![]() ![]() One of the things I’m most proud of about Touchcast’s virtual events are the people involved. But much more, we need to make sure that nobody gets left behind. This means changing, transforming, and harnessing technology to create digital experiences that are as fulfilling, engaging, and connective as gatherings in the real world. Our shared challenge, then, is to innovate and lean into this future. And, most importantly, people-our customers-often now prefer them that way. And not when you can accomplish 95 percent of your event goals with a fraction of the financial, personal, and environmental impact.Ĭovid has forced a reckoning within the $3 trillion events industry: Some things that were always done in a certain way-like physically transporting hundreds of human beings to a single room-can be done in more efficient and more convenient ways. There are some meetings or events that may yet be worth the costs. This is one major reason we’ve seen our business grow exponentially over the past year with clients from Pfizer to Accenture to Bloomberg hosting everything from tentpole events to daily investor calls on our platform. There’s no doubt we all would have preferred to be in the same meeting room at the same time, but there’s a cost to that: getting on a plane, hours of transit, missing time with our families, not to mention the financial burden of moving our globally distributed workforce to a single physical location. For 90 minutes we all signed on to Touchcast-from India and Belarus and Israel and the United States and Portugal and beyond-and discussed the future of events. It was a bit like online shopping all over again-a bit strange at first, but then addictively convenient.įor instance, this morning I hosted a town hall with attendees from all around the world. They didn’t just get used to attending events virtually, they began to appreciate and depend upon the ease. And attendees grew accustomed to logging into a conference rather than flying to one. Travel expenses were redirected to digital expenses. Prompted by the pandemic shutdown, virtually overnight all events and conferences moved online. Which leads to the real question people should be asking: Is the events industry facing its own Amazon moment? Which is another way of saying, humans are lazy. ![]() To achieve our goals, sometimes convenience bests experience. But over the past 20 years, we’ve forcefully demonstrated with our thumbs that while in-person shopping is great, we’d rather lie on the couch and get shoes delivered for free overnight. ![]() Going shopping has always been a physical and social experience, trying on new shoes or checking out the latest iPhone. But others, like Macy’s and Pier 1, didn’t have the capacity to do so and closed. Gradually over two decades, as Amazon grew to dominance and e-commerce sales steadily rose from $5 billion to more than $215 billion today, some stores like Walmart and Target leaned into creating e-commerce front doors and managed to survive and grow. But if you walk through pretty much any American city today, you’ll see empty storefront after empty storefront. Throughout our lifetime, brick-and-mortar stores have been dominant. In particular, I think we can see clues in the empty storefronts that litter our cities. And yet I think the answer is not in what’s to come, but what we can learn from the recent past. One of the questions I’m most asked about is the future of virtual events, especially as the pandemic has begun to subside and people are venturing out into the world again. ![]()
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