Sziget organizer widens horizons

While busy organizing nine events in Hungary this year, including the famous Sziget Festival, Sziget Kft recently decided to extend its activity to Romania, co-owner and Managing Director Gábor Takács revealed last week.
In addition, it is seeking ways to better optimize its existing events, and has launched a TV program.
“We saw that in neighboring countries, Romania is the only one where no real festivals are held, so we decided to fill the gap,” Takács said.
Sziget will organize a festival in the Romanian city of Târgu Mures¸ (known in Hungarian as Marosvásárhely) through a company named Sziget Romania, which is being set up with local organizers in Romania. According to Takács, the event will be a five-day festival at three locations, similar to Sziget but with a smaller budget, totaling just Ft 50 million (€200,000). The company expects both Romanian and Hungarian youngsters to visit the event, which is to be held this summer.
“In order to eliminate potential political risks, we agreed with the local organizers that apart from [British pop group] Chumbawamba, half of the bands will come from Hungary and the other half from Romania, and the campaign will be run in both languages,” Takács said.
The company’s biggest event is still the one-week Sziget Festival, which this August is being organized for the 12th time.
Similarly to last year, the budget of the festival will be somewhere between Ft 1.25 billion and Ft 1.45 billion, depending on the final program of the Main Stage, where the fees of bands generally range between €100,000 and €150,000, said Takács. He added that the event has reached a level where organizers cannot provide more new attractions at the festival.

Watching the weather

The company does not currently plan to start any further events in Hungary. Instead, Takács said, the focus is on developing current ones to bring in a predictable income.
“About one-third of all ticket revenues for the Sziget Festival come from weekly passes, and the remainder comes from daily passes, making revenues very sensitive to the weather,” he said. “We are trying to sell more of the weekly passes in advance, because even if the weather is not good, the revenue is guaranteed,” he added.
He complained that last year, rain in the first two days of the festival washed away the profit the company planned to make on the event.
The company does not restrict the promotion of pass sales to Hungary. Together with foreign partners, Sziget is also trying to sell more weekly passes abroad, with the help of promotion campaigns in the music press and commercials on MTV Europe.
“In 2002, we sold about 100 weekly passes in France. That grew to 1,000 last year,” Takács said.
He said most foreign visitors to the Sziget Festival come from Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and countries neighboring Hungary, but the company also has partners in Italy, Finland and the Baltic states.

And the other MTV

In order to fill the gaps between events, Sziget recently started its own program, “Sziget TV,” on public service channel m2, providing 70 minutes of entertainment each night.
“The original idea was to start our own cable TV channel, but the costs and the revenues would be quite far from each other,” Takács explained. “A cable channel in the format and quality we have designed would not earn enough to survive on such a small market.”
He said the program targets a very narrow market, but a very significant one from a cultural point of view.
“We wanted to do something very different from what people get from commercial TV channels. We did not want money to define the program,” he said.
In the current structure, one-third of the program’s costs are covered by the channel’s owner, Hungarian Television Rt (MTV), while Sziget covers the rest by selling commercial airtime. At the beginning, it had to pay costs from its own pocket, but Takács said contracts soon to be signed with two big advertisers, including T-Mobile Hungary Rt, will ease the situation.

A whole archipelago

Despite the company’s main project being a yearly summer event, Takács said its 50 staffers are kept busy all year round organizing the festival and several other events and activities.
These include the Sport Sziget, a sports event, and the Budapest Parádé, a procession of musical floats that attracts more than 500,000 partygoers. For children, there is the Matáv Gyerek Sziget, while the annual Szenvedélyek Napja highlights the dangers of drug addiction.
Furthermore, the company has several other live music events in its portfolio, including the Volt Festival in Sopron and the regular New Year’s Eve festival.
Sziget also publishes alternative music magazine Wan2, operates a portal, sziget.hu, and runs the Kultiplex alternative music and movie club in Budapest.
The main sponsors of the company’s events include Pannon GSM Rt, Dreher Breweries Rt, Philip Morris Hungary Kft, Siemens Mobile, Nokia Hungary Kft, Brau Union Hungária Rt and Pepsi-Cola.

Callow clients

Takács explained that, in exchange for sponsorship fees, the company offers its partners appearances in the events’ publicity campaigns and the chance to promote themselves at the events themselves. Sponsors can also give their names to program locations or organize their own programs.
Among the company’s various events, Takács said his own favorite is the Volt Festival. However, he stressed that the personal taste of the organizers is not the main consideration when inviting bands and performers.
“We are getting older than the target audience, and we cannot organize the festival for ourselves anymore,” he said.
The company received an ISO qualification at the beginning of this year in recognition of its service to audiences, he added.
“Our prime focus is on the visitors. If they are not satisfied, they will stay away, and so will the sponsors,” he said.
Last year, the after-tax result of the company was Ft 36 million, while its net revenue amounted to Ft 2 billion, with the Sziget Festival contributing about Ft 1.25 billion, Takács said.


by Anita Benko

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