‘What Really Happened’ is a B2B event series featuring honest, in-depth conversations. Real stories about the biggest wins, toughest challenges, and lessons learned behind the scenes. This edition was dedicated to event professionals, with leading industry specialists Marc Hofstede (CEO at Ambassadors of Entertainment) and Annejorie Hegge (Owner of Joor Productions), who have led some of the most complex productions in the industry.

In front of a carefully curated audience of event professionals at WTC Amsterdam, two of the Netherlands’ most experienced large-scale event producers shared an evening of honest, unfiltered reflection on what makes their work genuinely hard. Most industries celebrate their wins publicly and process their failures privately. Budgets, creative breakthroughs, and smooth logistics make it into the case studies. The near-disasters, the impossible calls, the moments of self-doubt — those tend to stay in the group chat until we reflect and ask: ‘What really happened?’

The road to ‘Festival op de Ring’

Annejorie Hegge took the room inside the making of ‘Festival op de Ring’. A one-day event that transformed Amsterdam’s A10 ring road into a festival site for the city’s 750th anniversary. What sounded like a single event was, in practice, eight simultaneous festivals: a run for 20.000 participants, Amsterdam Fashion Week, a sports boulevard, a cultural area with weddings and a forest of 750 trees, neighbourhood initiatives, a moving musical parade, an art section, and a nationally broadcast television music show, all at once.

Her approach was to set up eight separate production teams, each responsible for their own area, while she held the helicopter view across permits, safety, city coordination, logistics, and communication between departments. “Creativity is only fifty percent of the job,” she said. “The other fifty percent is adapting to regulations, safety demands, politics, and pressure.”

At the start, her work was about building the festival. Towards the end, it became about protecting the people building it. A shift, as she described it, from logistics into psychology. When asked how she maintains her own mental health through productions of this scale, she answered: “share when it’s difficult, ask for help, show your vulnerability.” Leadership in live events does not mean having all the answers. Sometimes it simply means trusting that you and your team will do everything possible, with the right intentions, as professionally and responsibly as you can. The result was a crew of hundreds of people behind the scenes who could look back with genuine pride. For Hegge, that is the real measure of success.

The stadium of possibilities

Marc Hofstede didn’t bring a presentation to tell his story; he brought a piece of brick from a production. As the producer of four editions of Symphonica in Rosso, the stadium concert series combining classical orchestras with pop artists, he arrived with a collection of hard-won lessons.

The brick he brought came from the Philips Stadion in Eindhoven. Season after season, Symphonica in Rosso waited to become a show at the country’s usual go-to venue for soccer games. When the opportunity finally came, it arrived with a fresh set of production challenges.

The electrical infrastructure required a three-phase power supply, but the stadium’s metal roof made it impossible to route cables over the walls. The only viable solution was to run them through the walls, which meant drilling 20 holes through the stadium structure. Securing permission took three weeks of negotiations with the stadium owners.

Holding up the brick, Hofstede reflected on what that process taught him about his role. A producer, he suggested, is really the cement between the bricks. The person who holds things together when everything is about to fall apart. “It requires a lot of convincing and negotiating to get through it.”

And you can’t do that alone. Both speakers emphasised the importance of surrounding yourself with the right people. “You are only as strong as the weakest link in your team,” Marc noted. “So think carefully about who you choose.” The underlying belief that united both speakers during the event was related to the theme of the evening: “the industry improves when people stop pretending the work is easier than it is. We really like to talk about things going well," Marc observed. “But the things we are not yet good at, that’s where we learn.”

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What Really Happened?

‘What Really Happened’ at the biggest event productions

WTC Amsterdam