HE CREATED THE LARGEST TOURING MUSIC FESTIVAL

0:00Adam Lynn: Ladies and gentlemen, you're listening to the last advertising podcast of all time. This is it, our last conversation. It's all done until probably next week. So enjoy this guest.

0:14Adam Lynn: Adam Lynn, welcome to the last advertising podcast ever. And thank God too, until maybe next week. How are you doing today, sir? I'm doing great. Friday afternoon, it's raining in Charlotte, North Carolina. So this is a very exciting activity for me. For sure, for sure. You're the CEO of Breakaway Music Festival, so different from our usual advertising conversations, but maybe there's going to be some connections, if you will, some through lines here. So first and foremost, Adam, tell me about you and your role at Breakaway. Yeah, so we started Breakaway over a decade ago, and the concept was pretty simple.

0:59At the time, I was living in Columbus, Ohio, and we wanted to bring awesome experiences to places that weren't getting them. So I'd actually, before Breakaway started, I was bringing DJs to college markets. So I started at the University of Michigan. My first DJ show was Steve Aoki. I brought him to Ann Arbor. I was a senior in college. And then we sold out. He had so much fun that we ended up taking him on a cross-country tour to 16 colleges. Dropped out of school. Aoki tour was successful. Next up was Tiesto, then Avicii, rest in peace, Deadmau5, Skrillex, you name it. But got started real grassroots, college markets, just bringing huge entertainment to these college markets.

1:51And we then translated that on a bigger scale. obviously went from clubs to theaters arenas and did our first breakaway in Ohio and now we've scaled it up we've got 14 of them across the country largest touring festival in the US growing internationally we're adding new genres we have a management a label business and activation company a media arm called breakaway studios so we've come a long way from little college parties in ann arbor but very excited for where we're at and uh yeah the the sky's the limit so

2:32Adam Lynn: what a great brand what a great story what was your what was the wildest college campus that you've been to for for specific concert that you can recall was the craziest one yeah been to a lot of crazy campuses i like to play the geography game with my friends where name that college sound bloomington illinois there's a bloomington indiana there's champagne illinois like i've just been to all these tiny little towns i'll guess well i guess well that's it there's two bloomingtons there's illinois state and yep and then you have bloomington indiana Champaign Urbana you've got you know Pittsburgh you have Mount Pleasant Michigan Kalamazoo State College Penn State ECU and Greenville I mean I could go on and on but I've been to all these small markets so it's funny when you know we've expanded and we're doing stuff in like Barcelona and then we're thinking oh well our next show is actually in Athens Ohio right so it's like international scale, but as small of towns as you can get in America.

3:45To answer your specific question, what is the craziest college town and then the craziest party is Athens, which is Ohio University. Not to be confused with Ohio State. Ohio State is Columbus, where we were started and headquartered. Athens is about an hour and a half, an hour 15, southeast in southeast Ohio, and a really, really small rural town. So when school is in session, the population of Athens goes from about 10 ,000 to 40 ,000. So college kids run that town. And it is insane. And it is a beautiful, great college town, but they know how to party real hard down there. And so we actually got involved in a festival called Number Fest, which actually predated Breakaway, which was a BYOB festival in a cornfield in Athens.

4:45And that was the craziest event we've ever been a part of. We were, when Breakaway got involved, we took away the BYOB. So we became the bad guys because we came in and we were like, all right, this is an awesome event. There's 25 ,000 college kids showing up to this festival in the middle of a cornfield. But we can't make this a BYOB party. So Brinkway came in. We set up real bars. We no longer let kids bring kegs into the middle of a field. Oh, come on, Adam. That did not go over super well. I know. By the way, you know, that wasn't fully my decision, but ultimately ended up being the right decision.

5:30We brought Kendrick Lamar there. We brought Wiz Khalifa. We brought the Chainsmokers to this tiny little town. We brought Migos. But that ended up actually being really like the launching point that gave us the concept behind Breakaway, which then went to the big city of Columbus, which obviously now is in 14 cities across America. So that's a long-winded answer. Athens, Ohio is champion for the craziest college town.

6:00Adam Lynn: I love that. Now, okay, there's to our list, our usual listeners are usually listening to chief creative officers at ad agencies, or sometimes CMOs at brands like a Dove, or I don't know, like, like, maybe a VP of marketing at Facebook, let's say. So this is not as interesting. This is interesting conversation, Adam. And I can, I, there's so many ways I can take this, but I think what I'm noticing already is the clear kind of brand promise in the name, how thoughtful it is and like how clean and clear the offering is. It makes so much sense. How did you come up with the concept originally when you were young?

6:44Adam Lynn: I believe you said you were still in school. You were a senior in Michigan. You dropped out. What were you thinking? Like, how did this idea hit your brain? Yeah, so there was a company that predated Breakaway. So Breakaway was birthed as the festival concept. But the original business was called Social Studies, actually. So I thought it was this fun little play on, you know, I was in college throwing parties and social studying. So at the time, I thought that name was genius. but the original name breakaway had to do with the first location that we did breakaway was was a soccer field so we did it at the columbus crew soccer stadium which is like right in the heart of the city and we did it on the field and so i was looking for a word that like had some sort of music inclination to it but also maybe there was a tie-in to soccer because at the time the MLS was was really excited about maybe trying this in a few other soccer stadiums and so I remember I had a like massive list on a whiteboard and we were just going through like soccer terms and and and breakaway was there and Instagram was still pretty new at the time this is a decade ago and so we're able to get the Instagram handle which to me was like Like we have Instagram, we've got a brand, right?

8:24And so Breakaway was born from that, from really just being a word that resonated between soccer and music. And, you know, we rolled it out in Michigan and North Carolina and Nashville. And in 2020, COVID hit. And so obviously I did not do any Breakaways in the middle of COVID. What we ended up doing were driving concerts and digital festivals. And so when Breakaway came back, and we were actually the first festival to return post-COVID, being such a small, nimble company as opposed to Live Nation, AEG, the much bigger organizations, we were able to pivot so quickly. The second the vaccines came out in 2021, and they said outdoor events are now allowed, you know you weren't gonna have these huge festivals like lalapalooza and coachella and whatnot but we were like screw we got we got to go for this thing and so we ended up doing three festivals in 2021 they all sold out but it was sort of the resurgence of breakaway coming out of covid and then it it took on this like new name right like breakaway everyone was like ready to break out of their house from COVID.

9:44And we sort of resettled into that, the second generation of the brand, which was, you know, like on the back of our hoodies, it says, leave it all behind, right? Break away from the bullshit. Like it says that on our stuff. So we've sort of taken on this new iteration of what Breakaway is and an opportunity to come to a two-day festival in your backyard and escape for a weekend and have this amazing experience that is affordable, is accessible to you via, you know, a 10-minute Uber. That's a big thing for us is, you know, you have these festivals like Coachella and Bonnaroo, et cetera, that are amazing events, but it's like to get to Coachella, you got to get on an airplane, you got to get a crazy hotel, very expensive festival ticket.

10:38We want to bring that experience to your bag yard in these smaller markets and then make it our cheap ticket price and also just easy to get to, easy to get in and out of. And so, yeah. So now we are Breakaway 2.0.

10:56Adam Lynn: And this is marketing conversation. Like you're talking about pricing, you're talking about like location, distribution, like how all of that plays so much into the brand this is all marketing conversation also allowing for the brand to evolve naturally without completely overhauling it and kind of listening to the market and what the audience needs at that moment i think is a really great lesson for everybody here my question now though what was the breakaway breakaway moment what was the breakaways breakaway moment that you were like okay this thing is legit like i like Like, sometimes entrepreneurs like you and I will still take a chance no matter what, but you'll realize there's this pivotal moment.

11:40Adam Lynn: What was that for you? Yeah, so we had our pre-COVID moment, right? So in 2019, we had got into what I would call critical mass. So started in 16 in one market, two markets in 17, 18 was three. By 2019, we were four cities. and if you look at the grand scheme of what was out there, Lollapalooza sold to Live Nation, Bonnaroo sold to Live Nation, EDC sold to Live. So like all these brands had already been consolidated and boom, here we are, basically the largest independent. And so in 2020, we had actually, we launched California and Washington, D.C. So we expanded it up to six markets. And so we were just like on critical mass.

12:32So it was going to go four, six, 10, and just like rocket power. And then, you know, I'll never forget, we announced our dates for 2020 in February. So we put all the dates out, all the new cities. So, you know, you can flashback and see the 2020 announcement. And then two months later, actually six weeks later, there's a COVID outbreak and I have to cancel all those festivals. So, I mean, that was a major bummer, obviously, as an entrepreneur who had worked so hard to get my business to the point where we were scaling at that level. you know and I had huge companies trying to acquire us and we were like we're not for sale we're growing this thing we want to stay independent and then basically became illegal to do what what our business had set out to do so so that was that was the first run 2021 we bring it back everything sells out right so it's just like People could not wait to go to concerts.

13:42And so we actually rode that momentum into 2022. And I mentioned we had gotten a few offers around acquisition. So I decided that we weren't ready to sell. But to get to major scale very quickly, we were really interested in bringing in financing. So we actually closed our Series A in 2022, led by a group called RSC. And RSC led it and we brought in a lot of strategic investors. That same year, I won Goldman Sachs top, actually most intriguing entrepreneurs award. And, you know, so it just kind of gave us like critical mass. And then from there, which was November of 22, that's when things like really took off because then we had, you know, some real financing behind the business, a bunch of brand momentum, but then the ability to go grow and scale and hire, you know, because I was still running, you know, those three festivals in 2021 on a skeleton team on like 10 people.

14:57right so now I'm close to 70 employees with breakaway so the the amount that we're able to grow and scale um and the value of the product like our festivals are just so much better because we're able to have the headcount to support and and put out an amazing product for our fans

15:19Adam Lynn: yeah you know I'm I'm it's so fascinating to me like the obviously the series a and like when to sell that's an entrepreneur's podcast but what i think what people need to know now is like what are the basics that you've learned in in terms of marketing and event marketing like now looking back if you wanted to launch a new city let's say what would be like the step step-by-step process very loosely speaking like a b c d e of launching a new breakaway and let's say a new city in the US. Yeah, I think for us, it's, it's identifying the market availability, right? Like, I think, consider us almost like, you know, a franchise, right?

16:04If you're Barry's boot camp, you want to analyze and make sure there's not an orange theory or whatever the comparison would be. So we're, we do a lot of research on each market and just make sure we're not going head to head. like I'm not going to go to Chicago and go compete with Lollapalooza, right? That's a crazy idea. But, you know, finding markets similar to Columbus and Charlotte and these non-primary cities that have built up to man, like Minneapolis is one of our strongest markets. And that's a huge city. And it's just, you know, no one had brought any experience like this to that market.

16:44so I think doing a lot of market research is important and we always talk to agents and managers and just using the internet and seeing what's out there I think for us from a marketing standpoint one thing that's always set apart breakaway is that we're really grassroots with our marketing this isn't a hey let's go run a you know a google and instagram and snapchat and tiktok campaign and call it a day we we go to these cities we set up real relationships with the local nightclubs the restaurants i do a lot of that myself i really enjoy that part of the job going to meet you know who owns the biggest nightclub in charlotte north carolina right and they're very happy to talk to us, right?

17:36Because this isn't New York or LA or Chicago or Miami. So establishing those local relationships so it's an authentic partnership. And so people actually know about Breakaway before it's just a huge announcement. And then I think it's about connecting, again, locally, but with influencers and ambassadors. And so not saying, hey, I want to expand to Tulsa, Oklahoma. I'm just making that up. And I'm going to go run an influencer campaign with an agency from LA that doesn't know the first thing about Tulsa. We send our teams in. They go find, you know, the most influential guys and girls that are maybe in college or they graduated college you get them engaged you get them signed up you get them free merch you know this is right out of like celsius and like that that playbook tinder's run that but but go and find great local ambassadors that want free swag they want free tickets and they become your champions in these markets and so if you if If you add up all 14 markets that we're in, we have like 5 ,000 kids that work for us, that have a Breakaway t-shirt, that have a hat like I'm wearing, that are proud to wear it.

19:02One of my favorite things is we have a group chat. It's called Breakaway in the Wild. And so like all the executives at Breakaway, if we just are at the airport or at the grocery store and we just see someone wearing Breakaway, we always snap it and we share it in the group. and that's the coolest feeling like I created a brand we created a brand that someone went into their closet this morning and they said that's what I want to go wear that's sick

19:35Adam Lynn: that's sick interesting okay so audience analysis market analysis check but I think the interesting thing so going to those established centers of like spheres of influence so that could be like the bars the clubs the the tastemakers and the businesses there and like what will you say to them like if i'm a bar owner in tulsa oklahoma and it's like the poppin bar there like what would you say to me the owner

20:06um well i'd say i'd say uh i hope business is good in tulsa um yeah no like like just the the beauty it's like this thing is coming here like yeah so what what what's changed over time is i used to like we expanded to dallas last year right and so i remember going to dallas and when when i'd get to markets or houston was a new market this year um people now know what breakaway is whereas many years ago i would have to go and i would take like flyers with me and say, hey, this is the event. This is how many people we're bringing to your market. Now, for the most part, that club owner in Tulsa is like, oh, that's so cool.

20:57That breakaway is coming here. So that education piece is no longer like an obstacle for me. But what I would, you know, in general, what we do is we set up ways to integrate them into the festival, right? This, in a city like Tulsa, and again, this is an example. We are not planning on going to Tulsa, Tulsa, Oklahoma next year. Of course, this is a bad conversation. I love Oklahoma. I think, honestly, it's a good market in the future. But, you know, when Breakaway shows up in the town, we are one of the biggest cultural events of the entire year for these small cities. So how do we get you involved, right?

21:41If you're a restaurant owner, can we bring the artist to your restaurant before they come and perform? If you're a nightclub owner, can we host pre-parties, after-parties, ways to really just integrate? You know, I brought up like Orange Theory and Barry's Boot Camp. Last year, we did a partnership with Barry's Boot Camp in every single city that we showed up to. and we'd bring a DJ in and we'd have a Breakaway Barry's workout class. We're doing run clubs in each city. So we show up Saturday mornings after the first night of the festival and we have thousands of kids show up to come run with Breakaway with us and we'll partner with a local run club.

22:26So to me, it's local relationships, but organic relationships too, right? Like this isn't force. This isn't, you know, Adam's the CEO and there's like someone five rungs below him. Like lots of times I make these calls and I'll make the trip. And so, yeah, we build really strong relationships with these communities. and you know it's why for example charlotte north carolina we came here in 2018 and i told you before we started this call we just opened an office here because now i have 10 employees and it's becoming like one of our biggest markets in the country so incredible you know it it's not bring the festival one year and never come back we're looking for markets that we go to and we return every single year.

23:22Adam Lynn: I love it. I love it. For the folks that want to learn more, can they reach out or can they go to, like how can they learn more about Breakaway or if they want to talk with you? Is that a possibility? Because there's probably a lot of college students that are listening too. Yeah, I do a pretty good job. I get a ton of inbound, probably way more than I used to. I do a really good job of responding when people reach out because I remember being in college and reaching out to people and being really disappointed when someone did not respond to me. So as long as it's not like, hey, I want to go DJ your festival because I do get a lot of that.

24:01Yeah, I tend to make the time, although my schedule is super busy. To learn more about Breakaway, breakaway.com. We actually just got that domain. I'm really excited about it. And at Breakaway on Instagram and TikTok. And yeah, feel free to send me a message on Instagram is usually the easiest platform or LinkedIn. And it's just Adam Lynn. And like I said, I remember being in college. I remember being trying to figure out what the hell I wanted to do. And I took a shot on something. And by the way, it was never always, it wasn't always so pretty, right? Obviously, we're in a great position now.

24:45but you know a lot of ups and downs but of course every entrepreneur will will tell you that so

24:53Adam Lynn: you built a beautiful brand that people love they wear in the streets you should be super proud as you know everybody probably talks your ear off and they want a piece of it now but uh thank you for for just giving us a little behind this uh behind the scenes view of how you're running the marketing there so nicely done hall of fame episode thank you