Struggling with placeholders

I’ve used the instructions here:
http://wp-events-plugin.com/documentation/using-template-files/

and have templates working fine. I’m now trying to get placeholders to show on event-single.php

After the PHP I have: #_CATEGORYCOLOR
But this just gets shown as is, with no conversion to the actual category color. I’ve tried other placeholders such as #_CATEGORYNAME but they do the same, so I’m obviously doing something wrong.

The end goal is to get the category color out so that I can change the cell background color on the calendar when there is an event.
I’ve followed all the suggestions here:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-events-manager-choose-a-color-for-a-category?replies=17
But they dont work. It just prints out ‘#_CATEGORYCOLOR’

Interestingly, if I print_r echo $EM_Event:
echo $EM_Event->categories->categories[2]->color;

color is blank.

Does anyone have any thoughts?

http://wordpress.org/plugins/events-manager/