The future is physical and digital
This is part four of the Revive & Innovate: Vision for the Future blog series, written by Soundings Founder & CEO Tracy Judge, MS, CMP. Follow Soundings on LinkedIn to stay up to date on all of our posts!
Cvent CONNECT Europe 2022
“The concept of combining physical and digital to create a fully immersive experience needs to be the focus of all our event marketers.” - Colleen Bisconti, IBM Vice President of Global Conferences and Events
One thing is for sure: the future of the event industry will be hybrid – in some capacity or another. In this article, I’ll share insights I gained from connecting with industry leaders about the future of the industry and how we can prepare for a continually shifting event model.
Digital leaders
PCMA
PCMA has established itself as a leader in digital engagement, and they continue to lead the way – from the education they offer to the way they demonstrate through events. They once again nailed it with the PCMA Convening EMEA omnichannel experience, including bringing in top industry experts to show us how it is done.
Colleen Bisconti, IBM Vice President of Global Conferences and Events, speaks at PCMA's Convening EMEA 2022.
IBM
During the PCMA Convening EMEA session “The future of business events: CHANGE remains the only constant", IBM Vice President of Global Conferences and Events Colleen Bisconti told IBM’s adaptability story. She shared how the company changed Think 2022, a 33,000-person event to ‘Think on Tour’, a 17-city in-market road tour, because they asked themselves the question, “Why are we expecting our customers to come to us?”
But they didn’t stop there, Colleen contributes IBM’s success to a hybrid approach, providing the digital audience with an engaging experience (instead of just streaming the show) by showing all the highlights of the show, executive interviews, product reviews, and more. The approach was wildly successful, drawing a total of over 80,000 participants during the event.
The event's success informed Colleen’s belief that “the concept of combining physical and digital to create a fully immersive experience needs to be the focus of all our event marketers.”
Cvent
Cvent CONNECT Europe 2022
Cvent is another organization that has been at the forefront of incorporating a great digital experience at their events. They provide a news channel, CONNECT TV, at all the Cvent CONNECT events to keep attendees up to speed on the happenings of the day and the conference overall. As an industry leader in creating hybrid experiences, Cvent takes all types of attendees into consideration, increasing engagement in person and digitally, both during and after the event.
The Attendee Hub at Cvent CONNECT Europe made it easy for me to check out the sessions I could not attend live in London and explore additional content and resources.
Looking ahead
Overall, I am so proud of our industry for how quickly we have been able to integrate live and digital experiences while increasing overall engagement. I have never interacted at an event as much as I have with the events I attended over the last month, and it undoubtedly has made the experience and ROI for me much greater. As mentioned in Part 2 of this series, I am also proud of how our team at Soundings is working to ensure our talent are skilled to support this digital/hybrid need.
Questions
How are you integrating digital into your events today?
What did you learn during the pandemic that could augment your live event strategy?
Where do your customers (attendees) want to engage with you?
Resources
I've curated a list of resources to aid your efforts in addressing the talent shortage. Access the resources list here.