Terror

 

I was not predicting the future, I was trying to prevent it.

― Ray Bradbury

A year ago, I urged live event organizers to prepare for domestic terror.

Sadly, that prediction proved correct last night.

The Future of Face-to-Face is Now

A lackluster CES earlier this month prompted Fortune to question the appeal of live trade shows.

CES' organizer "will unquestionably hail it as a success and tout the benefits of face-to-face interaction despite the pandemic," Fortune observed. "And, in many ways, it’s hard to argue against that."

The sparsely populated event, however, underscored the fact that exhibitors can no longer be expected to spend tens of thousands—if not millions—of dollars merely to meet a handful of buyers; and that attendees can no longer be expected to hop cross-continental flights, merely to meet a few suppliers.

"While the sponsors of these events are eager to bring them back, the attendees are a lot less certain," Fortune said. Given the hesitancy, "it’s valid to ask if they're worth it."

My take is that, with the advent of the virtual meeting, live events' future hangs in the balance.

They may not be worth all the fuss and bother.

To keep live events worthwhile—and better than their virtual cousins—organizers must find new ways to assure not only participants' safety, but their ROI. 

The latter is something organizers haven't had to do—and something they may not be able to do.

For the harsh truth is, while virtual events are far from great, they're good enough. 

They allow buyers and sellers to connect, while eliminating almost all of the downside risks inherent in live events.

And in a risk-averse world, that says a lot.

Live events may be history, unless organizers find ways to reduce participants' risks.

Not one day, but now.

Above: Conference at Night by Edward Hopper.

Show Animals

2022 and 2023 are going to be HUGE for in-person events.

— Joe Pulizzi

Content-marketing guru Joe Pulizzi is bullish on tradeshows, as are many who've attended one lately.

I'm not so sanguine, despite the Delta variant waning.

But a tradeshow-industry insider suggested to me this week that my bearish views aren't justified. 

He pointed to the recent shows held by Informa, the National Association of Convenience Stores, the National Confectioners Association, and the Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute as examples of the industry's recovery.

I allowed I was perhaps underestimating tradeshow organizers' resiliency.

But whether you back bulls or bears, don't put your money on these two species: cows and pigs.

They're done for.

Three decades ago, I wrote an investigative article—the first of its kind—for the tradeshow-industry magazine EXPO.

It revealed two best-kept industry secrets: one, that most organizers' shows were cash cows; and two, that most organizers' net margins were piggish—well over 70%.

The article, entitled "Porcine Profits," made a few show organizers uncomfortable; but none disputed its accuracy.

Pent-up, post-pandemic demand notwithstanding, those heady yesterdays are over.

Show expenses are up; show participation, down; and no broad-scale economic rebound is going to change either of those facts.

Organizers are going to have to forget about bulls and bears and cows and pigs, and at last become rhinos.

That, or become dinosaurs.

HAT TIP: Thanks to Dan Cole for introducing me to the rhino.

Burn Rate

Desperate for cash, the organizers of Burning Man are auctioning art to stay afloat another two months, according to Billboard.

The event operator has partnered with Sotheby's to sell 100 works of art, so it doesn't go under before it can begin to sell tickets for its 2022 event. Prices for the art reach into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Burning Man, which normally attracts 70 thousand attendees and generates $43 million in registration fees, has cancelled its annual event two years in a row. CEO Marian Goodell told Billboard his company was in "dire straits."

Will other event organizers follow suit?

Talk about a fire sale!

The Elephant in the Room

When we don't tell the truth, and others don't tell us the truth, we can't deal with matters from a basis in reality.

— Jack Canfield

A cheerleader for the event industry recently begged organizers to avoid any mention of what's foremost on exhibitors' minds: attendance.

In an industry that's touted—and inflated—attendance numbers for 70 years, that suggestion isn't merely ironic; it's absurd.

But, as writer Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

When you're the one who's in charge of the circus, there's little sense in denying the elephant in the room.

Exhibitors aren't that stupid.

No Vaccine for Vanity

Vanity costs money and is a long way leading nowhere.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Planners of scientific and medical meetings are captivated by yet another band-aid fix for flagging attendance: vaccine passports.

Vaccine passports will bring back the crowds, they insist.

But one such planner, Ben Hainsworth, has called vaccine passports a "red herring." Planners should instead be focused on their value proposition. 

“If we have vaccine passports, but we are still thinking about events in the same way we did in 2019, the recovery will be a big flop," Hainsworth says. "We need to think about the unique value of face-to-face and start re-pitching and redesigning our meetings."

It's no surprise scientific and medical meeting planners love vaccine passports. For daydreamers like them, vaccine passports are the panacea of the month. Naysayers like Hainsworth are simply that—naysayers.

But is he? I think not. When you consider their elements, today's scientific and medical meetings offer attendees little of real value: they draw no leading practitioners, provide no unpublished research, and appeal to practically no one but job-hunters. Why would they recover after the pandemic?

I saw these gatherings lose their value long ago, while working for scientific and medical meeting planners back in the '90s. 

A smug bunch, the planners I worked for clung vainly to the status quo, repeating tired formulas and delegating the crucial work of program-design to volunteers. Content to live in the "fairyland" of federally subsidized science and medicine, they denied that meeting attendance was declining—geometrically—and that my research was showing first-world practitioners found their events irrelevant.

Two real-world movements drove the decline and irrelevancy: open science and managed care. But these vain planners would have none of it. They bristled when presented with the fact that their events were subsisting on job-hunters, grad students, and a few third-world practitioners, while pointing with pride to their swelling exhibit halls, a boon to hospitals in search of equipment. But there were hidden economic pressures on equipment-makers, too, thanks both to managed care and the inherently unaccountable nature of tradeshow exhibiting.

Flash forward to 2021 and the chickens have come home to roost. The pandemic has already up-ended meeting planners' reality and experts are predicting that by 2025 the world will be a world of "tele-everything." Practitioners, yearning for safety and convenience, will work from their homes and private offices, travel less frequently, and make few forays into public spaces. Live scientific and medical meetings may be nothing more than a pale memory.

Too bad there's no vaccine for vanity.

HAT TIP: Thanks go to Warwick Davies, principal of The Event Mechanic! for alerting me to Ben Hainsworth's remarks.

You Cannot Download Experience

 

We event dinosaurs—who've witnessed and dealt with the long- and short-term effects on face-to-face marketing of recessions, travel-bans, terrorism, pandemics and the web—are frustrated by the industry's vivid demonstration of inaction and incompetence in reacting to Covid-19.

Experience stems from bad judgments. 

But in a youth-oriented, know-it-all society like ours, the lessons learned from bad judgments made in the past are considered trivial; and the dinosaurs who made them, annoying.

It's too bad you cannot download experience with a click.

Mask Politics: Another Threat to Live Events

An association executive, writing on LinkedIn, points out that many of the businesspeople at a live event she attended recently refused to wear masks.

"Masks are politicized," she writes. "Plain and simple. Many, many adults did not wear them. 

The exec sees others' insistence to go without masks ironic, given the purpose of the live event was to cheer on the reopening of live events.  

"For all of the rallying cries of 'working together to get us back to work' in the meetings industry, there were a lot of people who apparently felt their right to not wear a mask trumped everyone else’s shared expectations for safety.”

As long as mask-wearing is political, live events are threatened.

Perhaps eventpeeps should plan two editions of every live event in the future: Coastal (Safe Edition) and Flyover (Superspreader Edition).

Or should they consider my other solution? 

Happy Days

There’s a trick to the "graceful exit." It means leaving what’s over without denying its validity or past importance.

― Ellen Goodman

Job losses in the event industry are staggering, with some estimates exceeding 95%.

But to mention the industry's downturn, or suggest that the happy days are over, is to invite exile.

The holdouts won't have it.

Although the industry's collapse may deserve a speed-record, collapses have happened before. 

Whole swaths of the economy—industries that once employed tens of thousands—have been suddenly, and permanently, eradicated.

Some memorable examples of such now-extinct professions include:

• Badgers. Badgers were loud-mouthed middlemen who hawked farmers' goods at open-air markets. (The profession gave us our verb meaning "to harass.") Grocers made them obsolete overnight.
  
  
• Lamplighters. Lamplighters were driven out of business with the introduction of electrified street lights. 
  
  
• Pinsetters. Pinsetters set pins in bowling alleys before the job one day was abruptly mechanized.
  
  
• Knocker-uppers. Knocker-uppers woke people, using a bamboo stick to rap on their customers' windows. The invention of the alarm clock doomed them.
  
  
• Leech collectors. Leech collectors supplied surgeons with blood-suckers before "bleeding" patients fell out of favor.
  
  
• Resurrectionists. These wily entrepreneurs—also known as "body snatchers"—supplied med-schools with corpses until the use of paupers' bodies was legalized.
  
  
• Computers. Computers—often women—crunched numbers all day, until calculators made their jobs obsolete.
  
  
• Lectors. Lectors sat before factory workers and read aloud from books—sometimes books banned by management—to keep the workers entertained. A union strike in the 1930s put them out of business.
  
  
• Ice cutters. These rugged specialists, who cut big blocks of ice from lakes and delivered them to homes, were frozen out by the electric refrigerator.
  
  
• Milkmen. Every housewife's friend, the milkman suffered the same sad fate as the ice cutter.

The disruption triggered by the pandemic is horrendous. I wouldn't wish it on anyone. 

But it makes me wonder, can possible good come from the collapse of the event business?

I can think of two benefits:

A cleaner planet. Long before the lockdown, critics of the industry proclaimed the practice of assembling thousands of businesspeople, year after year, to mingle with suppliers and sit through seminars was unsustainable. But event organizers shunned sustainability, because it would slice into their profits. Perhaps tomorrow's organizers, facing a new breed of attendee, will think differently about their carbon footprint.

Better wages. I was among the lonely souls promoting virtual events over a decade ago. (In 2011, with an equally avid partner, I produced a day-long workshop that featured five case studies of successful virtual events. Getting more than a couple dozen organizers to attend the workshop was like pulling teeth, and we discontinued it a year later.) I have long believed that, like Hollywood and IT folks, event professionals can earn better wages as virtual event producers. It's an exciting, emergent field—a veritable "wild west"—and promising territory for those willing to acquire the right skill-set.

For those who can't, or won't, accept that the happy days are over, perhaps it's time for a graceful exit.

Beatnik Babies

 

We'll get you through your children!

― Allen Ginsberg

In April 1996, I dragged my three then-school-age kids to "Rebel Voices Speak Again," a 12-hour poetry slam hosted by the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery.

Poetry slams were all the rage at the time, and this one promised to be a whopper: a day-long marathon of readings and reminiscences starring slam poetry's originals, the bards of the Beat Generation (the living ones, anyway).

My kids—by far, the youngest listeners in the auditorium—seemed reasonably attentive and were, thank goodness, exceptionally well behaved throughout. 

It probably helped that we went for lunch to the museum cafeteria, where they could eat hot dogs and potato chips.

I sometimes wonder whether that countercultural cavalcade of cool cats and hot chicks—Corso, Creeley, Elmslie, Ginsberg, Jones, Koch, Lauterbach, McClure, Ferlinghetti, Padgett and a half-dozen others—converted my kids from would-be conformists into the three strong, wildly independent, free-thinking adults they are today.

Did the Beats "get me" through my children?

Maybe it's true: poetry is dangerous.

My Take on the Events Industry

Dear Pollyanna:

So sorry to burst your bubble.

The ride you're on is neither brief nor V-shaped. 

Covid-19 has thrust events into an existential crisis.

Whether the crisis was overdue is beside the point.

Everyone knows this year will be seen disruptive.

But no one knows—once we get control of the virus—whether or when the events industry will rebound, or what shape events will take.

Yes, I agree with you: face-to-face fills a Maslowvian need.

But events will have to be reformulated to succeed post-pandemic. 

Attendees aren't going to revert to old behaviors. 

Your can't, either.

If you're betting otherwise, call me.

I have a bridge to sell you.

Hedging

"Lead-gen leaders" are twice as likely to use a multi-channel approach as "mainstream companies," according to a survey of 1,000 B2B marketers by Digital Doughnut.

You could say lead-gen leaders understand hedging.

They know that "no single class of content asset stands out as particularly effective for driving good-quality leads," as Digital Doughnut reports; and yet, at the same time, that every class―if used well―can drive good-quality leads.

The channels they find most effective? The answers below might surprise you.

Source: The State of B2B Lead Generation, courtesy Digital Doughnut

Why are Events Attracting Publishers?

While events are no easy money, publishers are onto them like white on rice.

Digiday reports that Forbes, in a move "symptomatic of an industry in change," is shifting from magazine to event production, firing print people and hiring event ones.

"Forbes’ struggles aren’t unique, given the carnage that befell both traditional and digital media outlets in 2017," Digiday says.

What's behind the carnage?

A new study by Reuters suggests readers are done with digital content—there's too much of it, both good and bad—and that content shock is slaying the golden goose digital publishing represented 20 years ago.

Today's readers spend only eight minutes a day on publisher's content—and most (92%) are  unwilling to pay for it. That's made it nearly impossible for publishers, reliant on advertising income, to sustain profits—no matter their investments in cool platforms and reputable content.

"The content bubble will eventually burst unless more robust business models are found," says Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, coauthor of the study.

One "more robust business model" may in fact be events, where margins hover around 30%.

Marketing Misfires are Maddening

Old-line retailers are deluging holiday shoppers with irrelevant emails this season, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Among other misfires, retailers have been promoting luxury underwear to broke college kids and women's clothing to men.

"Retailers have their work cut out for them when it comes to customizing and personalizing their email offers," the paper says.

So do many event marketers.

They're swamping attendees' in-boxes with vague offers of "must-attend" conferences.

Attendees are growing angrier and more resistant by the day.

The counter-move is targeting, and you shouldn't be surprised if 2018 turns out to be the year event marketers mastered it. 

The stakes are too high to do anything less.

Targeting demands not only that you segment your lists, but that you think hard about the relevance of your value proposition, and its expression. Can you:

• Distill your value proposition? Can you convey is a few short, simple sentences why anyone attends your event? Can you make the sentences memorable?
  
  
• Capture the message in a Subject line? Can you convey that value in 10 characters?
  
  
• Personalize the email? Can you avoid sending generic emails? Simply including the reader's name in the Subject line boosts open rates 26%.
  
  
• Assure readability? Can you design emails that encourage speed-reading and comprehension (especially on a mobile phone)?
  
  
• Leverage your content? Can you put content and speakers center stage? Will attendees meet celebrities, thought leaders, and influencers at your event?
  
  
• Provide social proof? Can you persuade readers they'll miss opportunities others enjoy by attending your event? Dropping names and including testimonials do this.

Events' Uneventful Downfall

Humankind's oldest, events remain, if not the cheapest, the best marketing channel.

But CMOs aren't keen on them, according to a report by The CMO Club.

While 7 of every 10 CMOs surveyed say events accelerate sales, 2 of every 3 say events aren't measurable; and 7 of 10 say events' "accountability gap" throws into question the event spend.

The accountability gap "creates challenges at budget time when the funding decisions are being made about events," according to the report. 

"While events are deemed critically important, they often lack the supporting financial data to objectively prove their value. Compared to other components of the CMO’s marketing mix that have become more sophisticated in measuring ROI, event marketers are lagging in their ability to connect the dots between activities and demonstrated results."

The accountability gap also makes choice difficult―the chief reason companies exhibit in the same events repeatedly, complaining all the while about lack of ROI.

What's a marketer to do? The report suggests you should:

Set unique goals for each event. "Not all events have the same purpose," the report says. "Some are designed to generate new leads and accelerate opportunities currently in the pipeline, while others are focused on strengthening relationships with key customers and gaining feedback to improve how marketers can better respond to their needs." Setting unique goals "will create a foundation for capturing the appropriate data to analyze the events against the stated objectives."

Create unique plans for each event. "Silos" often prevent cooperation between marketing and sales, pre-, at-, and post-event. Preparing written plans will knock down the silos and encourage both groups to capture relevant data.

Deliver an experience. This is mandatory. Quit simply checking boxes. Pick up the phone and call people before every event, be ready with a strong value proposition, and deliver it on site. If your event isn't an experience, it's a waste of time.

Feed your marketing automation and CRM systems. "Rarely are events judged on the revenue produced at that event," the report notes. "Opportunities discovered at the event take time to close and require significant post-event nurturing from marketing and follow-up from sales." Unless you import event data into your marketing automation and CRM systems, you can't track results.

Measure both activities and sales impact. Data captured at events should demonstrate ROI, not just reflect a bunch of activities. Ask your CMO to help you create C-suite-appropriate reports.

If events don't become a measurable marketing channel, they'll continue to be seen as a grievous expense, rather than an income-producing asset, the report concludes.

That could be their downfall.

Sponsors Want Spillover

Rigid thinking causes most trade show organizers to continue peddling sponsorships like they were ads, when today's sponsors want something much more valuable.

Sponsors want spillover.

Spillover results when attendees transfer their good feelings about an event to its sponsors―an effect no ad can produce.

While today's marketers believe awareness―the outcome of advertising―is hard to measure and cost-justify, they don't feel that way about engagement―the outcome of sponsorship.

Today's marketers will sponsor an event to engage people within communities; to build relationships and demonstrate market leadership, customer care, and social responsibility. 

They'll even do it merely to block a competitor from doing it.

But they won't sponsor an event for awareness.

How to Name Your Event

My business partner and I are at work on a new name for an event. The conference has outgrown its birth name (as every conference should). It's time for something different.

My standards for a good event name are few:

• It should be descriptive ("The Builder's Show") or evocative ("Magic"), or both ("Dreamforce")
• It should be short ("CES")
• It should be enunciable ("TED")

Event marketer Tony Patete has more complex standards:

• It should be straightforward ("The Startup Conference")
• It should be a keyword ("INBOUND")
• If an acronym, it should not spell anything unseemly ("TURD")
• It should avoid braggadocio ("The Best Conference Ever")
• It can be a portmanteau ("ComicCon")
• It can both evoke and amuse ("Brand Camp")
• It should not already be in use ("Apple")

Naming or renaming an event need not be hard. I once renamed a puny conference with the laughable name SCUC (Satellite Communications Users Conference) using only my delete key. Today "Satellite" attracts over 13,000 attendees.

When your event's name doesn't cut it, a tagline can help. While no cheerleader for taglines, B2B marketer Gary Slack agrees:

• A tagline can help explain what is new, unknown, or poorly named
• A tagline can help communicate purpose, difference and value
• A tagline can foster esprit de corps

Slack has his own simple set of standards for a tagline:

• It should be necessary in the first place; otherwise, it's clutter
• It should clearly communicate a strong promise
• It should avoid corporate speak and pedestrian "happy words"

One of the better taglines I ever wrote was for CES: "What the World's Coming To."

Although lots of folks liked the slogan, it lasted only a year.

A newly appointed marketing director killed it, telling me, "Taglines are stupid."

He lasted much less than a year. But the tagline never resurfaced.

Bad Apple

Why does Apple seem bent on sinking your event?

In the past 13 months, the tech giant has taken shots at three activities vital to your event's well-being:

• In August 2016, Apple released Version 10 of iOS, which lays siege to your email marketing program. Version 10 begs users to opt out of senders' lists by displaying a mammoth unsubscribe banner above each incoming email. Opt-outs have soared ever since.
  

• In June 2017, the company announced its next version of Safari will block retargeting, so your ads won’t stalk prospects any longer. Safari will "sandbox" any third-party cookie after a day; and if the prospect doesn't revisit the site that dropped the cookie within that period, Safari will prevent it from dropping another, should she later return. Ad agencies are in a lather over Apple's move.
  
  
• In July 2017, Apple triggered "Appageddon" by prohibiting "white label" apps (built from templates) from its App Store. That includes the vast majority of event apps. Marketers must forfeit event branding in favor of the app developer's branding, or resort to paying for custom event apps.

Event Producers: Bodies at Rest

A body in motion stays in motion; a body at rest stays at rest.

— Isaac Newton

Most B2B events are tired, creaky and ridiculous. And it's no accident.

Most event producers are lazy.

Decades of easy money have made them that way.

That's not to say they're the only lazy businesspeople you'll encounter.

Laziness surrounds us—and runs rampant in industries where easy money once was made. Banking. Stock trading. Real estate. IT. Retail. Advertising.

Ad exec Mitch Joel—who calls laziness not sloth, but self-approval—laments what he sees in his own industry. "There is no doubt that certain strategies and tactics work, but it's the lazy mentality that has got me down these days," he says.

Folks in advertising, Joel says, are allergic to "long, hard and disruptive work." They're unwilling to wake up in the morning and say, "Today is a great day! We're going to destroy what doesn't work, test more things, tweak others, build newer metrics, and keep at it."

You might say they need some woke.

A lot of businesspeople need some woke. Instead, they're imbibing hype.

Hype is particularly dazzling to event producers, says event planner Warwick Davies, who's down on the hype-of-the-month: event tech.

Event tech promises panaceas, but really offers little more than quick-fix "gimmicks," Davies observes.

Gimmicks won't resurrect a dead event.

"Sure, there are some tools and processes which will make your event more efficient and easier," Davies says, "but none will fix an event which is poorly conceived, researched, and not wanted by your prospective audience."

No silver bullet can substitute for long, hard. disruptive work.

"If your philosophy about how to create a valuable event is wrong, there’s no amount of technology that is going to save you," he says.

Fierce Competition

Are you mad enough to launch an event?

RAI Amsterdam wants to encourage your madness.

Entrepreneurs and would-be event producers can enter its juried competition, Start up Your Event, through early September.

Think Shark Tank for trade shows.

A jury of event professionals will judge the ideas for first-time events submitted in terms of opportunity, feasibility, audience reach, value proposition, brand positioning, innovation, and other success factors.

RAI Amsterdam will award the winner not only six days' free space—2,000m² net for an event in October or November 2018— but, more importantly, free consulting in experience design, community management, and attendee and exhibitor marketing.

The winner will be announced at the mammoth broadcasters' show, IBC, at RAI Amsterdam in mid-September.

"There is definitely room for new shows, maybe not necessarily in the traditional exhibition format that we are used to," says Denise Capello, RAI Amsterdam's head of business development. "The world is changing and innovation rules, so there are plenty topics to be found. You need to figure out the trends and needs. Your destination is just the final piece in the puzzle.

Capello says most would-be producers who fail do so because they lack insight into their audience.

"Over the years, we've seen a number of startups, and find lack of in-depth knowledge to be a key indicator of failure. Would-be producers need to produce better feasibility studies to support their ideas, better event concepts, and better audience insights, which come from canvassing."

To date, three event concepts have been entered into the competition, which was announced in June.

"We've also had a number of inquiries from consumer event producers, whose concepts unfortunately do not meet the entry requirements of the competition," Capello says.

"But they have inspired us to come up with a new partnership model for consumer events, the first hopefully launching in the summer of 2018."