Kati Eismann, global marketing director at Adam Hall, reflects on her journey from the music industry to professional audio, and shares her insights as to why the brand doesn’t have a competitor, how the company has grown by 10 times in 10 years, why trade shows are like “throwing money out of the window”, why immersive is the future – but why Adam Hall will not be a part of that – and teases a groundbreaking new product that “doesn't exist on Earth yet”.
You have transitioned from the music industry to professional audio and event technology. How did that transition happen, and where did your career start?
It's gone full circle. I started out very early in the music and event technology business. At the age of 14, I was volunteering at a small festival in Germany. It was a music and youth festival that now attracts 30,000 visitors, but back then, it was around 2,000 visitors. I was preparing sandwiches and bratwursts backstage for the artists at that time, so I was caught by the sparkle of the live event technology industry.
I did that for four to five years, and then I started learning something after school which was very boring, but I always remembered that magic of music and live music. I got the offer at the age of 19 to start in a promotion agency; I didn't have a clue what I meant, actually! But nevertheless, I was so curious, so I decided to start there. I started promoting bands during their live tours by calling TV stations and local newspapers to get interviews for them and to promote the tour.
How did you move into working for major labels, and what were your experiences like as everything shifted to digital?
I worked for the three big major labels: Universal, Virgin and Warner Music. I worked for them for almost 10 years as a product manager and later in A&R, so I was always very close to the music industry itself. That was more than 15 years ago. Then the big digitalisation hit the market, and the major labels didn't have an answer. They thought, ‘Oh my God; what can we do to work against it?’, instead of, ‘What can we do with it?’.
It was a bit frustrating being responsible for the signing of artists because behind every artist is a human with a soul and wishes and dreams. All of a sudden, the big major labels were forced to hunt for the big next thing and big next artist, and I wasn't capable of promising them that they would become a big star under our umbrella.
All the old strategies we used to bring artists up do not exist any longer, because it's all data-driven nowadays. You can predict a certain, let's say, fame for an artist, and you can achieve it by buying clicks and really smart digital campaign strategies. But it was high pressure back then because you couldn't predict it.
If a label called me today and said, ‘Do you want to become a marketing director for a record label?’, I would say no, because I would be so afraid of not knowing how to do it nowadays, because it has changed so much. The core mechanics haven't changed. It's just the channels that have changed – and the speed.
I did that for almost 15 years, and by then I had seen a lot. I would never say I have seen everything, but I explored the music industry in the golden times of the ‘90s and ‘00s, so I thought, ‘It's time for something else’. Then I had a short four years in the fashion industry because the strategy behind fashion was quite similar to music at that time.
Of course, I was always very close to music and was always interested in it. The years went on, and I had my own agency where I always had my fingers in the music biz somehow because I brought brands and artists together.