Inside Bonnaroo: The Voice of a Project Manager

Bonnaroo is one the largest music festivals in the world, on an annual basis it draws over 100,000 people to a small town of Manchester, Tennessee.  Each year in the scorching summer heat, hundreds of the biggest bands perform to a variety of people who come for the day or camp all week. With so many bands, and so many people on 700 acres of land, planning is essential, and it takes the whole year to do.

Buzzafied.com interviewed Jeff Cuellar the Director of Marketing and Business Development for Bonnaroo.  Through the 3 part interview done by Walter Weller a University of Tennessee student at the time interning at Buzzafied, we learn a lot about the festival grounds, Cuellars job, and the niche market that Bonnaroo caters to.  Cueller describes his role as one of many hats. Being employed by an entertainment company, Bonnaroo is actually a yearly project for him, and planning and making it a success is done by him and his very large team.  The uniqueness of this project makes his team very diverse, he coordinates not only industry professionals but also local government officials, neighbors, and media personnel.  Although Cuellar does not deal with every single aspect of the festival such as stage plots, line up decisions or vendors, he does manager what happens with the grounds after the festival, drawing in other events and making use of the property gaining it more and more exposure.  His team mainly focuses on the branding of the event to local media, government and to the niche market it attracts. 

With festivals becoming more and more common around the world, we are seeing a higher demand for leaders with project management skills to be commissioned to coordinate these events. Jeff Cueller started out working only seasonally and now manages projects throughout the year to ever evolve the brand that Bonnaroo is quickly creating.

Below are the last 2 parts of the interview with Jeff Cuellar, it has a more in-depth tale of his position, information about the Bonnaroo Festival and some interesting marketing reasons behind who gets picked to play these historic events.

References

Buzzafied.com. (2010, March 15). Jeff Cuellar Interview Part 1 [Video file]. Retrieved from 


     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMxo6z-tcu0

Buzzafied.com. (2010, March 15). Jeff Cuellar Interview Part 2 [Video file]. Retrieved from 

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTT04yXVqFU&feature=related

Buzzafied.com. (2010, March 15). Jeff Cuellar Interview Part 3 [Video file]. Retrieved from 

     http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiDUXkgDj9A&feature=related