Enough time has elapsed since the start of the pandemic (and the temporary end of in-person events) that we can make some early observations about trends – and mistakes – we're seeing in the event space. In this episode we provide some cautions about the current market and offer thoughts about your own events through the end of 2020 and beyond. We are in a time of both uncertainty and opportunity, and only a smart strategy and creativity will prevail as businesses fight to gain your attention and participation.
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Prefer to read? Transcript:
Welcome to P3, the perfect presentations podcast. I’m Doug Borsch, vice president of Perfect PlanIt. This is going to be an event-focused episode again, since we’re starting to see some trends develop and this is a good time for a check-in on that.
We’re now 4 months into the pandemic. The country is largely trying to reopen in fits and starts. We’re in that in-between stage where we’re all anxious to get out and reestablish some normalcy, but still reluctant and apprehensive about sitting in a restaurant or getting a haircut. I’m no prognosticator, although I have my suspicions about how this will play out over the next couple of months. Unfortunately, politics is the lens through which so many decisions are being made, and that worries me, so my hope is still that you’re taking precautions and staying safe.
As I said, I want to talk about some of the events trends we’re starting to see emerge, some good, some not so good, and a few that will take more time to be able to evaluate.
I’m old enough to remember the first time I saw the internet. I don’t mean as a kid. I mean as an adult seeing a Mosiac browser showing actual web pages. It was fairly mind blowing to me, but not to my boss at the time who couldn’t understand how it had any advantages over a fax. He wasn’t what you would call visionary. I’m not sure I was either, but I sure as hell knew this was a sea change for our agency’s clients.
What I found interesting was how so much of the early internet was made up of two elements. First, access to information. A lot of it was academic-focused, but companies quickly started jumping in to create their own pages. I remember radio ads—remember listening through those?—where they’d end with “Find us on the internet at HTTP://blahblahblah.com. Man, what a world. The second were the entrepreneurs, trying to create new business models. Everyone knows Amazon was already selling books online, and so that’s what we tend to imagine. But there were plenty of efforts to try to replicate the real world on the internet. The best (or worst) example I can think of were virtual malls. Think for a moment about a mall. A huge building with every kind of store under the roof. Virtual malls were websites that you’d go to and hit a landing page that would in essence be the entrance to a mall. And on that page you’d see a ton of little banner ads for stores at the mall. Shoe stores. Book stores. Clothing. Jewelry. The idea, in as much as it ever could be called an idea, was that you’d go to the mall online just like you would in the real world, then choose your store, and each store was paid for by a merchant who had their store “AT” that mall. Let’s think for a moment about what a terrible idea that was. A 10-year-old would have asked the same question as an adult…if you want to go to a shoe store on the internet, wouldn’t you just visit the shoe store website directly? You certainly don’t go to a website that has within it a hundred stores and see if they have a shoe store.
I struggle to really convey just how dumb this idea was. And it lasted for the blink of an eye because of course no one thought that way, even in the very earliest days of the internet.
So that’s a good transition to the talk about the first trend we’re seeing with online events, and what we think is turning out to be the first mistake. It’s trying to replicate an in-person experience online, note for note. Now,
