Stockland Martel Blog

 

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Eventbrite, a website and app that help people find and attend events and classes that feed their interests, has just released its first-ever ad campaign, which was shot in classic black & white by Doug Menuez. Below, Doug talks about the making of “It Starts With Yes.”

On New Year’s Eve, around 9 PM, I got a call from Tamara Mendelsohn, VP of marketing, and Erik Gomez, communication designer, of Eventbrite, to ask if I’d be willing to shoot their new advertising campaign, the first ever for their company. They sounded brilliant and deeply passionate about this project and their company, but also clearly crazy to be calling about a major production late on New Year’s—my kind of crazy. It all felt just perfect. I loved these guys immediately.
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The call was not a total surprise, as a few hours earlier I’d gotten a heads-up call from my dear friend Ivy Ross, who leads Google Glass, to say she had recommended me for the campaign. Given the holiday, I truly did not expect to hear more that day but was very grateful for her faith in me. In quickly researching Eventbrite, I learned it had been founded by Julia and Kevin Hartz, a dynamic young couple who bootstrapped it through the early years. Last year, they did something like $1.5 billion, so they are clearly tracking as a Silicon Valley breakout success story. This is actually a rare thing—the vast majority of tech startups fail. Knowing this, I realized how much was at stake for them.

For the ads, they wanted to capture moments of emotion experienced during events that their audience could relate to as authentic. We both felt my background in documentary photography and photojournalism made this project ideal for me to do. I love to bring my real-world experience into commercial projects and collaborate.

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Plus, these guys had the idealism and humanist values I saw in the 1980s during my time shooting Steve Jobs and the great innovators of Silicon Valley (recently published as Fearless Genius). Tamara explained their vision is to use technology to get people off their screens and into the real world. Life is an accumulation of experiences, after all, and Eventbrite’s role is to help make it easy to have them. Very cool.

They further explained that they’d tried using stock for the ads but had decided they just could not find images that conveyed authentic emotion. And they wanted to feature real events that they actually support.

And then they asked if I could start shooting the following week, in San Francisco. That meant I’d have only three or four days to prep. No pressure, right? As someone who spent years winging it for news magazines, I know I can pull of just about anything, anywhere—fly in and make friends, hustle like mad, pull favors, break laws, and get it done. But when you’re working with advertising budgets and with people’s jobs on the line, it’s very different.

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I could have done this guerrilla style, but I felt a greater responsibility given this was their first campaign. Failure was not an option. I also felt a desire to build a relationship and think long term to help evolve the campaign with them over years. So when our call ended, I immediately called veteran producer Darcy Diamond, who instantly agreed to jump in blind.

Next, my agent Tamika Harold at Stockland Martel worked with Alexa Plew at Eventbrite on the budget and deadline. By Monday evening we were full speed ahead, with a week to produce five or more ads. Darcy connected with Alexa and the Eventbrite team to get the production going. The coolest part is that Eventbrite invited their employees to volunteer as talent.

Eventbrite has clearly built strong relationships with their customers, because they generously gave us access to actual events. We shot a sushi-making class, hip-hop dancing and yoga classes, a jazz concert, a lecture, and a fantastic rave scene at a local nightclub.

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It was very cool to be asked by Tamara and Riley Rant, the lead copywriter, to share my thoughts on the picture edit and copy ideas related to emotions and story. Riley was there with us at all hours of the day and night, making sure that they found the perfect words to match my photos, and she was the genius who came up with the copy “It starts with yes.”

After we wrapped at the club on Saturday at around 1:30 a.m, we processed files all night at the hotel while then retouching all through the flight home Sunday, finally delivering all the files Monday as Tamara, Erik, design director Andrew Sandler, and the team wrestled the layouts to the deadline. Whew.

Eventbrite made our experience shooting experiences for them a total joy and a great way to start 2015.

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