was a job that you could have but, what the heck, I'll give it a shot, right. I wanted to get into publishing in New York and all of that. So I interviewed at this place called Reed E xhibitions. And it was to run the big publishing trade show. And you say it was unconventional? I thought it was unconventional, because I think they made me interview about 12 times just looking for me to slip up. And I was so ignorant. I remember asking in my first few interviews, what I would do for the rest of the year, right? Tradeshows, three days, is it a seasonal job, or how does this work? And they kept assuring me I would be quite busy the rest of the year. Also really, I somehow talked my way in or didn't talk my way out of the job. And they hired me to run book Expo America. And that's my, that's my, let me see here, two minute version, of my professional background?

YS Chi: 6:29

You know. It's a wonderful lesson for young people these days. To be so open minded as you are. Was it your upbringing? Or was it some magical person in your life that that gave you that courage to be so called? unconventional?

Lance Fensterman: 6:46

You know, that's, that's a really awesome question, actually. Cuz you think about it, and the people that have affected your life, right. And sometimes it's timing, the right person at the right time. Sometimes it's just an amazingly charismatic person. But ultimately, I think it was, it was, I think a lot about my, my grandmother, who was a working class woman worked her entire life selling shoes. And she taught me early on that as long as you're close to your customers, right, the rest works itself out. And I've always kind of thought that and I of course, wasn't thinking that in, you know, 12th grade when I was a terrible student, or when I was flirting with college, but not attending it. But throughout the rest of my life, I always kind of was taught, you know, hard work, be yourself. And if you're close to the people that matter most in your business, which are your customers, typically things tend to go okay. And the last lesson, I think I learned, I think, is enthusiasm, enthusiasm, and passion, usually is going to win. And as I started working for Reed, and I'm sure we'll get into that in a minute. I travelled a lot. And I'd never travelled internationally. And I'm now doing M&A deals in China, and I don't speak the language. And I realised that, you know, enthusiasm translates, you know, smile, translate, passion, translates and energy translates. And it's really aided me my entire life, which has given me I think, that ability to just say, why not? Let's try, why not? Let's try and always thought, like, for me, confidence has been the lack of believing I couldn't, you know what I mean? Some people think confidence is like I can do anything. And my confidence has always been, well, maybe I can, why not? Why couldn't I? Let's try that. That's what I think kind of helped me along the way, even though my path is unconventional.

YS Chi: 8:44

Yeah, but I think that a series of unconventional paths that you have taken, have given you certain skill set. I mean, whether it's running a restaurant or being a journalist, or running an independent bookstore, you're talking about running things, right. And there must have been tremendous learning curves in that.

Lance Fensterman: 9:03

Ah, yes, it's a learning curve

YS Chi: 9:06

Including failures!

Lance Fensterman: 9:07

Yeah, I was gonna say learning curve is another way of saying mistakes and failure. And when when you when you don't do things the way you're supposed to, you know, picture air quotes when I say supposed to, you, you tend to then get very comfortable with the idea of mistakes and failure as well. And I think that's what happened along the way. Right? And I've never been afraid of that because why not? My my pathway isn't pristine to begin with my pedigree is not unrivalled. And I'm just a guy who's enthusiastic and willing to try things. Therefore you are very comfortable with a mistake and learning from it. And then kind of quickly adjusting, picking up trying something different trying it again, I think that comes from I hope, a place that sort of enthusiasm and not being too precious with yourself not wanting to not wanting to worry about getting a little dirty or falling down or making a mistake, for sure. So yes, there has been a learning curve.

YS Chi: 10:06

Well, I guess you're saying it's almost better that you start from a low point. So you can travel up high. I mean, I completely relate to you Lance because I feel like you're describing part of my life too. But this is not about me. So, it's always interesting to hear other people's stories. And one thing that I always say is that it's pretty much impossible to predict where people end up right, in three, 5, 10 or 25 years. And career pivots are so common these days. And it's important to try to keep learning and adapting to new experiences. In fact, if I remember correctly, one of your first events with us was the inaugural New York Comic Con. And that didn't exactly pan out according to your original plan, did it there? What happened? And what are the most important things you've personally taken from that, to help you now lead the ReedPOP entity altogether?

Lance Fensterman: 10:59

Totally. I'll keep using your language, there was a learning curve involved there. So New York Comic Con was was launched as an idea that was looking at Book Expo America, the show I described to you the trade show, and you know, not a lot of growth in the publishing traditional publishing world. But a couple of segments were growing, and it was graphic novels, and manga, which are Japanese comics, basically. So started digging and said, Well, why, and really just looked at a very successful show in San Diego called San Diego Comic Con, and wonder why there wasn't one of those in New York? The answer was, it's really expensive to run shows in New York, it's hard to build big things, you know, all the reasons, we know that, you know, scale is tough to achieve without a big a big lever. Well Reed is a big lever. We were able to then use that leverage to launch something of scale, in New York called New York Comic Con. And the first edition, keep in mind now, Reed is a trade show company. And we run business to business events, we offer, you know, solutions for business owners, we bring buyers and sellers together, we provide professional education, it's all quite suit and tie and tidy. It's 2005, when people are still wearing suits and ties to work, people are still going to work in 2005. So there wasn't a lot of experience with dealing with huge crowds, you know, fan events, consumer events, live events as entertainment as opposed to business solutions. So the launch went quite well. And we were expecting somewhere between seven and 10,000 people, and we thought we were prepared. In the end, some 15 or 18,000, people showed up, we had no idea what crowd management or crowd control was, people that bought tickets couldn't get access to the show. People that didn't buy tickets, did get access to the show, which is if you're keeping score at home, not the exact way you want that to go. And then eventually, the fire marshal really just came in and in put us out of our misery and said, Why don't you just stop? We're gonna make that decision for you. And so the event was actually shut down. And by most accounts, it was a pretty much unmitigated disaster. Except for, you know, you want customers that want your, your product, whatever your product is, and we had found a group of people, a community of passionate people that really wanted what we were doing. We just needed to figure out how to effectively provide it for them. So that was a frightening and a low point. But it was an opportunity point. And so then it became what do we do about it? You know, how do we fix it? How do we endear ourselves to this this newfound passionate community that frankly, we don't know? Right? And I think an interesting point, just thinking about it, at the time in 2005, all of these cool fan conventions, were more under the radar than they are today. They were also all run by fans. So it would be you and me YS we would, you know, love manga and we rent out a hotel ballroom somewhere and, you know, figure out a way to make it happen. Now, suddenly, there, there's a larger entity, big company coming into the space. So we were very cognizant of needing to do this properly. And we certainly were cognizant after that first effort.

YS Chi: 14:45

Yeah, you've scaled it. You've also uh, systematised it so that it can be repeated and grow. Right? So I think that's what's really remarkable is not just that you have the capacity to see around the corner, on something like Comic Con as a concept, but to actually execut it in in a continuous manner. To make it systematic,

Lance Fensterman: 15:08

That that was an absolute learning again, if you think about, you know, entrepreneurs mindset is, you know, build it and grow it, not necessarily sustain it. And and for the first few years we were about growth, what are we building, let's grow, let's buy, let's launch, let's partner up and create JVs, let's do all these exciting things. But then you have to start trying to really wrap your arms around what it is you're building, and how do you make it sustainable, scalable, repeatable? You know, it's one thing when there are eight people, you know, in the company, in all the decisions, it's another one now you've got, you know, 20, and you're not seeing people every day, and then you have 50. Now we have 200, you have to figure out then what we believe in as a brand, what is our cultural values? How do we create something that is sustainable and scalable and repeatable and along the way, yo know, if you're, if you're eeing a theme, it was, I got to earn. So I'd never worked for a corporation. Before I joine Reed and I, I had my scept cism about the corporate world I've now been there for 14 ye rs, because I've gotten to grow, try, learn, be entre reneurial, my job has chang d every day, every month, every year because I've been able o make

YS Chi: 16:33

Yeah. And and has the company as well, the timing of your arrival and the time of the the Reed Exhibition business making the transformation has been just very fortunate together. So we're gonna stay stay with the business side. And we know that obviously, we're facing a global pandemic right now. And times are certainly very taxing, personally, professionally, socially, and so on, you know, Lance, as a leader in rather affected industry, what have you found to be the most challenging to navigate in terms of your teams and employees? And do you see any positives in the near horizon?

Lance Fensterman: 17:10

I'm trying to categorise and rank the challenges right now, because they are numerous, for sure. I think probably the most challenging thing is trying to absolutely radically change what we do quickly, without being able to work in familiar ways. I like change. But you're saying like, okay, we've everything I just described, we built a large, sustainable business that has all sorts of structure. Now rip it up, start over, recreate your value proposition, potentially question who your customers are, change what most of the people in your organisation are doing, determine if they can adapt to that change, right? Do all of this rapidly without ever being in the same room with any of these folks? And, you know, we're event people we like to be together, that's what we do, you know. And so I think it's just the sheer volume of change needed the pace at which it's happening. And the unfamiliar format in which we have to work through all of that has proven to be really a fascinating challenge on good days, and a daunting challenge those difficult days, and then layer on top of it, the need to remain calm, and positive, and enthusiastic and passionate. While you're really having a lot of challenging days. So I think that is you probably asked for one thing I gave you 22. But that's just kind of the way that the mind works these days, I think.

YS Chi: 19:04

Well, that's very well said. But one thing that you said that really kind of triggered my curiosity further is the remaining calm against maintaining the enthusiastic passionate attitude because they can be quite contradictory at times. How are you dealing with that with as far as your people are concerned? How are they taking the cues from you, between the calm and the enthusiastic and passionate?

Lance Fensterman: 19:31

Yeah. I think the calm is reminding people we have a plan. We might be writing it as we're presenting it, but there's a plan. Right? And we're making the next right decision. But reminding people that passion so we're focused, and we're measured, but passion and enthusiasm is what built ReedPOP. It's what got us where we are. So you can take passion and enthusiasm and unchecked it can become panic. But if you're rooted in calm and planful, work the problems, make the next right decision, and then push forward with passion and enthusiasm. Like that is what we are trying to get right. And again, on the good days, you get it right. On the bad days, you know, you're panicked, and downtrodden. And those get to a minimum. But certainly some days are challenging this environment.

YS Chi: 20:33

Yeah, well, it's no secret that most live events around the world have been cancelled or postponed this year. And it seems to be extending perhaps into next year. Right now, I guess we have in person shows slowly, starting in China, Korea, Japan. And I just heard today that Russia and Turkey have also run some shows. But it might be a little while until we see something like that here in the West, where thousands and thousands of people show up under the same roof, and in the same exhibition hall might be permitted. Now, of course, we're lucky to live in a digital world where lots of things have been able to move online. But there's nothing quite like dressing up for an event, lining up and meeting other mutual fans in person. So what are your thoughts on the fan propensity to engage with live shows again? And what have you learned so far, in trying to bridge the experiential gap in a socially distant COVID world?

Lance Fensterman: 21:31

Yeah, well, to sort of define, you know, what we do is, it's shared experience more than anything else. And you know, you can talk about all the facets of our events, but really, it is shared experience, it is coming together with people with similar passions as you and celebrating those passions. It's, I liken it often to going to a sporting event, you can watch the football match, or the soccer match on TV and probably get a better visual of it. But it's not the same as being there when the thing happens, and celebrating it and screaming about it with your fellow fans. And that's what we provide people. So the good news is that, that is still desirous. Our communities and our fans want that shared experience, they miss it the way we miss it. And when we can offer it safely, they want it. So the good news is, our product is paused in the way that we know it, but it's not dead. And that's important. Because you see, there's been things over time that have you know, killed formats of products. And that's not happening here. We see the data. So that's a positive. The challenge, though, is moving things online, it's very difficult to capture that. It also means as we try to move experiences online, you know, being together, being able to, you know, feel something is our differentiating factor. When we move online, we're, we're just another website. And there's a lot of really good pop culture websites out there. So how do we create that differentiation? What do our customers and our fans really need from us? And that's been the interesting challenge to explore. Now, going back about two years ago, two and a half years ago, I guess. I led the acquisition of a network of websites that were based in the UK, that are centred of the video gaming space. The company was called gamer network, they had a couple of events for the video game space. But what they had was 60 million readers and viewers every month that we're going to their websites, and going to their YouTube channels. And that has proven to be very helpful. Because a bunch of us event people sitting around imagining what a digital universe looks like and what fandom wants, and how do we create it and well, we have 100 or so experts sitting in Brighton in the UK that do that all day long. So that's been really helpful to us in terms of taking a show like New York Comic Con, or our big video game show, which is called Pax, and bringing those online. And those digital experts that we have in the UK have been incredibly helpful. And that's been one of the interesting challenges over time. And so how do we bring those teams together? And I think you had asked me, you know, are there actually positives that have come out of these these challenging times? And I didn't really answer it, but the answer is, we're able to do things that we've been wanting to do faster. So we wanted to be more digitally enabled on our live event side, we've wanted to better integrate those content teams into all of our shows, right? We've wanted to become the absolute best online, offline, live, digital pop culture event company, because no one else has that space. But you're bringing two things together to businesses to get the two cultures together, you know, YS you've done this before, that's hard. Yeah, hard. But this situation has necessitated it and made some things faster moving. And that's actually been a positive for making change and sustainable change, not just temporary patchwork.

YS Chi: 25:45

That's right. That's right. Let me just jump right back to PAX. I heard that PAX Online and EGX digital event happened in late September, and that I heard a statistic that it ran over nine days, for 24 hours a day, and reached 12 million unique gaming fans. Tell me, I am very curious how something like that goes.

Lance Fensterman: 26:12

I had the 3am to 4am shift. And so I handled it diligently. No, I'm just kidding. Some years ago, we launched into Australia. And so we have a really awesome team of geeks in Australia. Obviously, I just mentioned our UK folks. And then teams in the US. So it made it really cool. And actually kind of easy in the sense to run 24 hour programming, because you just move from you know, one continent and region to the next, you know, the UK would start the day and us would then take the baton and then we'd hand it off to Australia. And we were able to,

YS Chi: 26:53

hey, Lanza that's starting to sound like a trading desk for foreign exchange or gold.

Lance Fensterman: 27:00

Instead, it was it was geeks on Steam, you know, playing video games together. But I really love like, I love the scope of it. Like that's a cool thing to say, right? It's 24 hours a day, three continents, you know, three time zones or whatever, nine time zones. Awesome. That's really gaudy stuff to talk about. But what was really cool actually was the manner in which the team's really thought about, you know, PAX is about community and a shared experience, but community these these, these gamers like to come together in ways that they don't get to during the year, they'll play together online, they get to actually come together, community share experience. And so how can you move that online, that challenge and the team really figured it out in a lot of ways. And

YS Chi: 27:47

Well maybe you have people like Travis Scott, perform all the time,

Lance Fensterman: 27:52

That that's certainly certainly helps you got it. But I was pleased, the, the numbers that we shared are great numbers. But the fact is, we believe the numbers are even higher, because we were on different platforms, from Discord to Steam, to YouTube, to our own website, to we were streaming on Twitter go across, we were working across I think 11 different platforms, all of whom measure their engagement differently. So we had to come up with some stats that we could share. But actually, I think the engagement we had with our community was significantly higher, because we were offering so many different means to interact with each other with the content with the speakers we did 2000 panels or streams are special events, like there was just so much for people to grab over that week and a half. And it gave the team a feeling of running something. And for people that gravitate towards events. They like that party, they want to build that party and experience that that party. They missed it.

YS Chi: 28:58

Oh Bravo to your team. Bravo to the whole team. Yeah, let's, uh, let's fast forward a little bit, Lance, and look ahead into the post COVID climate. What do you think will change? What do you think will change? What do you think will need to be changed in the exhibition industry? And how do you think ReedPOP is best positioned to come out on top in leading those changes?

Lance Fensterman: 29:28

It's, I was laughing because the idea of looking into the future these days, like I have not planned lunch today, you know, so anything could happen between now in those two hours. So, so this is the toughest question you've asked me but I think it's interesting because I actually think the change is not as dramatic as we think. Meaning we have to make and keep promises to our customers. And that's not actually any different, there's no change there. Right? Our customers, whether they're a big video game company, or a small indie comic publisher, or a fan that dresses up in cosplay, I'm talking about all of our customers. They trust us because we make promises to them and keep them. Right. And we have to continue to do that. But the promises are not different, right? They're around, we always promised a safe event. But now that means something different safe was crowd control safe was, you know, in some of the major cities we work in, safe might have been terrorism, right, we're going to make a safe place for you, or safe could be harassment or bullying. Now, it's about health, we're making a promise of a safe, environment, organised environment, and you're going to trust us to do the things that we said, right. So that's actually no different. We make promises and we have to keep those promises. But that means I talk about all the things we're learning to do. Now we've got to be health experts as well, we've got to understand all of the variables, we have to deliver them to be able to keep the promise of safety and health. So I think that's, that's a change, but not actually a bedrock foundation change. For our business model. The idea of digital is now here to stay, we like, as I told you, we wanted that for years, we wanted to add that component and weren't moving fast enough. So I love the idea that everything we do in the live event space will now have digital platforms, and digital delivery sitting right next to it at every step of the way, constantly, it'll be fully integrated. And that's a big change for us and one that we put on a whiteboard every year. But we we just didn't deliver fast enough, and now we'll be able to. So I think that's really a positive change. I think the last observation I would make is that, you know, I think, for Reed Exhibitions, trade shows will come back faster, you know, in a semblance of what they used to be, than ReedPOP, meaning it's easier to control a business to business environment, than it is our environment. So I think what will happen is, you'll see the trade shows and exhibitions, like you referenced in China, there's events happening in Turkey and South Korea, their business to business events, those will come back first and we'll be able to see our cousins that run those, learn some things about those promises that need to be kept. But what I know is that when our events come back, when ReedPOP events come back, they will come back, like bigger, the scale will come. Embracing the passion for them will scale much more quickly. Because that's what we do.

YS Chi: 32:56

Well listening to you today, two words pop in my mind. experiential community. That's what you've been building, and it's admirable. Now I'm going to completely pivot before we have to go and ask you about your love of Lego. What's the story there?

Lance Fensterman: 33:16

I think that's awesome. As a kid growing up, it was kind of the only toy I ever really wanted. And I think the idea of not having rules continues. I like the idea that sure, I like to follow instructions. And I like order. And I like a plan. So good. I build by the design, I build by the instructions. But once I've done that, I rip it apart, and I can build anything I want, as far as my imagination will take me. And I've always liked that. I like that sort of duality. And I've been able to do that within Reed. If I think about it, right? I work for this big corporation. And there's processes and procedures and there's resources that I got to work within the end of the day, though, once I unlock that side of things, I can build anything I want. And that's exciting to me.

YS Chi: 34:06

Well, your life in private and your life in profession seem to be consistent. Thank you so much Lance for opening up so candidly about your own life experiences. And also for sharing some of your insights with us today about ReedPOP. You have endless topic to get audience engaged. And I'm only sorry that we only have 35 minutes to do this, but hopefully this will trigger other interests. And that's what we want to do. I also want to thank to our listeners for tuning in. Please don't forget to hit subscribe on your podcast app so that you can get new episodes as soon as they're released. And tune in next week for another episode of our Unique Contribution series. Thank you for listening.