What Essence Festival Keeps Getting Wrong (And What It Reveals About Communications and Events)

Essence Festival ran July 3 through 5 this year, its 32nd year, right here in New Orleans. I was there for the daytime events, not the concerts this time. In past years I've had real conversations with people inside Essence's leadership. This year, with bigger crowds than I've seen in a while, I never got near anyone at that level. What I got instead was hours of conversation with vendors working every corner of that floor, and with attendees ranging from women who've been coming since 1995 to people experiencing it for the first time. This piece comes from those conversations, from what I watched happen in front of me, and from what's been reported publicly about the festival's finances and its future here. When I'm citing something I didn't witness myself, I'll say so.

Essence Festival is one of the largest celebrations of Black culture anywhere in the world. It has run every Fourth of July weekend since 1995. In a strong year it pulls half a million people into New Orleans and pumps more than 300 million dollars into the local economy. At its best, it is genuinely something else. That's exactly why people get this frustrated when it falls short. Nobody complains this loudly about something they don't love.

This year came in already carrying weight. Essence's parent company still owes the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center roughly 400,000 dollars from last year, and there's a separate, disputed claim that it owes a local production company over a million more. The state cut nearly 2 million dollars in funding after last year's drop in attendance and hotel bookings. This is also the final year of the festival's current contract with the city, with nothing announced to replace it. The owner has pointed to a broader pullback in corporate sponsorship, companies retreating from DEI spending industry wide, not just here. Last year's concerts were rough too. One headliner played to a half empty room after the schedule ran hours behind, and another artist publicly called out the disorganization affecting her own set.

So there was real pressure on this year to get it right. In some ways, it did. Teyana Taylor came in as chief curator, and the lineup mixed today's biggest names with legends in a way people genuinely loved. By my own eye, turnout looked bigger than it has in years. People still want to be there. The real question is whether the festival's own infrastructure could keep up with them.

From what I saw, and what vendors and attendees told me all weekend, it mostly couldn't.

Start with the floor itself. Despite the bigger crowd, there was noticeably less space in the convention center this year, and fewer of the big sponsor activations that used to anchor it. Vendors in Beautycon told me flat out they'd cut giveaways down to sample sizes, nothing close to the full size products of years past. More than one booth shut down for hours at a stretch, either to restock or to clear space for a celebrity moment, leaving attendees standing in front of a closed table they'd planned their afternoon around.

Ticketing told its own story. Three day passes were on sale for months. Single day passes didn't open up until the last month. Not everyone wants three days of programming, and not everyone can afford it. Then the lineup changed late, and people scrambled, some trying to unload tickets for a night they no longer cared about, others trying to buy their way into a night that suddenly mattered more. None of that is complicated. It's advance planning, and this year it wasn't there when it needed to be.

Then there was the tech side. A lot of the vendor floor's energy went into registration marketing this year, QR codes, sign up stations, collecting attendee data instead of just handing out product. Fine in theory. In practice, wait times were long, the wifi barely held, and the codes didn't always sync for older attendees who aren't used to that kind of interaction. Some of the festival's most loyal, longest standing supporters had the hardest time doing the one thing vendors most wanted them to do.

That same wifi problem bled into everything else. This year's schedule and panel information lived mostly in the festival's app, and more than one attendee told me it wasn't updated in time, so they missed sessions they'd planned their whole day around. A shaky connection and an app only communication strategy do not mix well.

Underneath all of it is the same question. Essence's audience isn't one thing. Women who came in 1995 are still coming, alongside their daughters and now their granddaughters. It has never been an audience with one budget or one comfort level with technology. When your ticketing quietly favors the highest spender, your registration systems assume everyone is fluent in QR codes, and your vendors ask for more data while giving less in return, the people who feel it first are the ones who've been showing up the longest.

I want to be fair to Essence here too. None of this happened in a vacuum. The festival is genuinely under financial pressure, not just from its own missteps but from a sponsorship market that's pulled back across the entire industry. Thinner floor space and leaner giveaways are symptoms of that, not proof of carelessness. But that context doesn't explain everything. An app that updates on time doesn't cost more money. Neither does opening single day tickets earlier, or building a registration process that doesn't leave your oldest fans behind. Those are choices, not budget lines.

This is exactly the kind of problem Vysyons was built to sit inside of. Communications and Media, and Events and Engagement, are two of our four pillars because they are almost never separate problems in the real world. A beautifully promoted event that's poorly run still loses the trust it worked to build. A flawlessly produced event that's poorly communicated still leaves people feeling like an afterthought. Essence is dealing with both this year, under more financial pressure than most organizations ever have to survive in public. A lot of organizations with none of that pressure make the exact same mistakes.

The gap between what an organization is and what its audience and vendors actually experience is not a mystery. It is a planning and communications problem, often made worse by financial pressure rather than caused by it. The first step toward solving it is being honest about where the breakdown actually is, and which parts of it are genuinely fixable regardless of budget.

If you were at Essence this weekend, as an attendee, a vendor, or someone working the event or communications side of it, I would like to hear what your experience actually was. Reply to this post. I read everything.