Case Study: How zkipster helps the Cannes Film Festival and its business hub, Marché du Film, run events

With roots stretching back to 1939, the Festival de Cannes is one of the world’s oldest and most celebrated film festivals. 

Every year the Cannes Film Festival showcases a selection of the finest new films from around the world on the French Riviera. During several prestigious competitions, juries of international cinema luminaries vote on the festival’s official selection to award the best feature films, performances and filmmakers. Cannes prize winners are hugely influential, with previous winners of the top film prize, the Palme d'Or, including La Dolce Vita, Apocalypse Now, Pulp Fiction and Parasite.

What happens at Cannes Film Festival?

It’s not just red carpet premieres, glamorous photocalls and a star-studded awards ceremony that happen at the Cannes Festival. It’s also a pivotal moment for the global film industry, thanks to the Marché du Film. It’s the business hub of the festival and the film world’s largest annual gathering of industry professionals, with more than 15,000 buyers, sales agents, producers, distributors and institutions from 140 countries. 

Centred around the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès, the annual Film Market is where film professionals connect, network, sign deals and establish partnerships while discovering new films and industry innovations from around the world. The Marché du Film encompasses film industry programs, 1,500 screenings and 250 events, including pitching sessions, project showcases, keynotes, panels and networking events, and it was this carefully curated event program that Cannes Film Festival needed help with.

The Cannes Film Festival challenge

Cannes needed event management software to:

• Send and track branded digital invitations and collect RSVPs
• Import and scan externally-generated QR codes
• Provide a rapid, frictionless check-in experience for guests and staff

Using zkipster has improved the quality of our entrances to events by a large margin! Our teams are much happier working with such a tool which affords them greater control and ease in their work overall. Things run much more smoothly with zkipster around!

Michèle Waterhouse | Directrice Administrative | Le Marché du Film

The overall goal

Find a centralized, secure and user-friendly platform that empowers Marché du Film organizers to manage their guests and events efficiently and consistently, year after year.

The zkipster solution

The Festival found zkipster when searching online for a digital event management solution. When benchmarking zkipster against other tools they noted our Case Studies with other clients in the entertainment business, and after trialling the software they felt it would provide exactly what their teams needed. The festival first onboarded zkipster in 2022 and started with a Professional plan, before upgrading to Enterprise in 2023.

Cannes has hosted close to 37,000 unique guests across 579 lists with zkipster to date. Our software has powered 226 events, including cocktails, closing parties, mixers, special screenings, presentations, panels and lunches.

Communications

Multiple efficient, experienced teams are responsible for delivering the packed schedule of high impact events that take place during the Marché du Film’s eight day run. Each team runs different events and has different guest lists as a result. These lists are imported into zkipster to begin the event registration process. 

The international film festival’s brand identity and reputation for excellence must be maintained throughout the Cannes guest journey. The zkipster Enterprise plan includes centralized campaign templates, so branded designs for email invitations, response forms (for collecting RSVPs) and other communications can be created and used by all the Cannes teams, with small tweaks made as needed. 

The campaign templates help maintain consistency across all guest touchpoints and events, and the teams  say they have been “really useful”, and made the registration process for each event much faster. Marché du Film events follow a similar format, and each team knows that they can hit the ground running by returning to their saved templates every year.

After making any necessary adjustments and additions to the templates they are able to send out customized emails and forms straightaway, with no need to start from scratch. The duplicate function also works well for the team’s needs, allowing them to copy and reuse tried and tested campaigns. Sent campaigns are tracked via the reporting function and any sending issues, for example incorrect email addresses, are identified and fixed.

For some Marché du Film events, QR codes are generated in zkipster and included when sending out email invitations. However for most events, the Cannes teams use a separate platform to issue guests with accreditation badges that contain unique QR codes. These externally-generated QR codes are then uploaded into zkipster using a “badge” custom field.

This means that when guests enter event venues or screening rooms their Cannes badges can be scanned by the zkipster app for check-in. zkipster integrates seamlessly with the teams’ existing registration system and processes, and the teams say: “we appreciate being able to use our own QR codes to check-in guests.” 

Some guests only confirm their attendance at the Cannes Film Festival, or the length of their stay, at the last minute. While most invitations are digital and managed in zkipster, event organizers also send out some paper invitations to accommodate last minute additions like these, and ensure there is capacity to accommodate tentative RSVPs.

Check-in

A typical Marché du Film event hosts 600-700 guests – some accommodate up to 3,000 – but capacity varies depending on the type of event. Usually there will be three check-in staff at the door: one to greet the aforementioned guests with hard copy invitations, and two handling digital check-ins with the zkipster app.

Continuous check-in mode is activated in the app, allowing for fast and uninterrupted scanning of the custom QR codes in the badges that were distributed to participants during the registration process. Late last year color-coding was applied to the check-in states on the zkipster app, with different colors now representing guest checked-in, guest not found, and guest already checked-in: 

I was personally very pleased to find out there are now different background colors for the different messages appearing on the screen when scanning participants. This was undoubtedly extremely useful for us and made check-in a lot speedier and smoother!

Sofia Valente | Chef de Projet | Le Festival de Cannes

The colors mean that the different check-in states jump out, especially for events taking place at night, and make the process easy for non-English speaking staff to understand. The zkipster app ensures that check-in is fast, seamless and user-friendly for all.

After each event the team accesses the post-event report to view how many guests checked-in and how many were no shows, and uses this data to follow up for next year’s festival, increasing capacity if needed. Sessions are used to stagger entry for certain events, for example tours of the Marché du Film; allowing the host to lead a small group of guests for each session and direct them to suitable booths and exhibitors.

Sofia Valente, Chef de Projet at the Festival, is the account admin and zkipster super user and she guides the different teams, advising them on managing their events and communications. She also trains new starters and check-in staff, who have specific account permissions and can only access information that is relevant for check-in. 

The Cannes teams are experienced, autonomous zkipster users, but whenever they have questions or encounter any issues they are impressed with the responsive and knowledgeable zkipster Support team. Sofia and her colleagues are “very happy” with zkipster and hope to expand their usage of the software in future, to which we say: merci, et à l'année prochaine!

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Header image: Jacques Audiard Parcours Presse Cloture. Photo by Jean Louis Hupé.