Event Industry News Podcast

Keeping on top of stress

With more than 20-years’ experience working in live events, at Incisive Media and Ocean Media, London, before moving to the Middle East for DMG in 2012, Ashley Roberts took on the General Manager role at Omanexpo nearly 18 months ago.

 

On the back of World Mental Health Day, the focus for this episode is stress and mental wellbeing. Famously, event organisation/delivery turns the dial right up – a recent Stress Matters report highlights how 28 per cent of respondents had taken some time off attributed to being overworked or stressed and Covid-19 has further impacted the industry.

 

Working from home can make it harder for people to share or network with their work family and Ashley discusses some of the initiatives he has introduced to keep his team’s moral up.

 

These include one to ones, ‘town halls’ where people can anonymously ask questions in a public forum and by being open and honest about where the business is financially and in its projections.

 

Ashley also highlights the benefits of an initiative like employee of the month, a simple, well received way to give some invaluable recognition.

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A sense of touch

With more than 20-years’ experience in and around live events, Mike Ford, director at UK/US based full-service engagement agency Touch Associates, has been involved in delivering and developing hybrid and virtual solutions since 2015.

In this episode, Mike talks about the reasons clients wanted to switch away from physical show in those early days, highlighting how budget constraints took one company from hybrid and on to fully virtual within about three years, but kept all the plates spinning.

Among a number of topics, we discuss the formats that get great events going online, their learnings, how tech has a whole lot of answers if you know who to ask. The ‘always on’ of virtual events and the potential for year-round partnerships with agencies. 

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Pushing sustainability forwards

Anna Abdelnoor, a freelance corporate event producer, is co-founder of the not for profit group Isla, which launched in September, focused on supporting and encouraging the event industry’s transition to sustainable working practices.

In this episode, Anna discusses the huge appetite for solutions she discovered in putting the organisation together last year, how she has worked with agencies in the thick of the industry, her founding partners, to take the competition out of the sustainability question and how there should be basic, minimum standards that everyone works to.  

We talk about the collective want for an independent, representative body that inspired Isla, the organisation’s training manifest, how to manage sustainability, setting KPIs, approaches to event design, the budget question and much more besides. 

Love at First Sight

MD Richard Belcher joined First Sight Media in 2006 when the company was primarily focused on producing DVDs and VHS tapes of graduation ceremonies. Richard helped spearhead First Sight’s subsequent step into the corporate sector; conferences, exhibitions – not least Event Tech Live - and general video production, which in turn led to streaming live events, FSM’s “niche” as Richard puts it. Tellingly, the last shoot before lockdown was for a hybrid event.

 

In this episode, hear how First Sight has adapted its experience to fit the new environment since March 2020, fitting with the speed people/clients want to work in delivering their virtual and hybrid pivots.

 

As well as discussing some of the common misconceptions, Richard highlights how investment in terms of production value of the content is vital if you want to present a brand properly – especially if you’re charging people to watch.

 

On the flipside of that, he mentions the monetisation around ‘eyeball’ marketing via an example of an event that attracted 36,000 visitors on Facebook and its value to a sponsor that just wants to be in front of an audience.

Beyond the blue sky thinking

Founding director of independent promoter/festival organiser From the Fields, think Kendal Calling, bluedot, Inner City Electronic, Off the Record and Bournemouth’s Arts by the Sea, Ben Robinson is never short of ideas.

Touching on Kendal Calling and the company mantra, in this episode Ben focuses on music, science and culture fest buedot, typically at Jodrell Bank University, and transforming the event for a virtual audience in 2020, which, with a lot of the content educational, wasn’t a straight swap.

Hear how turning the bluedot dates into A Weekend in Outer Space gave the team behind it a new impetus during lockdown, keeping them creative, how the new-look is driving funding to Jodrell Bank and a whole lot more.

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Government support missing the mark

COVID-19 has hit suppliers along the event industry supply chain particularly hard and Downing Street’s ‘one sticking plaster for all’ solution hasn’t helped much.

Essex-based Showcase AVi had business halt for several months due to the pandemic’s effect and founder/managing director, Ben Collings, mounts a passionate defence for the greater industry in this podcast

We talk hybrid and virtual events first, how Showcase AVi shifted its focus over lockdown to provide a platform for filming, live streaming and green screen technology as well as looking after speakers – the human kind – in the virtual world.

Borrowing from football parlance, the final third of our chat sees Ben highlighting the flaws in the Chancellor’s provision for the event industry, how his strategy should be better educated and more productively focused.

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Powering up a personal brand

Alongside her role as senior events manager at specialist information provider Chemical Watch, Juliet Tripp is her own brand; a professional speaker, host, blogger and more besides with an inspiring take on the global event industry picture.

In this episode we talk about the transition from physical to virtual events, the value of having that alternative in the shadow of a pandemic, creating effective content and delivering it, in both domains, social engagement and more besides.

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How Buzznation are helping business meetings go virtual

Ratnesh Singh, head of global business at Buzznation Event Technologies, and author/keynote speaker/futurist/strategic technical advisor Bernard Marr are prime examples of tech supply and demand.

 

As an influencer, Bernard works with companies including Microsoft, Cisco and IBM to help them “amplify their voice” while ‘Nes’ has seen extraordinary demand for solutions to support the global switch to online business interaction.

 

In this episode we discuss what virtual events look like, how tech is supporting an industry that can’t meet, and the role they will play as a marketing strategy going forward. How COVID-19 has triggered new ways of thinking, how Marr pivoted to find fertile new pastures live streaming content on LinkedIn and YouTube, to the tune of 20,000-strong audiences. Still greater reach for his ideas, his brand, and no airports, no hotels and no time away from home.

 

As Nes explains, people did their education through lockdown. Now they’re asking more technical questions, using tech to keep their businesses afloat through the pandemic,

because, like Bernard, they’re ready for the virtual world order.

 

And how hybrid events, online reach coupled to a physical event, will be the new/better than normal.

Putting a new era in experiential

Spawned from the UK’s first guerrilla marketing agency Buddha’s experience with/onus on projections, disruption and PR stunts and his military background, Mark Evans launched Kommando Experiential Marketing in 2000.

Committed to pushing against the traditional advertising/marketing tide, Kommando moved into the digital space and saw the tide change with social media.

The group of companies that sit under its umbrella, including Nomadix Media, research and develop tech for brand development and for rethinking/adapting the experiential space.

In this episode Mark talks about setting the company up, his Buddha background and beyond, going on to highlight Halo, a new product incorporating facial detection, which can be added to any screen/camera set up to provide public or personalised messaging to key locations in a venue or event.

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Perfect Conversion

Ed Tranter, Managing Director at 73 Media/industry spokesperson, had to wholly rethink a launch event, the grassroots’ focused Rugby Show, in the eye of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this episode, Ed takes on an odds-defying journey - from the theory of Ricoh Arena, Coventry, where the show floor would have featured half a rugby pitch, to the reality of the virtual world.

Back to the drawing board, Ed and team focused on the nascent Rugby Show’s strengths: mission, brand, reach, influencers et al.

With 95 per cent of the content delivered live, realising 73 Media’s strengths and working with Silverstream TV to produce/deliver the live streams, 100 per cent to time and high quality, was a crucial element in the event’s success.

While it has a weight of backing from the British and Irish game, stepping across to the virtual world brought speakers to the podium a physical Rugby Show never dreamed of.

73 Media is an event organiser and agency hybrid. Delivering consumer, B2B and corporate events, company highlights include The One Earth Show as well as The Rugby Show.

With management roles at Miller Freeman, Centaur, Informa and Mark Allen Group on his CV Ed Tranter is also a member of the AEO board.

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