Those four words, I am told, are what prompted hundreds of people across dozens of organizations to come together within an 8-day period of time in order to try to stop the City of Miami from making a colossal mistake.
“Standby for mobilization instructions” were the words that stuck in the craw of The City of Miami’s City Manager. They are the words that brought media outlets out to cover our press conference. They are the words that got the attention of research facilities, universities, environmental groups, homeowner’s associations, and other municipalities. They are the words that helped make a local issue a viral story.
When the words, “standby for mobilization instructions,” left my mouth, everyone on the call chuckled, and one of my producers said, “Wow! You really want to start a $#*%-storm don’t you.”
You see, “standby for mobilization instructions,” is the line with which we ended the Facebook video we produced to launch a PR campaign designed to try and prevent the Ultra Music festival from moving to Virginia Key.
Let me say this clearly – I don’t have anything against music festivals. I don’t have anything against Electronic Dance Music. And I don’t have anything inherently against the organizers of Ultra. In fact, for the past 20-years, The Ultra Music Festival has been one of many events that have given Miami its flavor and vibe.
Over the years the festival transformed from a one-day event to a three-day event. It grew in size from around 10,000 attendees (in the early 2000s) to roughly 165,000, last year. While Ultra was experiencing its explosive growth, though, Downtown Miami was also transforming.
Ultra in Miami has grown from an attendance of 10,000 to more than 165,000
New luxury condos with spectacular views attracted scores of young professionals. The business district was reinvigorated with new office buildings and a small-business innovation scene to rival any city. There were more full-time residents in Downtown than ever, more families and business owners, fewer tourists, fewer transients. In other words, Downtown Miami had become a neighborhood.
Unfortunately, however, it had become a neighborhood where, once a year, for a long weekend, 165,000 EDM fans descended to party and listen to their music at 110 decibels and 150 beats per second.
Windows shook, traffic became unbearable, and Bayfront Park – that neighborhood’s version of a “Central Park” — became unusable for a month because of the sheer impact that multiple stages, tons of technology, and 165,000 dancing people — creating roughly half a million pounds of garbage each day — caused to the land.
The size and impact that Ultra had on the Downtown Miami neighborhoods became problematic for many residents.
In short, the festival and the neighborhood were no longer a good match. The inevitable split was coming, but neither the City nor the festival organizers seemed to see it. Maybe they did see it. Maybe they thought they could force the neighborhood to conform to them as opposed to the other way around. We’ll never know.
What we do know is that earlier this year, after Ultra’s contract expired, the Downtown neighbors and local business owners organized and were able to put enough political pressure on the city to ensure the contract Ultra had for Bayfront Park would not be renewed. To their credit, they worked for more than two years on this eviction and their mobilization efforts paid off.
This, of course, created a bad situation for Ultra, being that they had already started selling tickets for this year’s concert. It also created a bad situation for the City of Miami, because if Ultra were to relocate outside of the city, the City of Miami would lose millions in direct revenue and many more millions in indirect revenue.
The City and the organizers scrambled to craft a solution, giving Ultra a venue in which to hold their festival while also keeping it within the City of Miami. On November 4th, news broke that the two parties were negotiating a contract for the new Ultra venue: Virginia Key.
Additionally, the City Commission would vote to approve this new contract in 8 days.
And that’s when the phone at The M Network rang.
One of the many services our company offers is something called crisis communication. Essentially, we help define and manage communication strategies and messages when an important or urgent issue arises for companies, organizations, municipalities, or individuals. These communication strategies generally include internal communication, and public communication through the press. Sometimes, however, they include mobilization and community activism, designed to get the press and public engaged.
Like everything else we do, in this sphere we are known as the “good guys.” We like to stay on the right side of issues. We don’t “spin,” we don’t take bribes, and we don’t mince words. Because of our reputation, we get a lot of calls from people who think they’re on the right side of very public and potentially very ugly issues. On some occasions, those people are correct.
This was the case with The Village of Key Biscayne. They were 100% correct – but 1000% behind the eight ball.
If you look at the map below, you will notice that Virginia Key is just off the coastline of Downtown Miami.
This is a map of Downtown Miami, Virginia Key and Key Biscayne. I bet you can see where this story is going.
There is a single, four-lane road that takes you over the bridge from Miami to Virginia Key. It is the only way in or out. You will also notice that that same road, over that same bridge, is the only way in or out of The Village of Key Biscayne. The City of Miami, by giving Ultra a contract to hold their music festival on Virginia Key, would be forcing 165,000 people across that bridge. Let me put this in a little more perspective, 165,000 people is just over 1/3 of the entire population of the City of Miami. It’s 20x the entire population of Key Biscayne. If the City of Miami actually created a contract to send 165,000 people across that bridge over a three-day weekend, it would, for all intents and purposes, cut The Village of Key Biscayne off from the mainland. Nobody leaves the island by road. That was their crisis. And they needed our help to communicate this to the general public in hopes that the public would put enough pressure on the City of Miami Commission to get them to vote no on this proposal.
Here’s a lovely view of the Rickenbacker Causeway: Imagine this bridge with 165,000 people coming across it.
Now, let’s be perfectly blunt. The City of Miami City Commission doesn’t care at all about what happens to the 8,000 people living on Key Biscayne. This is especially true when weighing Key Biscayne against the +$2-million in revenue the City would be making. Worse still, in all likelihood, very few people in our community, other than the 8,000 people living on the Key, would care either.
Making success even more unlikely, Ultra Music makes somewhere around $30 million dollars on ticket sales alone. This allows them to spend lavishly on marketing, lobbying, and mobilizing fans. They had also been working on this deal for months. We had about 8 days from the time we were contracted. And our budget was less than $10,000 – all in. In other words, there was no way in hell we were going stop this. Our client was outgunned, outspent, and had very little political pull with the City.
Nevertheless, we took the gig because, quite frankly, there were significantly worse issues with the City’s plan than just traffic in Key Biscayne.
The 863-acre Virginia Key is also home to:
The 700-acre Bill Sadowski Critical Wildlife Area
The NOAA Southeast Fisheries Science Center
The NOAA Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory
The University of Miami’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science
The Historic Virginia Key Beach Park
On this little island, there are hundreds of protected birds and animals and thousands of protected plants, all very sensitive to human impact. There are also millions of dollars of marine, atmospheric, and environmental experiments going on as well as several protected, historic sites.
Among other things, The Southeast Fisheries are responsible for the research that helps commercial fishermen ensure that their product, and their livelihood are protected for generations to come
There are millions of dollars in State and Federal research grants going on at Rosenstiel School.
There are no hotels or restaurants.
In other words, there is no place for 165,000 people to stay on Virginia Key. Each day they will need to commute on and off the island – sometimes multiple times a day.
Because there is no mass transportation to Virginia Key, they will need to invent ways to get on and off the island.
Will that be a fleet of busses or trollies? It will take an estimated 2,700 of those to transport 165,000 people. That might create a traffic nightmare worse than cars.
Maybe they can deploy water taxis? A bevy of young people headed back on a boat at 2:00am from a long day of partying at Ultra. What could possibly go wrong? How many festival goers might look at the traffic back to the mainland and say, “I can swim there?”
And because there are no emergency services on Virginia Key, if someone were to need immediate, serious medical attention, either on Virginia Key or Key Biscayne, they would most likely need to be airlifted or boatlifted.
Coloring all of this – and this is not meant to be judgmental in any way – is the assumption that the crowds that attend something like Ultra Music Fest aren’t just larger than those that come to… say… the boat show. They are also composed of a very different type of audience who make very different decisions, creating a significantly larger impact on the areas they visit.
Pushing 165,000 people, no matter who they are, onto Virginia Key starts as a bad idea. Adding the frenzied EDM atmosphere of carefree, uninhibited partying made more exciting by pyrotechnics, confetti, and all the other substances that help enhance the Ultra crowd’s experience, makes this idea exponentially worse.
A giant mechanical, pyrotechnic spider at Ultra may not be the only one-of-a kind creature on Virginia Key
Environmental stewardship and self-control are not traits typically attributed to the Ultra crowd.
In our initial call with our new client, when all of this was explained to us, the first words out of my mouth were, “Holy cow! People are going to die.”
And that’s why The M Network got involved with this project.
This was more than about The Village of Key Biscayne being inconvenienced for a weekend. This was about the safety of people at and around the event. It was about massive risks to the environment. It was about millions of dollars in important research being done for the state and federal government in jeopardy. In other words, this was my City Council getting ready to make a crappy decision that would hurt a lot of people — mostly so that they could pull a couple more million dollars out of Ultra for one more year.
We had an obligation to point this out. Not to stop them, but rather because somebody had to say something. That subtle difference helped us to redefine what success would look like.
For The M Network, success would be about getting the word out to our community and the EDM community. For our client, it would be about leading the charge for the little guys, creating alliances, and forcing their way to the table for future discussions with the City.
Knowing that we had just 8 days before the City of Miami commission voted, though, it was critical that we got a lot of people’s attention in a very short order – this would include people opposed to Ultra being on Virginia Key as well as people that were all for it. It meant that we needed to be a bit more sensational than we are ordinarily comfortable with. For this project, the louder the conversation the better. (It helped that we knew that logic was on our side).
The immediate and profound impact of our “Standby For Mobilization Instructions” social media video gave us instant access to local and national media, which we were able to parlay into a “must cover” press conference at Virginia Key. Even the EDM friendly crowd covered us.
The Mayor Elect and the President of the Brickell Homeowners Association address the media from Virginia Key
We combined this with an intense social media blitz designed to engage the EDM crowd in an open dialogue about real issues. We actively, transparently and consistently communicated to them that, despite what they may have thought about us, this was not a campaign to ruin their fun. It was a campaign to save them and the environment.
We knew that the Ultra organizers had paid for and bussed in supporters at the last Commission hearing that they were involved in. There was no doubt they would do the same. We had neither the time nor the resources to organize so well, so we built a website, noultra.com. The entire idea was to give visitors an easy and instant means of emailing the City Commissioners.
The impact was swift and positive. 60,000 people viewed the video within the first 48 hours. 15,000 people went to the website. 7,000 people emailed a City Commissioner. Hundreds of people from Key Biscayne and the surrounding communities provided email addresses and phone numbers in order to join our efforts. Community groups, environmental groups and research groups all chimed in and committed to support our client at the pending commission meeting.
Equally interesting things happened online. When we engaged with the EDM crowd, openly and honestly, some immediately trashed us. But then their own followers jumped in and backed up what we were saying.
You know why that happened? It happened because these are reasonable people.
When faced with the overwhelming stupidity behind the idea of moving Ultra to Virginia Key, the only logical conclusion was, “Totally agree with you.”
So… how’d it go?
In a word: predictably.
Everyone in white was a paid supporter of Ultra, bussed in to make their voice heard
We got about 60 supporters to the Commission meeting. The Ultra organizers bussed in at least four times that many. A delegation of Key Biscayne elected officials were invited to dialogue with the City Commission hours before the public hearing. Ultra lobbyists had been at work for months. We challenged the wisdom of creating an agreement to host 165,000 people on Virginia Key – an event that would be without precedent — without first seeing a traffic plan, security plan, environmental plan, emergency response assessment, sound study, or meeting with any of the concerned neighbors. The City of Miami Commission came with a contract ready to be signed.
Even still, public comments started on this agenda item at around 10:00am and went to nearly 3:00pm (with a 30-minute break for lunch). Then the commissioners debated till roughly 7:00pm. There was grandstanding and hand wringing. Ultra promised to build an African American Heritage Museum on Historic Virginia Key. That sealed the deal for one commissioner. Another commissioner renegotiated the contract from the dais, working Ultra for an additional $600,000. One commissioner quoted Donald Trump while haggling for more free tickets to the event; another negotiated an extra fee for every attendee beyond a specific number. It was a mob hit. The Ultra lawyer stood at the podium, begrudgingly accepting every change, shoveling additional cash and additional incentives to the five commissioners.
After the third or fourth hour of this nonsense, I’m sure the Ultra organizers thought moving to Virginia Key was just as terrible of an idea as the rest of us – mostly, for them, this was because it meant they had to continue to do business with the City of Miami.
Then, at 6:50, still without the votes to pass the resolution, the commissioner sponsoring the resolution asked for a 10-minute recess. In a telling moment, caught on an open mic just before the commission came out of recess, that same commissioners could be heard saying, “My goal was to get the money. I wanna get the money, that was my goal.”
I realize that this sounds like a scene out of a movie, but if you have the time (and are a glutton for punishment) you can watch it all unfold here:
Or you can just hear the off mic comment by clicking here:
Here’s the commissioner who sponsored the Ultra resolution caught on a hot mic. This happens at around the 6 hour 42 minute part of the meeting
At 7:05, the vote was taken and, to no one’s surprise, R-18-0523 passed.
Ultra will have a festival on Virginia Key in March.
BUT – The new leadership of Key Biscayne forced their way into this and other conversations that involve Virginia Key. And environmental groups, the university, the research facility and others, will all have a say in the permitting process.
Finally, Ultra organizers, EDM fans around the country are now fully aware of the environmental and safety risks inherent with their festival at this location. Whether they decide to do anything about these risks will have to wait till March 29th-31st– when Ultra will be held for the first time on Virginia Key.
In short, we did all we could do. In the end, though, human and environmental safety, common courtesy, and logic were not enough to overshadow cold, hard cash. No matter what happens at Ultra, though – whether it is a roaring success or a raging disaster – it is the Miami City Commission who you can thank for this.
Standby for mobilization instructions.