The conference producer’s dilemma – facing up to a hybrid future
Understanding Narrowcasting
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The pandemic and the explosion of online meetings has wreaked havoc with two major media business sectors.
The obvious one is the conference and exhibition business which is now trying to adjust, adapt and get back on its feet as travel opens up. The other, surprisingly, is the video and recording business born from broadcasting, which you would have thought was onto a winner. The pandemic did bring a lot emergency business to video companies who could simply plug their cameras into the internet, but not all is well post pandemic. The evolving art of Narrowcasting is different and more relevant to specialist and business audiences served by conferences.
Desperate corporate clients were prepared to pay top dollar during COVID for anyone who could make the technology work for more than 15 people. That being the average number in a zoom or teams meeting before dogs start barking, presentations won’t share, videos move around, and the chair can’t see who to call next while a separate argument breaks out in the chat.
But the pandemic also brought the idea of free automated meetings and access for all online. One client told me that they had got through the pandemic on all the savings they had made by having no conferences and physical meetings. No hotels, no travel, no meals, no work cover and all this zoom and teams kit was already on their computers. That financial thought has stayed with many organisations’ finance directors.
First the conference business. Some face-to-face meetings have roared back. Companies are investing heavily in team building, getting their staff back together and restoring morale. Even in companies where working from home is still a dominant trend. These new bonding meetings I predict will be growing to compensate for the fragmented nature of the “new office online”. You can see some of the serviced office providers morphing some of their rooms into high end hospitality venues to host these.
Commercial conference organisers and their executive committees, with memories of being burned by high video streaming costs or bad experiences with online meetings providers, have been happy to go back to tried and tested face to face models in nice hotels, great networking, and quality time out of the office. Sponsors and exhibitors, and the marketing people behind them, have been keen too – many of them having been furloughed or dropped during the pandemic or not impressed with online marketing experiences and how to measure engagement and leads.
Yet I have had several clients who have come a cropper with turning back to that 100% face to face approach.
As the day of the event approached some delegates realised there was no online option and rebelled. Who were these delegates? Not surprisingly overwhelmingly women, probably with caring responsibilities, who had got used to having access and being included in online events and were not happy going back to the side-lines. But also time poor ( often quite senior) delegates who might have to drop out of attending in person, wanted to hear one special speaker and had got used to having the guaranteed recordings of presentations to revisit post event.
More surprising were the speakers, especially top speakers, ministers and well-known box-office figures – busy, time poor leaders who had installed top tech on their desks and had been appearing online around the world without leaving home. They liked the productivity of it and expected an online audience and video output as an option. The novelty of travel had worn off for them a long time ago – they would only come out for very special events or the right fee. Putting the jigsaw of conferences together was getting a bit more complicated.
The past months have seen a string of last-minute retrofits to install hybrid live streaming so everyone can take part online as though they were in the room.
This should be attractive to conference organisers, after all this is a new revenue stream – online bookings. Look at what the FT does with some of its events. Free to attend in person which keeps the sponsors happy, a charge for online delegates which drives revenue. The delegates like it, the sponsors like it but the marketers are still working out how to measure impact, but they will work it out soon.
All through the pandemic the delegate response and engagement online and consequently the lead generation it produced, was much less impressive and it hurt to be an organiser when half the audience did not appear. In response too many conference committees or producers are behaving like old football association managers who feared that Rupert Murdoch and Sky would kill football with live streaming. No one would attend the match, they thought, if they could watch it on TV and the club would lose revenue.
I hear the same anxiety all the time from conference and exhibition organisers. But that’s not what happened to football, quite the opposite. Video brings new revenue, new audiences – you just need to know what to do with the video to add value for everyone, get the costs under control and reach new audiences. The more they saw the match on TV, the more they wanted to be there next time.
I can’t comment on conferences and the online world without talking about the big online apps and conference management systems. Cvent, Whova, Hubilo, Slido, ON24 and many more. Building a great business as online phone apps for delegates and conferences and trade shows before the pandemic, they leapt into action to plug video into the back of their systems. It did not always go well.
There were two approaches. Approach one – go full TV production – build a studio, build all your live streaming on the TV model, lots of slick prerecording, professional presenters and heavily scripted presentation. It filled a gap during the pandemic but lacked authenticity, which in business to business is very important. And the cost terrified all but the biggest exhibitions and trade shows.
Approach two was to plug zoom or something similar into online registrations systems and let the speakers (their staff) and the delegates run it themselves, all automated registration, automated reminders, all click to join, enter pin number, find your room, wait to be let in, register in chat etc. Again, this filled a gap during the pandemic, but the highly automated approach was often a car crash (see Party Political Conferences 2020) or a nerve-wracking experience for the producer. As one frustrated organiser put it “if it wasn’t for the speakers and delegates it would work fine”, not quite spotting the problem with that approach.
The real problem was huge over engineering and TV models at one end, with unsustainable costs – which get worse when cameras and AV have to go back into conference rooms. While at the other end an automated system that depended on speakers, chairs and delegates to have a level of technical ability that did not exist. And, again, when cameras have to go back into conference rooms for hybrid the costs have shocked.
For the video companies used to working to the TV and advertising model (a few minutes to convey one high impact image or idea) the problem has been their high cost model with careful scripting, filming, recording, re-recording, post editing. The very high costs for video in the conference AV industry (often simply projecting onto a big screen) are unsustainable for most.
The model and the disciplines of the video industry do not match the high pressure needs of 6 to 12 hours of “one take TV” – live streaming professional or business speakers coming out of a typical one day conference with a couple of break out streams and quickly turning that into an on demand video box set of recordings from the day.
In conferences the speaker should, and expects, be in control and it is a serious and costly mistake to forget it. Smart conference producers have learned the disciplines to film around the speakers and secure good quality one take TV with all the presentations in place with no expensive post edits.
The new live streamers are the conference venues that are now investing to turn themselves into de facto studios with live streaming capacity.
Some of their AV teams converted themselves into live streamers for the pandemic and did a good service to online clients. But some of the costs they are now quoting are 3 or 4 times too high to provide a good return on investment. In addition, a lot of the functions they have built behind the glass walls in the new control rooms are now available online, on the cloud.
Where’s the revenue is a common cry. The first overlooked revenue streams are the “cancellations”. Most event producers face cancellations. Next is buyers’ hesitancy if their diary is not certain. It is not unusual, even with a paid fpr conference, for 5-10% of delegates not to turn up. If your cancellation policy does not repay them, they may never come back. With a post event, on demand video option guaranteed you do not need to refund a delegate and those who do this report no complaints and buyers hesitancy is overcome with on demand.
With the FT and others showing new ways of mixing payment models there is a bright future for affordable live streaming. A coherent approach called narrowcasting is emerging to distinguish it from the broadcast model most other video producers are used to operating in.
Narrowcasting is a wrap around editorial, filming and publishing model for high value narrow, specialist, professional audiences across a variety of sectors, often with their own business language, working at the cutting edge of new policy, knowledge, science, and technology.
The current challenge as in-person audiences are coming back unpredictably and half the online audiences often turn out to be on demand audiences.
However, there are 4 new challenges coming over the horizon where livestreaming will need the wider approach of narrowcasting to meet the need.
First, the pandemic fallout does not seem to be over, and employers (and their insurers) may be asking staff to be cautious and not travel or mix as a new strain comes along with the flu.
Second, we are going into a new period of austerity, companies and organisations are already tightening budgets, especially in the public sector so remote access and interactivity will be essential .
Third, the demand to reduce the carbon footprint is already leading organisations to pick the low hanging fruit of reducing staff travel, and conferences are an easy target.
Fourth greater equality of access for women with caring responsibility, people with disabilities and those who are just time poor. During the online world in COVID they had access and are not going to give it up.
Narrowcasting is a new way of looking at evolving conferences into studios, looking at bigger audiences, new revenues and new publishing models. It demands new affordable technical and video solutions but also wrap around editorial and publishing skills for specialist markets.
So live streamed video is here to stay, and smart conference producers are looking to turn their programme assets into narrowcasting programmes with new revenues and bigger audiences.
Register your free place here for the free Hybrid Conference webinar on 13th January at 10am.
Neil Stewart
Neil Stewart is the CEO of Neil Stewart Associates, a conference consultancy company that has worked for 30 years in specialist public policy and association conferences development for government and the private sector. He created and has run several businesses and has worked for INFORMA and other leading conference media groups. He is the Editorial Director of the Narrowcast Media Group, the livestreaming division of Policy Review Projects Ltd.
For more information contact Angelo@narrowcastmedia.co.uk or ring 00 44 207 324 4330
