The Entertainment
Tips for Choosing the Right Entertainment for Your Venue

Having an ideal location, great food and beverage offerings and the friendliest waitstaff in town can take a bar or club owner a long way toward lasting success in the nightclub and bar trade. Unfortunately, however, service, super cocktails and convenience of locale are not enough to guarantee that a venue will remain popular with patrons in today’s highly competitive nightclub and bar trade. Nowadays, customers want and expect more. In addition to the basic amenities, they want to be entertained in unique ways that go beyond DJs, karaoke or evenlive bands.

Be Different
Choosing the entertainment companies that provide the level of entertainment that customers are looking for today definitely requires some thinking outside the box. For the typical venue owner, it means more than just being different for the sake of being different. More to the point, it means differentiating one’s entertainment roster in ways that customers can relate to and appreciate. As a celebrity booking agent, Mike Esterman with Esterman Entertainment (www.esterman.com) helps venues throughout the country and the world do exactly that –– whether the house is looking to revamp its entire entertainment lineup or just shore up a slow night. “In the celebrity world, with today’s paparazzi, magazines and tabloids, having celebrities and models live and in person at a venue or club has become huge,” Esterman says. Among the celebrity talent that Esterman books on a regular basis are such well-known names as Kevin Federline, Mario Lopez, Carmen Electra and the casts of television’s “Real World” and “Laguna Beach,” among many others. While Esterman can book almost anyone being sought by a venue for a price that ranges from $500 for a fashion model to perhaps $100,000 for a one-night appearance by a celebrity as high-profile as Paris Hilton, he says he relies heavily on the judgment of the owner/operator in determining the right fit for a given venue. “Ultimately, it has to be the venues’ know-how in their own marketing strategies,” Esterman says. “I could try to sell them every song and dance that I think would do great in Fargo, N.D., but the club owner may never have heard of that guy, and the same may be true of his clientele.” The results of matching the right celebrity to the right club can be lucrative indeed for a club, Esterman says, noting that he has booked star celebrities for venues as remote as Dubai and Australia. He says the best advice he can offer a club owner looking to branch out and bring a celebrity into his or her club for a live appearance is to be careful with whom you deal from an agent standpoint. “When you go to buy talent, don’t listen to just talk from a company,” Esterman says. “They may claim to represent people that they really don’t deal with directly. Therefore, those agents are what we call middle agents in the industry, and they work through bigger companies like ours.” Esterman says he spends a great deal of time fixing problems that so-called agents create for well-intentioned owners. “With a little bit of research, you can then find legitimate sources.”

The Last Laugh
As with any brand and flavor of distraction served up to the general public, entertainment can be cyclical. Therefore, it is incumbent upon a club owner and operator not only to understand the preferences of his or her clientele, but to put it in the context of the times. Catering to the mood swings of nightclub goers in contemporary times has been instrumental to the success of Charter Talent, an agency which currently books comedians in 200 bar and club venues throughout the country. “Our business has really expanded in the last two years,” Founder Bill Green says. “I don’t know if it’s the economy and everyone wants to laugh or what.” As with Esterman Entertainment’s celebrity bookings, Green says that the club owners’ judgment weighs heavily in deciding the kind of comedian who will work in a given venue. “You certainly don’t want to book a blue-collar comedy act in a hip-hop club,” he says. Moreover, Green says a venue must have the right setup to start with in order to cash in on the trend toward comedy and comedy nights in onpremise settings. “You have to have room for everyone to sit down,” he says. Beyond these requisites, however, Green says his specialty of helping venues host successful comedy nights with nationally known comedy acts — some as huge as Ron White and Jim Gaffigan — has proven to be the revenue-ready answer for the more than 200 clubs who rely on his entertainment services on a regular basis. For the average comedy booking at a club, which runs approximately $450 to $600 for an opening act and a headliner, Green says club owners can charge $10 at the door. And with just 100 patrons, the house doubles its money just on the door revenue alone. Then there is the profit from the 2-3 drinks each guests orders, as well as dinner, if applicable. “Of those 100 people,” Green says, “Fifty will likely be new people who are going to come back again for other nights at your venue.” “It sets the nightclub apart as far as entertainment,” Green says, adding that many of his regular clients choose to book comedians through his LaffsExpress.com comedy club franchise. “By having the Laffs Express comedy logo inside a club each week, customers come to think of the entertainment as better quality,” Green says. And there are promotional advantages as well, he says. “We do marketing through MySpace and in other ways.”

Playing the Game
Of course, celebrities and live music only work in certain venues to increase the excitement factor. Sports bars looking to take their entertainment level up from just showing sports on television have the option of using interactive games, and as technology progresses, the options get more numerous and more diverse. NTN Buzztime’s ensemble of trivia, sports, card and electronic games offers patrons at thousands of venues throughout the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom the chance to compete for prizes, as well as national recognition. “Restaurants and bars pay a lot to bring in a band or host a one-night event,” says NTN Buzztime Director of Marketing Taryn Weiss. “For the same cost, our games are available from open to close, seven nights a week.” The Carlsbad, Calif., company currently offers more than 30 games geared to a wide audience, including its Texas Hold ‘Em and Blackjack games. And with its newest game launch, Boys and Their Toys, NTN is out to assist venues in drawing younger legal drinking age crowds as well. “Our tagline for Boys and Their Toys is, ‘Stuff that guys gotta know,’ about cars and sports,” Weiss says. “It’s similar to what you might find in Maxim.”