21 July 20262:59202 views on YouTubeWatch on YouTube
Small community events have a habit of becoming accidentally exclusive. Nobody decides to keep them quiet, everyone just assumes somebody else is doing the promoting, and the result is an event that only the people who already knew about it attend. This episode is an attempt to break that cycle for Foil Fest, with a fair amount of confusion along the way.
The details, as far as anyone will confirm them
Foil Fest is on August 1, at a private beach hosted by Brooke. Zen Water Sports will be there, and so will Glide Water Sports, both giving lessons and putting people on boards to try. There will be free BAWLS Guarana. Beyond that the picture gets vaguer, and the episode is honest about it: whether other brands are sending anyone is an open question, and even the practical question of how many cans of drink to bring got an address in reply rather than a number.
Nobody would say whether to promote it
The running joke, and also the actual problem, is that direct questions about promotion kept coming back cryptic. Asking whether to promote it did not produce a no, so the decision here is to promote it anyway. Glide Water Sports had nothing about it on their website when asked, for the same reason: they were not sure whether they should. The logic offered in reply is hard to argue with. If you want people at an event, you have to tell people about the event.
An event with several names is an event nobody can find
There is a genuinely useful point buried in the comedy. Zen Water Sports calls it the Twin Cities FoilFest. It goes by several other names elsewhere. When something has three names, a search for any one of them scatters across different pages and none of them is clearly the official one, so the person who half remembers hearing about it never gets there. Pick one name, point it at one page, and let everything else link to that. As it is put here, engineers and marketing are opposites, and this is where that shows.
If you are anywhere nearby
The invitation is open to riders in the Twin Cities, elsewhere in Minnesota, and across into Wisconsin, and it is aimed as much at people who have never been on a foil as at people who own one. The point of the day is lessons, first flights, and meeting other riders. Details sit on the Verdant Ride homepage, a couple of items down the page.
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