I'm Joe English. Welcome back to Las Vegas, Nevada at Eventech. I ducked today with Jessica Rusely about how UFC wired Las Vegas for International Fight Week. Let's listen in. Jessica, thanks for joining me. Absolutely. We're here at Eventech in Las Vegas. Your hometown? My hometown. The company that you work for is hometown? Yup. So Las Vegas, we like to say it's the hometown of the UFC. And when you come to Vegas, it's our job to make sure that any UFC fan, anytime they come here, they get that UFC experience. And that is maybe partly to get people involved in this part, not just watching it, but to be able to sort of live that lifestyle. Correct. Actually, that brings us to International Fight Week. So International Fight Week is Mecca for our fans. It's the biggest event of the year for our company and most likely for the sport. And what we try to do that week is we bring in dozens of tournaments, dozens of these independent tournaments. So jujitsu, karate, different types of wrestling, Brazilian jujitsu, a slightly different one. About 4,000 people came in for this last one. And we're talking amateur tournaments. So this could be a five-year-old kid, as could be a 40-year-old amateur. And then we had some world championships, the MMAs. We had some super fights. And then we had our pay reviews. But to bring it all the way back, this is the week when we bring all these guys in, the future of our sport. And we raise them up and put them in the spotlight. And we give them access to everything UFC. So it's not only about them coming and competing and having great time. It's also about them having access to all the things that a UFC fighter would have access to. And we bring our fighters in and they talk to the different athletes and they work with them. So we really want to bring it all home, tie it all together, and then let them go back out the door and prepare another year and then come back next year. Because International Fight Week happens in Vegas every year, the week following the 4th of July. And this year you did some technology things that were intended to blow people's minds. Take it up a level. Yeah. All this about the technology. Yeah. You integrated that. Sure. So I think the biggest challenge that we have at any point in time is the fact that we've got 480 million fans worldwide. And we need to connect them. So if something happens right here right now, except for the fact that we might be on film. But if it happens right here right now, it goes away. And only you and I had that moment. If we can create a social media aspect and then we can amplify that, we could put it out. And we can give it a home. Now you can remember that experience. You can share that experience with everybody else that's going on. So that was our goal was to take all these experiences that were happening. Over 200 different unique experiences during a fight week and give you the ability to take that home and send it out real time talk to people about it. And then at a later date, go, hey, do you remember this? So we put all that together. That was the starting point. The next step was to say, all right, now we want to actually talk to everybody real time about what they're doing, how they're doing it, what they might like. We want to like what they're liking. We want to pick something out and go, wow, this guy's great. And then talk back to him and bring him in to talk with the fighter who he might have just been tweeting about. So we want to connect all those different elements. So we brought in Thuzy. Thuzy's been a long time partner with us and they created a system to go and scan RFID. So you could pre-register, you came to the event and then everywhere you went, you could scan your RFID band and you would transfer all of this data out. And it might be to Facebook, it might be to Twitter, whatever social media mechanism that you told it about. And what kinds of what kind of experiences were they? So we had simple things where you could go and you could put yourself in a fighter face off with Ronda Rousey. You could go and talk to again using Ronda, you could give her props for her next event, you could give her your encouragement. So there were gifs that you could out and do those. We did things where you could punch and it would measure how hard you punched and then it would put you in a scoring system against other fans working into the future. We're working on that with all of our fighters. So where I want that to go is that all of our fighters have a score and you can come in and you can punch and every time you do this you can get closer, you can see how you measure up. If it's a little five-year-old kid we're going to a handicap him so that he could see if I was really a 200 pound you know, Russia Evans or I'm sorry I don't know what his actual weight is. But if I was Russia this is how hard I would punch and give everybody that ability to have a first-hand fighter experience. So I'm going to take it there. We did other things where you could run and you saw exactly how fast you were running and you could see what somebody who when they're training how fast they would run and we call them jiggies and you run in place. We did things like a run, a 5k run called the Ultimaean 5k where you'd run with the fighters and then we would take videos of you as you did these different fighter-related workouts and then you would go back and we'd put that all together into one little bucket. So it showed you running it showed you doing all this stuff coming back. So we had all the different elements that happened in the events but then on the back side what we did is we said who's the fighter that year four right what's your what who would you back in this fight and we allowed fans to pick which fighters they wanted to align themselves with and then we broadcast that out. So when the fight actually happened we were able to to send you a note and say hey we know that you pick Connor and we know you picked Jose. This is happening right now. Be ready. So you didn't actually have to be at an event you could still be part of it and and have gone on to something else and then the other element which I think our fans loved was with all the RFID technology we gave you fan benefits so we worked with all our partners throughout Las Vegas people like MGM and SPE Group and Denise and Palazzo a three-month street experience, Monaril. You'd go and you'd scan your band and you might get a free drink or you could get into a club for free or you get into a pool party for free or you could in a couple cases like ReRaz you could actually get into a viewing party for free. So you'd watch our main event and you could do a bunch of different things that normally you'd have to pay for and the UFC brought them to you for free. So you worked on the experience you ran it personal and you created this brand affinity which is great right all fantastic things. So how was it how was the success of it what did people say? Well we had 80,000 people and applied analysis did this great you know deep dive into all the different reactions and I'd say the most amazing thing is that 86% of those 80,000 fans that that were pulled said that 89% agreed with the phrase that during that week Las Vegas became UFC city. That's fantastic. So we I checked the number like four different times I had to ask multiple different ways but that is the sign of success the fact that that group in a city where everybody is like laser focused on dragging you in and distracting you we were able to create an experience that translated our brand. That's fantastic thanks so much for talking to us good luck with your band. Thank you. Appreciate it.