Locate the idle hour inside an event and build a business in it.

technique — attributed to Brian Feit

At Lollapalooza, Feit and Starr noticed that artists were only onstage for an hour and idle the rest of the day, surrounded by idle press and idle brands. They pitched a lounge across the street from the festival to capture that unclaimed time, and the program grew large enough that the festival itself started asking where the traffic had gone. The insight generalizes past music: any event has stretches of unused attention, and the operator who identifies the gap and claims it before competitors notice owns real estate nobody else was bidding on.

For organizers scanning an existing event for an opening nobody has built on yet.

gap-finding, festival-strategy, positioning, timing