24/11/2023
ARCHcon 2023: The Full Review
ARCHcon Cebu has been one of the sought after events in the region. The last iteration of the event happened last 2019, which feels like a long time ago, and only a few months before the world ended. The event was announced last year at Otakufest 2022 at the J Centre Convention Hall, ARCHcon's previous venue.
One of the pain points that this event had to address was the fact that Cebu just had Litfest in the same venue the week before, which had a lot of negative press coming from guests. If anything goes wrong here, the trend of event issues in the area continues.
Before I continue with the review, here are a few disclaimers:
1. This review is based on feedback from people I interviewed during the event. This includes attendees, and those who had booths.
2. This also takes the perspective of someone who has worked on the production side, i.e. on-stage screen visuals, overall stage presentation, and program flow.
3. I don't serve tea. People have had enough of it from other pages.
The Good Things
The venue. IEC Convention Center is the home of this year's ARCHcon. The total exhibit space, according to meetings-conventions.com, is about a third of the total of SMX Convention Center Pasay. It's spacy enough to accommodate a lot of attendees. The air conditioning is cold, and comfortable. The planned layout takes into consideration the potential traffic going into the event space.
The line was organized. People got in pretty quick, and there was adequate space inside the venue for the attendees to line up. Even with the threat of a storm, they announced that they were going to use the basement as an area for attendees to line up.
The amount of things you can do inside. You have an esports area, you have an area for card games, you have an area for tabletop RPGs, you have a hallway of exhibits, you have an R18 area, and you have the main hall for merchandise, cosplay and music.
A full food court. This is the first time I've been to a convention with a full-blown food court. There were a lot of food options, which can encourage you to stay in the venue rather than look for other food options outside.
A lot of musical talent. For the gate fee, the amount of talent that performed on stage was a steal. Musical talents such as CHICKEN BLOW THE IDOL, Himegoto Zettaichi, Kuroguro, MNL48, Gumi, WEST&, BUGVEL, Pastel Mix, SODA KIT, and Bao the Whale were spread out across the two days, with most of them performing on both days.
An area for photographers. Part of the hallway for toy exhibits and hobbyist was set up for photographers, with mini studio setups care of Alley Cat Studios and Tada 360.
Having a separate stage for esports and cosplay. 2019 had issues with late programs, which was mainly caused by MOBAs being part of the main stage program. They separated the esports and cosplay stages to make sure there wouldn't be delays that would cause overtime.
Meet and Greet with the guests. There were meet and greet sessions with Reika, Kat Grey, Vanille Velasquez, Jed Gillamac, and Bao the Whale – all of which had gate fees separate from the entrance fee. While Vanille and Jed had a stage segment on day 2 for everyone on the main hall, the meet and greet sessions in the Molave Hall felt more special because it was only for a limited crowd and some media partners.
Preparing for the event hosts of the future. ARCHcon set up a host "academy" which had 24 participants, with some of them flying from other areas of the Philippines like Manila, and Zamboanga. While some attendees are already used to the voices of Claire and Josh as hosts, the organizers setting this up prepares a new generation of hosts for future events in the region.
Overall, as an attendee, this is a great event; however, there are some things that need improvement, especially if you notice the smallest details during the course of your experience.
The Areas that Need Improvement
Time Adherence. The gates were advertised to open at 10AM. They were almost an hour late for this. Part of the potential reasons why people were not allowed to enter beyond the advertised gate opening time is the fact that there were rehearsals ongoing – a key part of production that should not be seen by attendees. Given that the gates opened late, the program also started late.
Uncoordinated Segments. While there have been rehearsals for talent, time for rehearsals for hosts and the rest of production is evidently lacking. Some hosts talk over each other, winners are not prepared to go on stage during announcement, some names were announced wrong, stage blocking is messy, and there were times when they had to repeat announcements multiple times to get back on track.
I know production uses an active wallpaper. You can see the laptop's active wallpaper every now and then, which suggests that the persons controlling the screen could be hovering their mouse over the window icons on the taskbar. At least have an event-branded wallpaper ready in case there's a need to go back to another screen. Also, the taskbar can be seen on the main stage screen during some segments.
Presentations using PowerPoint or Google Slides. It seemed that the production crew did not know how to use Presenter mode, which enables you to control the presentation from another monitor while presenting the slides on the main screen. The people in charge were seen dragging a window to the main stage screen, which can give the impression that production wasn't prepared.
Lighting at guest areas. The guest performers, apart from the vtubers, were placed on the right side of the venue facing the main stage. It was not as well-lit as other areas of the main hall. This could have been better so the guests can see who they're interacting with and vice versa.
Market Research. I've had conversations with fellow fans over the past few days. We agreed that the demographic of animé fans attending conventions is getting younger vs. the time when we started going to conventions. Most of the expected attendees for this event are students, which could mean they won't have much budget to work with after paying for a costume. According to some attendees, the highest price they're willing to pay for the gate fee of a convention is PHP250, which is half of the one-day gate fee of P500. Even with the amount of talent being advertised to perform at the event, P500 will still feel pricy if the demographic is unable to shell out the amount. Also, not to underestimate the talent, but the star power of all of them combined wasn't enough to convince the general audience of this event.
Merchandise market cannibalization. Yes, there were a lot of booths, but a lot of them were selling pretty much the same things. Competition between merchandise booths is healthy, but if there are a lot of them selling the same set of items, the market grows thin, which means profits can also potentially go down. This is the same for the food court. There were some food court stalls that didn't attract many customers.
Social media promotion scheduling. Their post schedules make it seem like there were unused collaterals. The media was promised an announcement last October 25, but that didn't get posted. There might be factors behind this, but this shows a potential scheduling issue with social media promotions.
Some might say that this is a little bit nitpicky, but I'd rather point this out than see them do these again. On to the part where they need damage control.
Please Fix These
SODA KIT's performance. I seriously thought this was live. While there have been vtuber concerts that were prerecorded, the illusion of the performance being live is kept for immersion. People saw the VLC media player controls when the performance was played back. Also, the file they used had subtitles (not closed captions) during the MC segments, which completely invalidates the illusion of the performance being live.
Varying Treatment of Media. While I got the good end of the stick, some media partners didn't experience the same things I did. Some of them were not given IDs like I was, and were only given stamps, which opens them to restrictions, and at times, being shooed away from areas where they could've stayed. They said there weren't guidelines to photos, which I also asked personally to the organizers. They gave me an answer that should have been part of the initial media kit.
Signages. There was an abundance of signs for the major guests, but some of the very important ones (entrance here, exit here, tickets here, baggage counter here, this way for more exhibitors) had to be handwritten on a piece of paper. Key signages to other important areas of the venue were not placed in high traffic areas, which contributed to the lack of foot traffic going to the second floor during day 1.
The Cosplay Cavern - Day 1. This area is VERY under-advertised. Apart from the large directories where the names of the participants of this area are written, there were no other advertisements. The most obvious sign going to the second floor is placed on the left side of the entrance of IEC, which is opposite of the where most attendees are going. This means that people have to turn around to see that there's a Cosplay Cavern upstairs. It's also weird that they have all the collaterals of each Cosplay Cavern participant posted on social media, but none were used as signs. It would have been great to put a face to each name, especially when most of the participants are from outside Cebu.
The Cosplay Cavern - Day 2. Knowing that this problem exists, marketing should have devised a way to advertise this area more, apart from moving everyone to the ground floor. Little to no stage advertisements were done to promote this area. The only one time they promoted the Cosplay Cavern, according to some attendees, was a main stage segment where all Cosplay Cavern participants were lined up on stage, which ended up being very awkward since some of the cosplayers were blindsided and unprepared for such a segment.
Overall grade: C+. While this event was great on the surface level for attendees, a lot of the factors behind it pulled the grade down. They've fixed a lot of the issues I pointed out last 2019, but there were a lot of new factors that showed up.
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