Where else can you watch the Rock hype up a crowd, Ellen taunt a director, Broadway stars who played Mary Poppins, Tarzan, and the genie from Aladdin perform, Dancing with the Stars champions waltz, Johnny Depp throw grapes at the crowd, and Ed O’Neill sing “Let’s Get it On”?? Disney’s D23 expo.
One week ago I got home from California. I got to meet some of Disney’s bigwigs. This is because I am friends with a bigwig named Josh. He was the one being thanked, and I was his +1. But it was a great +1. We were basically insiders and got to do all the crazy fun things you hear of other people doing. We went to D23, Disney’s superfan conference that only happens every 2 years and where they share what is in store in the future. It’s basically like an Apple announcement meets a Ted Talk meets the Emmy’s. It was a blast. And hilarious. Some of the sessions were so secret and we got to see brand new clips of movies that weren’t coming out for a long time. You had to put your phone in this sealed bag. Lots of security were walking around and when the lights would go dim, they would have night vision scopes to make sure no one was recording. (all pics in this post were taken by yours truly)
I think 20,000+ people go to this and only 8,000 get in to the D23 presentations. You can guarantee to sit in the front section for $2000 and up. I believe that group of people is called the “sorcerers.” People camp out to get in. We talked to one mom and her son who waited in line for 4 hours and didn’t get in.
I learned a ton seeing how the Disney peeps think. So for the next 4 weeks each week I’ll give you a highlight of the conference and then a couple things I learned while there. I already mentioned some of the highlights so let’s go right to the stuff I learned:
- Everyone wants to be on the inside.
- Everyone wants to know secrets, the stuff that no one else knows. Or to get a “first look” or an “exclusive sneak peek”. They even went so far as to show us a part of the movie that the actual actors hadn’t seen. The new revamped Jungle Book kid who plays Mowgli (I had to look up the spelling of his name) was shown a clip of him with a tiger. He was blown away. He said “Wow. That was me! Are you kidding me?”
- It’s more fun to spoil than it is to be spoiled. The service was over the top. People really seemed to care about other people—their co-workers and the customers. And they loved it. One of the Disney execs said “It’s actually really fun to spoil people.”
- Food is good. We should eat it. Just kidding. Everything was spectacular. We ate at Ruth’s Chris Steak House for lunch one day and it wasn’t as good as some of the Disney food. (I mean it was really good but…)
- I asked one Disney veteran what he liked best about his job and he said he loved making people’s dreams come true. That’s a pretty exciting job.
What have you learned from being around Disney? The parks or the movies?
