Events go digital: Covid-19 has had a particularly disruptive effect on one industry in particular – the event industry, our industry. Almost overnight successful business models suddenly became untenable.
Special times demand special solutions. Over recent months we have been following this guiding principle to take back control and work out what we have to do to achieve the optimum solutions.
Now that many events have gone digital, ‘livestreams’, ‘webinars’ and ‘virtual events’ have become mainstream occurrences. We’ve also checked out these technologies, but we want to emphasise that they can never replace the familiar event formats, and that this isn’t our goal. Nothing will ever beat live communication in terms of its ability to communicate messages in a way that inspires and engages with the audience.
Livestreams, webinars and virtual events necessitate very different approaches and concepts – in terms of both content and technology.
You can’t just translate a ‘live’ event into an ‘online’ event.
Just because it works in real life doesn’t mean it will work in a virtual environment. But that doesn’t mean online events are any less valuable than live events. We believe it is important to avoid past versus future comparisons, so we have established new benchmarks for future events.
Hybrid – a combination of live and online events – will be the ‘new normal’. Hybrid events cater to participants attending live at the venue plus a digital audience attending from anywhere in the world. Today’s technology allows us to switch analogue events over to hybrid formats so that they can still go ahead in an alternative framework.
Although a lot of things are changing right now, Interpersonal communication is not one of them. The past months have taught us just how vital it is to interact and communicate with other people. We believe it is incredibly important to develop additional good concepts that make human interaction across a distance of 1.5 metres or via virtual channels possible. And the reason why this is so important is that nothing is more effective or engaging than a mix of pure emotions and communication.