You may well remember that, early June this year, we reviewed on NSC the latest entertainment idea by Richard Hawtin and the Minus Crew, the Enter event, which had been planned to happen in Space Ibiza over 12 weeks during the summer season.
Well, we have been following the development of the event over the entire season, and we saw it growing in audience and consideration (if by chance this was even needed) through the extensive usage of Social Networks tools by Rich Hawtin and his Crew, and we finally had the chance to travel down to Ibiza and experience the event ourselves.
Marketing
We think that, before mentioning the details of the party and how we lived it, a special mention should go to the marketing strategy applied to the promotion of the event, which we believe has been absolutely brilliant.
First of all, the communication patterns of the marketing strategy have been some of the most consistent we have ever seen around since a very long time (possibly some big brands should learn from here).
The Enter logo (a nice, rounded black dot) showed up pretty much everywhere in Ibiza and all over the world (this aspect was obviously facilitated by the erratic life of Hawtin himself) in form of flyers, posters, tattoos (anyone, at any Hawtin’s gig, had the logo stamped on the body). We saw it pretty much everywhere (even walking in a supermarket in Italy – which was kind of surprising) and somehow it remembered the success of the Plastikman logo when it was firstly launched in Detroit back in 1993. Something definitively Hawtin holds the secret of…
The black dot even showed up in the very touristic Salinas Beach in Ibiza, where black rounded plunges (which obviously remembered the Enter Logo) held quite a powerful sound system in the water (yes, you red it well, the soundsystem was in the water held by the plunges) with Hawtin himself djing from an iPad…Please watch below to believe.
We also really loved, as mentioned above, the usage Hawtin and his crew have been doing of Social Networks tools. Rich Hawtin seems to be quite experienced in this field, as he continuously keeps his fans (over 600,000 on Facebook only) updated pretty much about any single movement he makes. And so he made about the Enter event. He continuously posted about his experience in Ibiza this year, and he even started a quite a nice series of very short online movies filmed from his villa’s pool (from this the “Enter.Pool Episodes” title), filmed and edited by Barbara Klein and Ali Demirel (video artists permanently part of Hawtin’s crew), in which Hawtin himself interviews the Djs playing during the Enter party, promotes the night and generally talks in first person of how the summer progresses and even shows off some secret places in Ibiza (we lived on the Island for a while and we appreciated the effort of showing how beautiful she – yes she – is).
Another very intelligent marketing approach has surely been the connection made between the event and Ibiza Global Radio. In fact, from 8 to 9 pm on the day of the party, one of the main artists playing during the night was proposing a short radio show. The innovation has surely been that a few very lucky Facebook followers hanging in Ibiza have been invited to be present to the radio show and share some drinks with Hawtin and crew by posting the Enter claim “Take the next step” as comment on Facebook.
The Party
So, let’s come to event itself and how we experienced it.
Hawtin himself claimed the Enter event to be a mix of Music, Sake, Technology and Experience, and he tried to mirror this concept in the design of different areas, each one with a specific type of environment, music and experience connected…
In fact, the night of the party, Space Ibiza is specifically decorated and divided into 5 main areas: Enter.Minus, Enter.Kehakuma. Enter.Sake, Enter.Interakt and Enter.Air.
Let’s start from the beginning thou. We got into Space around 11 o’ clock. By that time Richie Hawtin (he was on this Thursday but Dj changes every week) was holding the pre-party in the Enter.Sake area…
The small sake bar was completely crowded (reduced entry price at 15€ surely helped), so it took a while to realize exactly how the environment was organized. As soon as we could reach the bar, we discovered that it was serving only Sake and Sake’s Cocktails, thing that we found quite original and maybe a little bit out of the focus of the Space crowd, which, as we remembered very well from the past, was mainly composed by cheesy party goers…However the selection of sakes was very clever, with a choice of different tastes for each level (cleverly divided into Entry, Intermediate and Advanced level – which also seemed to be focused to potential returning clients).
It has surely to be noticed that, as trained sake sommelier, Richie Hawtin also presented his own sakes: at entry level, the ENTER SAKE, and the Intermediate “DOT SOOKU, ENTER SPECIAL EDITION”, a sake brewed by certain Fujioka Shuzo in the Kyoto prefecture and which pretends it was the first time has left Japan in his history. Hawtin also filmed an interview with Fujioka Shuzo in his recent visit to Japan, in order to build a proper background for the launch of his version of Sake (another clever marketing idea – information is the core)
The Sake bar also offered a short but very clever selection of sake cocktails, elaborated by 41 Degrees Experience cocktail bar in Barcelona, whose owners, Ferran and Albert Adria’, are very well known for pushing gastronomic boundaries (they are also very famous for their parmesan ice cream).
We tried couple of those, the Fuji and the Minus, and we found them extremely well prepared (the preparation process is quite spectacular, with the usage of vapour and essences), and both gifted by an extremely delicate taste.
By the end of the pre-party, all other areas were opened so we started to walk around and have a look to the different experiences the event could offer.
Walking around we found ourselves in the old Space Terrace, where the Enter.Interakt area was located.
The idea behind this area is extremely impressive and innovative. There are a few installations, whose design remembers a little bit the Life Tree in the Avatar movie, which emanate different lighting and sounds (both sounds and lights are quite “new age” style). The innovative point of the installation is that people can interact (from these the name Enter.Interakt) with the environment through an iOS application called Smudge.
Smudge is a small application developed by another venture launched by Hawtin called Liine (the company mainly develops iOS apps which allow music, lighting and video performance via wireless, OSC and Core Midi protocols, and it is the responsible of successful software like Griid – also used in Plastikman, Bjork and Orbital live shows – as well as the Lemur version for iPad) that, once somebody gets in the Enter.Interakt area, it automatically connects with the main system via Bluetooth and allows the user, using the innovative app interface, to manipulate the sounds and the lighting of the entire area.
We really are good fans of Liine here at NSC (we are music producers and djs and Liine products have quite an important role in our production and performance environments) but, to be completely honest, Smudge and the Enter.Interakt experience have been quite disappointing.
As we said, we are quite experienced in using Liine’s products, however, it took a while before we found our way through the functions of the app (there are some posters with the instructions but they are not very clear). Once we understood how the system worked, we started to play with it but, to be completely honest, the entire experience has been quite disappointing. We repeat, we think that the idea is absolutely great, and it surely is an experiment that needs to be developed and repeated in the future, but for the moment it seems to be something which stays in the field of an idea and we didn’t really find it very rewarding. Also, as per the Sake bar, we think that the experience of Enter.Interakt was a little bit out of the focus of Space clients, who didn’t really seem to be interested by the app modulation possibilities, and were more interested by using the installation for taking pictures…In this sense, if the users has a more rewarding experience through the app, the usage would have probably kicked off more heavily.
After spending a while in the Enter.Interakt areas, we then walked thorugh the other areas of the event. Well, what can we say about Enter.Minus and Enter.Kehakuma. These 2 areas are all about party. Enter.Minus is the main floor, and it surely has a techno focus (that room was held by some techno masters like Christian Smith, Josh Wink, former Grammy award Ali Shirazinia aka Dubfire and Hawtin himself), while Enter.Kehakuma was a little bit more housy, with some ladies dj on as Madga and rising star Nina Kraviz. Music was really good, a little bit commercial but with a hint of experimentation which kept it acceptable to the listening. One good note is surely the original decoration, with big Enter dots covering the ceiling of the club, and most of all the position of the dancers who, dressed in quite sober Japanese suits, danced all night hidden behind big dot shaped curtains.
We instead really loved the Enter.Air area. The music was played by ambient dj Tommy Gronlund, which really fit fine on the rooftop terrace of Space, creating a very relaxing and comfortable vibe (somehow ruined by the excessive wish of protagonism by Space security staff).
Conclusions
We believe that the event is quite nice and very well built. The marketing and promotion strategy has been amazing, connecting guerrilla, social networking, PR, word of mouth and so on in a very clever and effective way. The idea of creating an interactive area is innovative and well thought, although it needs to be developed and brought to a deeper step to be really rewarding and game changing.
However we have seen a few down points about the entire building and implementation of the event.
First of all the location. It is not a secret that we never loved Space Ibiza and this experience didn’t really make us change idea. We come from a strong raving culture, made of freedom and endless open air parties.
Well Space represents one of the reasons why (all together with various Ushuaia, Pacha and so on) the raving culture in Ibiza has been fought and finally (this is how economics works) defeated. We really understand that Mr Hawtin, like some many of his colleagues, needs to make a living from parties, music making and promotion, but he also has got his origins down into the raving culture. Where is the man who started his career organizing endless parties in dark warehouses in Detroit, decorated with just black plastic bags and one strobe light?
We have seen nothing of old raving concepts Hawtin contributed to build. What we have seen is big flashing Space logos pretty much everywhere, and an excessive, heavy and sickening branding which remember us why we always hated this place.
And this brings directly to the second aspect we didn’t like. The entire Enter concept seemed a little bit more niche oriented, more than “cheesy Space party goers oriented”. We would have seen it much better implemented in a smaller place, aiming to some selected people, who could appreciate some of the curious and good details of the concept.
However this is how world is and we don’t think we will be able to change it anyway, so we are in any case pleased that people like Hawtin still pushes over the boundaries of innovation in order to create different new experiences.
Almost forgot. Special thanks to Global Publicity and specifically to Clare Dover, for ignoring our repeated requests of a press pass for the Event. Overall digital Pr approach is surely something which has been completely mismanaged.
Here is a short video recap made by Minus of the party we attended. Enjoy…
