The spirit of innovation has truly thrived amid this pandemic. We have seen major convention and exhibition centres in our region leading the charge towards venue and event digitisation, bringing onboard infrastructure that facilitates quality livestreaming and broadcasting. Along the way, hotels have joined in to offer livestreaming and broadcasting facilities, eager to be seen as a worthy supporter of increasingly popular hybrid online/in-person business events.
Venue managers that have gone on this path will soon realise that the only way to move is forward because with every online or hybrid event attendees experience, their expectations for quality content will rise. This puts pressure on event producers and planners to come up with novel ways to keep content and engagement interesting. In turn, event producers and planners will come to rely more heavily on partners that can help them easily turn ideas into reality, perhaps through the right equipment or with a collaborative mindset.
Far-sighted, savvy venues have continued to evolve and improve their digital and hybrid event offerings. They are finding audiovisual and broadcasting solutions from specialists that once catered only to television productions. No surprises there, as many event producers and planners have likened producing an online or hybrid business event today to delivering a major live performance.
Innovation is not only booming on the hardware front. The number of event software vendors across the world has expanded by 400 per cent in the past year, according to a global mapping study conducted by marketing specialist, Hoosh. You can read about this on TTGmice.com.
It is natural to feel that the familiar past of pre-pandemic days are more comforting than the unknown future, but the technology changes we are witnessing today are giving us a peek into a more exciting business events landscape to come, especially for conferences, meetings and product launches that could benefit from some creativity.
The combination of innovative event venues, new specialised apps to answer known and yet-unknown online and hybrid event needs, increased investments in event technology, and the consolidation of established event software players will ultimately benefit event producers and planners as well as attendees.
