Today we’d like to introduce you to Sharon and Jeff Sperber.
Sharon and Jeff, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
Both my partner Jeff and I got our start in the music industry many moons ago. We are both college radio nerds from the 90s and I worked at the NY version of KROQ, it’s ‘sister station’ WLIR/WDRE. I was Sharon at the Shore and got my start doing beach reports. Later both Jeff and I migrated into the record label world followed by marketing and ad agencies. We have been on both the client and agency side of the experiential marketing, event and promo world for many years. We started Eat|See|Hear in 2012 and we created the entire ESH brand with a focus on providing an amazing customer experience. We wanted to take the things that we enjoyed about going to outdoor screenings and make it even better. Like bringing your dog, screenings in iconic venues, enhancing the experience with sponsor activations and utilizing the absolute best production values possible to create the rare outdoor movie screening experience that looks and sounds as good as an indoor theater – no one in LA was doing that before or since we started.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
If it were easy everybody would do it! It is never a smooth road and every weekend event brings new and unexpected challenges that need to be solved in the moment. The biggest challenge, overall, is creating awareness and growing our audience in the 2nd largest metro area in the country on an extremely limited budget. Making sure that we provide an experience that people want to return to week to week, year to year. Customer service is definitely a challenge to keep up with. Curating a unique line up of food trucks vs choosing the same ones week to week. Finding great local talent to perform for our audience – we have a terrific music scene here in LA and narrowing down the bands is definitely a challenge! Finalizing our schedule and coordinating availability with the venues requires a lot of juggling until we can lock it all in (and sometimes after we THINK we have it all locked in). We also contend with copycat events that on paper may look similar but in practice fall far short of the experience we strive to deliver.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with EAT|SEE|HEAR – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
Jeff and I share the bulk of the workload and we have a support team of specialists in other areas that focus on overseeing the execution of elements such as production, PR etc.
Most proud moment: Having Judd Nelson introduce the Breakfast Club for a 30th anniversary screening- our event was the ONLY one he attended across the country.
What sets us apart:
• Our annual guess the movie schedule contest.
• 100% dog friendly. We walk the walk, talk the talk and bark the bark. Free biscuits at the door. Water bowls around the venue. Poop bags for those emergencies. Dog adoptions. And we’ve donated over $30,000 to NKLA, working towards making LA a No Kill city by the end of this year.
• We differentiate ourselves from other outdoor movie events in the area by having the best production out there. We have the largest inflatable screen on the west coast, standing 3 ½ stories tall with a 52 foot wide image – the entire screen is over 60 feet wide! Our projection is super bright (15-30k lumens) and we have a professional sound engineer mixing the live music vs the film. You also get an amazing line up of live up and comers performing. Chicano Batman, The Orwells, Jaime Wyatt are a few Eat|See|Hear ‘alums’ that are doing really well right now. And lastly, our venues are truly unique. We’re not in just any park or random locale – our venues are iconic. The Autry Museum in Griffith Park, Centennial Square with Pasadena City Hall as the backdrop, the Santa Monica HS Memorial Greek Amphitheater, LA State Historic Park with Downtown LA in view, and this year, inside the Rose Bowl Stadium for one very special event.
Pricing:
- General Admission: $14
- Air New Zealand Fashionably Late: $21
- Kids 12 and under: $8.00
Contact Info:
- Address: 4700 Western Heritage Way
Los Angeles, CA - Website: http://www.eatseehear.com/
- Email: info@eatseehear.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/eatseehear/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EatSeeHear/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/EatSeeHear
Image Credit:
Jeff Urban jurbanphotos.com
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