Blog · VIPs and security
The VIP Room Problem: Talent Gets Filmed Everywhere Except the Room You Control
A recognisable person cannot buy a coffee without somebody deciding it is content. They are filmed at dinner, at the gym, at the airport and, occasionally, at a funeral. Most of it is posted by people who mean no harm at all, which is exactly why asking nicely has never worked and never will.
You are not going to fix that. What you can do is make sure the one room you control is the one room where it does not happen. That is really what VIP phone pouch security is for. It is less a cordon than a night off.
The failure mode people underestimate is not the paparazzi outside, it is the invited guest inside. Your list is not a press list, but a phone turns every guest into a potential seller, and a grainy ten-second clip of the right person is worth real money. Then there is location: a geotagged story tells anyone watching precisely where your talent is standing and roughly when they will leave, which is a security problem rather than a privacy one.
Before the Internet runs phone-free VIP sections, green rooms, after-parties and private appearances, staffed or self-service, and the usual setup is to pouch the VIP area only while the main room runs as normal. The effect on the room is the part nobody expects. Once nobody can film, the recognisable person in the corner stops being an attraction and goes back to being a guest. Artists and their teams tell us the same thing every time: the value is not that the photos never got out, it is that the night stopped being a performance.
Written by the team at Before The Internet, a Toronto-based phone-free event company renting lockable phone pouches across North America.
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