No going back

With the clocks going forward to begin British Summer Time, the first easing of (we hope) post-Covid social restrictions, and UK vaccinations reaching around 50% of the population, there is a growing sense of relief and optimism that things – finally – are back on track. We are nearly through this. The future that we have all been longing for is nearly here. What might that mean for our industry?

It has often been said that the future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed. It’s also a tried-and-tested truism that businesses only innovate when they really have no choice. The effects of the past year have accelerated these truths to their logical conclusions. The results are likely to present the live events and experiences world with challenge and opportunity in equal measure. This is not an existential threat, but we are going to have to adapt.

Back in 2019, working from home seemed to many like an impossible dream. When polled, 99% of us said it would be nice to have the chance to work from home one day a week. Skip forward eighteen months and working from home has increased by 400%, two-thirds of us are happy about that, and 74% of CFOs and 80% of CEOs say they are likely to make part-time work-from-home the new normal.

Add to this the rise of the Zoom call – 300m people attended a Zoom meeting every day in 2020 – and you might think it’s going to be difficult to coax a B2B audience out of the house again. If anything, the opposite is true.

While 87% of business respondents say that a Zoom call is better than the old-fashioned conference call (more useful, engaging, productive) the number in favour of the physical face-to-face engagement is also significant – 85% of us believe that real-world interaction builds better relationships, and 95% of us favour the face-to-face in the building of meaningful long-term business relationships.

There is also a sense that aspects of the new normal may already be starting to pall. Citigroup is one of many major corporations to begin reining in the use of Zoom (via Zoom-free Fridays) and is actively encouraging scheduled e-free time-out and mindfulness periods. We are a social animal. The Zoom call helps us scratch the itch but it’s never going to be the cure. We need to be together, and when we are not together we need some time alone. How soon before the dream of working from home becomes the nightmare of living at work?

It’s unrealistic to expect an immediate and huge swing back towards live events, nor are we likely to now embark on a Golden Age of events and experiences, where we have more projects than staff to deliver them. Some clients are definitely keen to get going, but for many the past year has been a period of discovery and reassessment – that not all events are created equal, that sometimes the virtual makes for a more cost-effective solution, and that some meetings perhaps aren’t really necessary at all. At TFI Lodestar we are embracing this change in perspective and helping clients navigate it. We’ve learned a lot in the past year too. We want to explore the new terrain in tandem with our clients, and plot a better course together.

The physical, live, face-to-face aspect of doing business isn’t going away – not because it’s traditional, but because it’s effective. We engage better, learn better, retain information better, and feel better about the deals we’ve made when we physically interact with each other. Companies and associations that have previously relied on real-world deep-dive sales and training meetings, customer incentive and reward programmes, shareholder summits, conferences, congresses and colloquiums will in most cases continue to so, and will continue to benefit from them.

Audiences will need to be given support and encouragement – levels of reluctance to travel post-Covid vary around the world (in the UK and US the figures are relatively low, but in parts of Asia this could be a significant obstacle) – and we must continue to make a firm and highly-visible commitment to safety, sanitation, and social distancing. We want to engage, but many of us aren’t quite ready yet. That’s natural. We’ve been through weird and testing times.

Many of the next-generation events and experiences will reach much wider audiences – including paying audiences – via live stream or in the form of post-event content. Opportunities for broader communication and richer revenue streams have the potential to make conferences even more valuable than they were before. Other, smaller, periodic check-in and update meetings that were more about logistics than content or production are more likely to remain virtual. Most new client ‘event’ briefs will require the physical and the virtual to be considered equally in the creation of a blended response. The virtual and the hybrid are here to stay.

However things play out, one thing is certain: there is no going back. The new normal won’t feel like the old normal. The old normal is buried beneath the rubble of a seismic shift, and as we emerge into this new reality it will take time for us to appreciate the changes. A lot of what we knew before will remain in place. Things that we previously paid little heed to will suddenly enjoy new prominence. Unexpected consequences will appear like sinkholes. This is a new landscape. It’s time to draw new maps.