We Create Campaign Umbrella for Brands Without Diluting their Message: Harshad Chavan, Toast Events

by  Mugdha Gaonkar Industry Watch | February 5, 2021 | Interview

Harshad Chavan Toast Events

While curating, creating and executing experiences, the agenda at Toast Events is to customize down to every detail, to achieve what is expected by a client. In an exclusive conversation with EVENTFAQS Media, Harshad Chavan, Managing Director, Toast Events gives an insight about its transformation from an events to marketing to advertising firm over the years, his recent work and more.

Take us through your journey of how Toast Events has grown from an events to marketing to advertising firm over the years.

As a company, we believe in looking at the larger picture rather than just focus on our own niche scope of work. In our early days as well, the reason brands loved us is because we went over and above our typical event scope of work and gave cool marketing ideas to create buzz-worthy opportunities for brands.

For us, marketing is like a machine – various parts coming together, to achieve one goal. Very often, we’ve seen that in the chase for that one goal, the overall messaging delivery for the campaign goes for a toss. It was here that we felt we could create an overall campaign umbrella for brands, without diluting their message and provide them services beyond just on-ground events. We also realised that we’d been blessed with a remarkably diverse, non-events team; people who came from different brand marketing backgrounds – PR, Advertising, Digital, Brand Solutions. This mixed team really elevated the way we started thinking about brands and experiential – and made us realise that we could add so much more value to brands at a fraction of the cost that they would incur if they went to different agencies for different functions.

And here I must say, it was our existing clients that truly had faith in us and our ideas, and pushed us to take the leap and partner with them on functions beyond events. So, we took baby steps into the world of content creation and advertising. The response was phenomenal.

The team that we have also has an insane appetite for taking on challenges – so one after another, we discovered that we could use our collective marketing experience and our strengths to do so much more. And it’s paid off unbelievably well. Today, we don’t just look at events – we do content creation, influencer marketing, celebrity deals and relations, advertising, digital content strategy and partnerships for so many brands.

Tell us about some interesting brand campaigns or activations you have done for your clients in the last 6-8 months, as well as work that you have on hand now.

The last 6-8 months have been game-changing for us from a merchandising perspective as we finally started building that as a business vertical. At a time where people were not being allowed to step out, but were okay with having sanitized brand packages delivered to them, the response from brands to develop such merchandise that would capture influencer attention was phenomenal. We worked with some great brands like Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, Karix, Hansgrohe, among others, to develop brand kits that immediately got a shout-out on social media.

In addition to that, given the speed at which people were consuming content, we were lucky to work with brands like Bestseller, Forever New, Uniqlo to develop a lot of cool content for their ad campaigns or their digital press previews. Along with that, we also had a bunch of digital events that we did for various brands and have kept a fair amount of focus on that as well for the future. There’s some really good work, with some absolutely amazing brands in the pipeline from February to May 2021, and we’re excited to be back in full force for this.

What is the outlook for virtual events in the industry, now that the vaccine is here, and physical events may open up?

Physical events offer an experience that unfortunately virtual events can’t, so they will always get the lion’s share of interest and money from brands. Having said that, COVID-19 has taught us that the industry can adapt super quickly to any challenge and figure an innovative solution. So, while physical events may rise, who knows, we could discover a whole new form of virtual events that hasn’t been explored before and that could take the market by storm. We’re excited to see what the future will hold.