The pandemic is a lifetime opportunity for the Events Industry to finally, truly embrace digital technology
Large-scale gatherings are still on hold and there is a big debate for the next day of the events industry, as the economy around the world re-opens. Εvents are one of the real-life experiences that technology changed the least since the 90s. As the pandemic is forcing the industry to change, I believe exciting times lie ahead.
Virtual events as a necessity
From the very first days of the pandemic, most event organizers were forced to move their events online to save productions that were already underway, as well as sponsorships and ticket sales and avoid refunds. Some, especially the ones that had little progress with their 2020 programming when the lockdowns began, adopted a wait-and-see approach. Everyone though started discussing about the future of the industry.
It came as little surprise that the virtual environment is a different animal compared to a physical event. Significant production costs such as catering, venue rental, and logistics are no longer necessary, giving — on paper at least — more flexibility to invest more in technology. Greater focus is also placed on content sourcing, curation and delivery.
Technology, however, so far, does little to nothing to adequately transfer and enhance the experience of the physical event online. Most current virtual conferencing platforms (like Crowdcast, Microsoft Teams or Zoom) are less suitable for online conferences and events, as their offerings are meant to effectively substitute an offline meeting or workshop experience rather than disrupt large scale events. A few weeks ago, Accel and IVP co-led a $40M Series A round in brand new startup Hopin.to, coining it as “The Future of Events”. Hopin.to started its journey last fall and is already valued above $200M. Accel’s India branch backed Airmeet with $3M beginning of March this year. Hopin provides a better product compared to more traditional solutions such as Zoom, or Microsoft Teams, to run multi-stage live events and content, at scale. Yet Hopin and its likes have done little to address the key challenges and opportunities event organizers are dealing with in the dawn of virtual.
Some are:
- Access to Speakers/Content (be able to match high quality and professional speakers with event organizers as location becomes less relevant)
- Partners matching (maybe a crowdsourced campaign for smaller brands to be able to find their spot in large scale events, or even for the big high street brands to effectively allocate, monitor and assess their sponsorships)
- Audience networking (still tricky to get meaningful engagement even for physical events)
At the beginning of the pandemic, TEDxAthens, one of the most successful conferences in Greece, switched to virtual offerings, having already hosted two events: a special Virtual Discussion on early learnings and wisdom on COVID-19 in early March and a -more creative- Virtual Brunch featuring experiential content, live music, cooking and mixology workshops in late May. Although TEDxAthens brings a decade-long experience in event production and content curation, virtual is a virgin territory for everyone. Surprisingly, capturing people’s attention and sign-ups — especially for free offerings — was not an issue. In fact, for our first virtual event, we welcomed 20% of our audience from overseas.
Our core challenges revolved around the revenue streams of the virtual production, namely ticket pricing and sponsors.
- The pricing model for virtual is a key challenge. IRL event tickets provide access to content, access to networking, F&B and free experiences and entertainment, hosted by sponsors. On virtual, the audience seems to be less willing to pay just for the content, and a very vaguely defined promise to network with speakers and attendees. So what are the key value drivers? Are we moving towards membership-enabled communities around events and tribes?
- You can’t replicate the experience and the casual feeling of hanging out at the end of a long day of talks and workshops with a beer in hand. Is this, however, the curated networking experience event producers evangelize and advertise in the first place? Can technology significantly improve the quality and effectiveness of attendees networking?
- Another key challenge in audience networking is noise. At Collision, a few weeks ago, I received more than 60 requests during the last two days before the conference to virtually meet people during the program. No matter how explicit your meeting preferences are (say for example, I was only looking to meet with peer VCs in seed and early-stage, and Greek entrepreneurs and execs) in reality inbound requests pay little respect to that, massively adding and cold-messaging. Why does networking have to be a game of quantity and luck and not a play of hyper-curated quality business leads?
- Partners engagement: Sponsors and partners see less value in the virtual world, arguably since visibility for their services and products are more limited, while people’s attention is shorter. Can event organizers provide meaningful in-stream placement opportunities? How exactly are we leveraging audience data to target specific groups of attending that are more likely to interact with a partners’ offering based on their preferences and consumer profile?
My guess is that virtual events are here to stay as a parallel, and necessarily alternative, offering to live conferences. Yet it will take time until event organizers will be able to bring the production and content quality of live events in the virtual world, while partners and audience will start embracing and supporting investments in the new format. If event organizers can’t find a way to monetize on virtual, little will it do to update and upgrade their tech stack and virtual products.
The middle ground: phygital
At some point, somehow, physical events will return. It’s part of human nature to belong somewhere, and live events -from Coachella and Sundance to TED and the Web Summit- embrace exactly that: the notion of belongingness and tribe. Yet, they must bring their offerings to the 21st century. An essential part that’s still missing is what happens before and after the event itself. Few large scale event producers offer mobile apps with community features to enable audience networking. Very few use AR/VR solutions to enhance experiential content. And when it comes to indoor tracking and flow management, which leads to data they can later analyze to optimize their productions and costs, event organizers have very little evidence to show to partners and sponsors.
There you go, some more areas for startup disruption:
- Indoor/outdoor venue tracking (analyzing audience flow, sentiment and physical engagement — obviously this is even more essential for the restart of the industry from a security and public health perspective, in a social distancing friendly world)
- Queuing management / virtual checking for safety and health measures
- VR/AR content made easy (access to good quality VR/AR content brand partners can use and leverage for audience engagement)
- Tools for urban exploration (ideal for the many different urban exploration projects many event planners run for smaller groups, up to 100 people)
Anticipating the future of events
The experience of attending events can be anything from very rewarding to a complete waste of time. Virtual events will eliminate travel time and indirect expenses. Event producers should focus more on content and programming, as this will be the only — for the foreseeable future — key differentiation point. Echoing Benedict Evans, when we get access to new tools we squeeze them to fit the old way of working. Virtual should have its own value proposition and thesis. As for physical events, technology can and will unlock a more engaging and immersive experience for visitors, and better as well as more tangible insights for brands and sponsors.
If you are building industry-defining technology targeting the Entertainment and the Creative Media Industries, we would love to chat — send us your pitch deck at start@velocitypartners.vc
About Dimitris Kalavros-Gousiou
Dimitris Kalavros-Gousiou is a 32yo entrepreneur and investor who works at the intersection of technology, culture and new media. Before and outside Velocity.Partners, Dimitris is an Event Producer & Curator with a decade-long track record under his belt, from small gatherings and concepts to large-scale events and multinational media brands. He is also the Founder of TEDxAthens, one of the top TEDx branded events globally.
About Velocity.Partners
Velocity.Partners is an industry-agnostic Venture Capital fund. Our mission is to fuel Greek entrepreneurs around the globe to build world-class technology companies.
We invest in pre-Seed & Seed stages, typically up to €500K, and follow up next rounds, helping our companies build their team, prove product-market fit, gain market traction and get ready for big-league VCs along the way.
Our portfolio gets instant access to a global network of industry experts, international investors and potential clients. We also offer lifelong operational support, strategic advice and mentoring as needed.
Velocity.Partners is part of the Equifund family of venture capital funds and is also supported by the Operational Program “Competitiveness, Entrepreneurship & Innovation” (EPAnEK).
