For the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show, producers wanted 3,000 Houston-area children to simultaneously swarm the playing field to cheer on the performers. But who could they call upon to orchestrate such ordered chaos?
As the founder of Precision Event Group, an event-management and experiential marketing agency, Jason Wanderer (BA social sciences ’97) knows how to make the impossible possible.
He considers his role in the 2004 Super Bowl the most rewarding project in a long line of successful projects for clients including MTV, Universal Pictures, Disney, Pepsi and Glamour magazine.
Despite his company’s meteoric rise in the industry, the 33-year-old from East Brunswick, N.J., says he never expected this level of success.
“It’s surreal, but I feel like I started back in 1993. I had four years of real-world experiences in college,” Wanderer says, referring to his extracurricular activities at DU that laid the foundation for his career.
Eager to work in the top tier of event management, Wanderer moved to Los Angeles in 1999. There, he found lucrative, albeit exhausting, employment that left him burnt out after only two years.
After taking a brief reprieve from the real world, Wanderer intended to look for work. Instead, work found him as former clients solicited him to manage various projects and events. Wanderer reluctantly founded Precision in 2001 at the urging of his accountant, who told him, “Like it or not, you have a business.”
From there Precision evolved into one of the country’s premier event-management and marketing agencies, with offices in Beverly Hills, Calif., and New York City.
Unlike a party-planning agency, Precision conceives and produces events intended to translate the marketing goals and brand messages of its clients into real-life experiences.
“The challenge for us is finding ways to do things that haven’t been done before,” Wanderer says. “Our clients rely on us to give them events that are pressworthy and cutting-edge.”
In 2008, Precision was named one of the top 100 event agencies in the country by Event Marketer magazine and one of the top 50 event companies by Special Events magazine.
Despite these accolades, Wanderer’s goals have remained modest.
“We’re not looking to be on the New York Stock Exchange,” he says. “We’re looking to be a medium-size business that produces quality, large-scale events. We want to continue with our stable of clients that we enjoy working with and projects that we enjoy working on.”