MagicCafé Productions Closed the biggest deal ever

MagicCafé Productions Closed the biggest deal ever in the history of Belgian Magic. (World?)

How it all Started
Yes, I like challenges. I've met one of the Marketing executives of LU (from the Danone Group) at a Marketing Fair. He liked MagicCafé’s approach so he kept the business card.

He always wanted to do something with magic. So a few months later he gave my business card to one of his colleagues to see what they could do for a product launch.

They contacted me and we’ve been working and brainstorming on this project for more than 6 months, before the final signature.

NUMBERS
Is this a World record ? I don’t know, but it is the biggest product launch ever in the Belgian magic History.

More than 420 shows done by 52 different Magicians over whole Belgium and Luxembourg in more than 200 different salespoints over a period of less than 20 days.

Who is LU?
LU is part of the Groupe DANONE, a leader in the world food industry.

The Concept :
It’s called the “Back To School” Action. The period of this action was when all the mothers go with their children to buy school furniture. And since LU sells cookies (especially healthy breakfast cookies) , which is exactly the same target audience, it’s the right timing.

Every store buys displays with LU cookies. If the store buys three displays, they have the right to book a magician for an half day. That’s all. That simple.

Once the magician is booked, he comes with a special designed close-up table and magic giveaways. The close-Up table was specially designed for this action by MagicCafé Productions, made out of strong cardboard, foldable and easy to carry.

To receive a magic present the clients just needed to buy 2 promotions (cookies). 3 Promos for 2 gadgets and 4 for 3…

Regarding the magicians, I succeeded to convince the client not to ask magicians to play a character. Since this is such a huge project and it would just add stress and energy, it would be better for the magic quality to let magicians be themselves. Like this, every magician is more comfortable, less stressed and knows very well what to do with their audience. It is also nice for the magicians that there is no real message to learn, just to talk about the promos... that’s all.

Recruiting 52 Magicians
In Belgium we have a few Magic clubs, about +/- 10 . There is a maximum of maybe 20 professional magicians. All the other magicians are “good” or “better” amateurs.

In fact it’s a question of word of mouth. In a period of 4 weeks MCP collected a list of about 70 Belgian magicians willing to work. Unfortunately the action happened to be in a holiday period so only about 50 magicians were available.

Imagine 50 magicians all having different schedules, different planning, different languages (In Belgium there are three different official languages, Dutch, French and German) and since they are not available ALL at the same time MCP needed some more magicians that were found in Holland and Luxembourg.

Meeting and preparation
The first meeting was in fact divided in three different meetings since all magicians couldn’t be present at the same time. MCP organized together with the client a presentation of the concept and the details of the action.

Communication
MCP created a forum on internet with the sole purpose to have a better communication platform for this action.

52 Magicians calling all the time with the same questions and remarks… no time for that, so this forum was created where all the messages and dispatching of dates was shared. This is a great tool, once communicated… you do not have to repeat yourself! Except for the less technology minded, but they were very few.

The creation of this forum brought a solution to a project I had in mind since a few years: MagicBooks.be : It’s a Forum dedicated to Magic Books, and it’s purpose is to be a research tool for all the magicians in the world. With the collaboration of magicians from all over the world we gathered more than 1500 books in less than 5 weeks… By the time of writing we have more than 3000 books available for research....

This project is maintained together with Marc Decoux one of the better Belgian cardicians.

Interesting !
The biggest surprise of this action is that the magicians that are the most quite, or shy in life as well as the less technical are the best show/sales people on the field!

And the magicians that are the most noisy or more technically able are not always the better show people. This is not a legend, this is a fact!

Complications

I like brainteasers. But I never imagined the complexity of this project.

Imagine this mission:

More than 420 + gigs over whole Belgium and Luxembourg, more than 200 diffrent sales points, 52 different magicians. Speaking 2 or 3 different languages. Living all in different places. Every magician has different availabilities. And all this has to be squeezed in a timeframe of less than 20 days.

No there is NO software that provides a solution for that…. At least I did not find it, and yes, there are huge solutions like SAP but that is a little too expensive.

You know what? I did it !

A huge magnetic Map of Belgium, 4 Huge planning boards, an Excel sheet and a lot of thinking made this all possible! (Imagine an Excel sheet with more than 600 lines/23 columns.)

About MagicCafé Productions (MCP).

Jacky Kahan is the proud founder of MCP. Why the Name MagicCafé? Because Jacky always dreamed of having a place where magic is happening! And this place will be ! The question is when? He decided to make his living out of his passion. Jacky has a background of Sales & Marketing.

The purpose of MCP is to provide quality magic. MCP is working quite often as a consultant to guarantee the quality of magic. Mostly for other event agencies and more and more for Film and TV. MCP organizes product launches, corporate events and private parties. An average of 60 events per year.

Some references : Kraft Foods, Côte d’or, Sony Music, Bosch, CitiBank, Ford, Agfa Gevaert, MPI, Procter & Gamble, Saga Films, Hokus Pokus (Turkish TV) and of course Danone/LU

MCP also organizes quite often lectures and workshop for the Belgian Magicians. The latest were : Roberto Giobbi, Aaron Fisher, Reed Mclintock, Richard Sanders, Whit Haydn, Armando Lucero… and many others to come… Jason Latimer, Paul Wilson, Michael Rubinstein ...

More info on MagicCafé Productions & MagicBooks.be

Did all Magicians have a poor Childhood?

I've been talking to a friend yesterday and asked me this strange question :

How come magicians are people that had a poor childhood?

This is an interesting question. I think. This is a strange point of view, but understandable, no?

My friend thinks that it's because you had a poor childhood you need to compensate, and one of the possibilities is to entertain people, as if you have to give something back to people that you never received.

This made me think, and maybe he is right, maybe not, i don't know...

I know one thing, i had a great childhood !

till the next post!
j.

This is the First Post

Well, first of all welcome to this blog!

Why did i create this blog?
To be honest i have no idea.

I was just talking to my girlfriend about blogs, and i said to myself, let's create one.

So here we are.

I'm passionate about Magicbooks, I have created a site MagicBooks.be where we list "toc's" (Table of contents) of many many magicbooks. To date we have about 3000 books, lecturenotes and manuscripts online ready for research.

In less than a year we have more than 550 magician members from all over the world.

Check it out and see for yourself!

Have to go now.

All the best, and thanks for reading me.
Jacky