Customer Story
How Fanatics Fest Manages 400+ Talent in Real Time Using Eventeny
Highlights
Fanatics Fest brought talent operations fully in-house for the first time in 2026
Replaced a 2,800 row spreadsheet with a real-time customized schedule
Hundreds of talent handlers now receive live program updates with a single communication
Heightened information security with role-based access controls means travel, booking, & handler teams see only what they need
A show unlike anything else in conventions
Fanatics Fest isn't a typical fan convention, and it doesn't run like one. The 2026 lineup is on track to include Tom Brady, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Travis Scott, Jay-Z, and hundreds more athletes and celebrities.
Tom Brady alone had 20 distinct movements on a single day in 2025 with each transition carrying its own security implications.
"Getting communication out there is difficult. You're talking 300 talent handlers — no matter what, it was a challenge."
Before Eventeny:
A 2,800-row spreadsheet and no good way to update it
Before Eventeny, Fanatics Fest managed its entire on-site talent schedule in a Google Sheet. Last year, that spreadsheet had 2,800 rows, every talent handler working from a printed copy.
When a schedule changed mid-show the team had three options:
-
Send a runner to physically find the right handler and deliver a new printout
-
Try to reach them by phone on a convention center floor where cell service is unreliable
-
Hope the radio communication was clear enough and specific enough to act on.
Each of these options cost time and lost efficiency.
A Showrunner's Worst Nightmare
In 2025, a Google Sheet crashed in the middle of Fanatics Fest. It was the afternoon of Day 1 and around 60 athletes, celebrities, and cultural icons were moving through activations, stages, and photo ops across multiple floors of the Javits Center in New York.
"Just imagine Friday afternoon you have probably about 60 talent in the building, you have stages going, and now your only way to look at schedules in one place is dead..."
"If somebody doesn't remember what's happening, it's all there."
The solution:
Ditching printed schedules for instant updates
The FanaticsFest team came to us with a clear need: a solution that could serve filtered, role-specific schedule views to hundreds of people on the floor and deliver instant updates when plans changed.
That's where Eventeny's programming workflow comes into play:
-
The master talent schedule is uploaded into Eventeny, and a dedicated Fanatics Fest team member manages real-time changes on-site.
-
When something shifts, a single radio message goes out: refresh your schedule. Every talent handler pulls up their link, and the update is there.
-
No need for runners, no calling someone on a convention center floor where cell service is unreliable.
Information security with Eventeny
Travel schedules, arrival times, booking details, and movement plans can't be shared openly. Eventeny makes it easy for hundreds of different talent liaisons, travel managers, booking agencies, stage crews to work from the same live system without anyone seeing more than they should.
"No other Comic-Con has this kind of thing where you have to lock down information like that. This is not normal for an events company."
"Being able to have the confidence that everyone is going to see the real-time data — for us, it's huge."
The impact:
Empowered handlers = scaleable operations
For 2026, Fanatics Fest also made a structural change: moving away from external handler agencies and staffing the role entirely with Fanatics employees.
FanaticsFest is running three months of training to prepare their in-house team, and Eventeny plays a direct role in making that work.
Eventeny makes that transition possible. Program descriptions give every handler exactly the context they need for each activation (and nothing more).
The team builds in a simple training habit: before moving talent to the next location, refresh your link.
Custom schedule views
Eventeny's individualized links make information security for FanaticsFest easy. Jay Z's handler gets a link showing only Jay Z's schedule. The travdel manager sees only the people they're responsible for.
The result is that hundreds of people can work from the same live system without anyone seeing more than they should.
"It is revolutionary, for some people they'd be like, 'what's the big deal?'
And I'm like, guys, you don't understand."
Why Fanatics Events is building with Eventeny
For the Fanatics team, Eventeny is a real-time operational backbone for managing some of the most in-demand talent in the world, in one of the most complex event environments in the industry.
What keeps the partnership working is that Eventeny takes feedback from our organizers seriously. Our bulk upload feature, for instance, was built in direct response to how the Fanatics team needed to work.
"You keep moving forward with it. You take the feedback from your clients and you listen and you work it into the program to make it better."