Noche Neon: The 2,700-Guest Gamble

What do you do when your "Super Bowl" event for 1,000 guests suddenly balloons to 2,700 RSVPs just two weeks before showtime—and then a global tech outage hits? In this live-recorded episode from the TruNorth Presents: The Business of Experiential event in New York City, host Rick Kiley sits down with Marie Christofferson (Experiential Marketing Lead, Campari Group) and Jeannie Veneri (SVP of Client Services, SoHo Experiential) to recount the chaotic production of Noche Neon. This massive event celebrated the 25th anniversary of Espolón Tequila during the legendary Tales of the Cocktail festival in New Orleans. The team faced a "comedy of errors" that would break most producers: a 3x surge in attendance, the infamous 2024 CrowdStrike travel outage that stranded key staff, a DJ testing positive for COVID on event morning, and a centerpiece neon backdrop that arrived in plain black and white. Hear the incredible story of how the crew "acted like ducks"—calm on the surface while paddling furiously underneath—to solve every crisis, from hand-coloring a massive scenic wall with Sharpies to turning a production assistant into the night's headlining DJ.