Welcome to our round-up of content on day two of IBTM World Virtual. Yesterday we saw 9000+ meetings take place, over 7000 sessions watched, meaning we’ve now totalled 1,100+ hours of content watched!
We also dropped into some insightful and engaging sessions on the Knowledge stream – here are our highlights:
Tech Watch Live – finalist pitches
As part of this year’s highly anticipated TechWatch Live awards, the five finalists had the opportunity to pitch their product or service to the audience of events professionals at IBTM World. Chair of the judges for the TechWatch Awards, Dahlia El Gazzar, from Dahlia+ agency, introduced the pitching session by talking about the challenges of 2020 and what this year has taught us in terms of technology and implementing it in an innovative way to help brands succeed and thrive.
The five finalists were selected from 33 event tech submissions, and scrutinised by 19 expert judges from the Tech Advisory Group.
After Dahlia’s introduction, we heard in-depth presentations from the finalists.
These include Clipr, which uses machine learning technology to analyse recorded video content and highlight key topics making it possible to search and share moments that matter.
“Meeting fatigue is real,” says CEO and Cofounder Humphrey Chen. “There are 55 million meetings per day in the world. In 2020 the pandemic moved much of this activity online, where it could be recorded. This gave us an idea. What if we could get out lives back? What if we could build an AI that would quickly prioritise the moments that matter most? What if we could search for what we needed from these meetings, rather than attend?”
Then we heard from Consensiq, an intelligent polling tool which works on the basis that groups make better decisions than individuals and helps use this wisdom of the crows to the max. Kjell Lutz, the Consensiq moderator, explains: “We want to take voting to a deeper level, by having better dialogue, exploring options, stimulating shifting opinions and opening people up to new insights and perspectives.”
Consensiq allows people to vote on a variety of topics using a sliding scale of 1-100, which presents a complex view of any given situation. It also allows participants to see other’s points of view, and to change their minds.
Stephane Bernier President of Pubsphere Exhibits took us through the idea behind their innovative new solution for the event industry. EGID is a wearable solution with built-in light detection and ranging technology to discretely inform people nearby to respect and maintain their physical distances.
Says Stephane: “We are as eager as you are to revive the event industry, which is why our dedicated team has created EGID, a proven solution that will help ensure physical distancing on the trade show floor and beyond.”
Yarkin Sakucoglu, CEO and Cofounder of Socio, then introduced the Socio end-to-end event management platform, with a demonstration of how this interactive and user-friendly platform works including case studies from previous events.
“Our customers want a modern, intuitive, self-service solution that can be up and running within minutes. A powerfully customisable and flexible solution that fits their event needs,” says Yarkin.
Last but not least, we heard from Troop, a technology platform which enables planners to organise meetings based on data rather than opinions. Troop analyses various data points which influence where a meeting should be held using a rich data set which includes travel restrictions, health and safety, sustainability considerations and cost. Troop is a single source of information which aggregates all the date points needed to decide where a meeting is held.
Founder of Troop, Dennis Vilovic Troop says: “With the pandemic, what we’ve realised is that today we’re doing remarkably more. We’re actually helping the industry to get meetings happening again.”
To watch the session, which can be found here, you must have registered for IBTM World Virtual (registration is free via. www.ibtmworld.com). Don’t forget to tune in to IBTM TV tomorrow at 19:35 when the winner will be revealed.
Incentive travel 2.0 – what will incentive travel look like in a post-COVID world?
Jenn Glynn, President SITE 2020 and Aoife Delaney President SITE 2021
Jenn and Aoife looked to brighter times ahead and explored how the incentive industry is transforming for the future. Optimism for the future of Incentives is there around the globe, but the US is more optimistic – 63% of SITE respondents believe it will be back to 2019 levels by 2021. While the ability to travel safely continues to be uncertain, there is pent up demand for travel and its use as a motivational and reward tool is such that a boom is predicted when restrictions ease.
The priorities of organisers of incentive travel are continuing to change, with more now looking for enhanced soft power features (in terms of the importance of outcomes, in the research ROI drops from 1st to 5th position, replaced by Soft Power elements). For 2020, luxury experiences top the list of inclusions, followed by cultural experiences, CSR and wellness – the pandemic has made us dream of travel experiences that are off the charts – hence the rise of luxury and organisers are designing programmes accordingly. It’s also very worth noting the rise of CSR up the rank – the pandemic has taught us the importance of travel with a conscience.
There will be dramatic changes to the way destinations are selected and recovery will be local, then national, then international. A key decision-making factor will be the perception of safety and how a destination has dealt with the pandemic overall. The US has been hit by this and programmes in the country are being moved back to allow time for the situation to improve.
Incentive travel will recover – the question is not if, it’s when but there will be a continued prioritisation of soft power over hard dollars and a focus on the intrinsic joy of travel experiences with no strings attached and travel with a conscience.
To watch the session, which can be found here, you must have registered for IBTM World Virtual (registration is free via. www.ibtmworld.com)
What could COP26 mean for the event sector?
Fiona Pelham, CEO, Positive Impact and Miguel Naranjo, Programme Officer, United Nations Climate Change Secretariat discuss what actions the event industry needs to take to be more sustainable. This is set against the backdrop of the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26), which will take place in Glasgow from 1st – 12th November 2021. The COP26 summit will bring parties together to accelerate action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Fiona opens with a reminder that “there’s no doubt that sustainability is the solution to major crises in the world today” and outlines the four strategic actions the events industry could and should take in 2021. These actions are:
- Create a narrative on the importance of events, that speaks the language of the sustainable development goals
- To build capacity with the events sector so we all speak the language and have the skills
- Innovate through technology and new ways of connecting and interacting
- To show leadership
Miguel believes that the events sector can learn from what others are doing. For example, the sports and fashion sectors have established sector-wide initiatives covering all stakeholders to try to establish targets and plans to reduce emissions in a collaborative manner with support from the Climate Change Secretary.
Fiona asks, “What opportunity is our industry missing by not having a framework?”, to which Miguel responds “Well you don’t have everyone involved and with an initiative like this there is pressure on everyone in the sector to act. There’s only so much you can do on your own – you quickly hit barriers and as a society, we need to work in collaboration to effect real transformation.”
Miguel also confirmed that a new measurement tool will be launched by UNFCCC in the first quarter of 2021, which will be free to access. The tool can be used to estimate the impact of an event on the environment and includes pointers to help make the event more sustainable environmentally.
To watch the session, which can be found here, you must have registered for IBTM World Virtual (registration is free via. www.ibtmworld.com)
Survival of the fittest: Marketing your virtual meetings in 2021
In this insightful hour, Olivia Galun, Marketing and Membership Manager, IAPCO, moderated a panel discussion with top event marketing professionals Magdalina Atanassova, Marcom & Brand Manager, Kenes Group and Giulia Sarri, Marketing & Communication Specialist, AIM Group International.
The discussion centred around event marketing during the pandemic and beyond, and touched on video and influencer marketing, social media, the challenge of communicating to different time zones and sensitivity in communications during a pandemic. Olivia said: “We pretty much had to re-write the script for our marketing plan. As an association, we had to change our messaging and content to be more sensitive in the current worldwide situation.”
She added: “We took away the content for content’s sake. It has been a really good lesson learned for me. I hope we carry it forward.” Magdalina agreed, adding: “It was also an interesting year as we could lose all the unnecessary messaging and stick to what was really crucial. All of a sudden, we had one common thing no matter where we were in the planet. We all understood the same situation, so we all had this empathy for one another.”
Guilia said: “Internal communications was also really important. We focused on communicating a lot, and more frequently with our staff.” When asked how to make your event the must-attend Guila said “authenticity. It doesn’t really have to be mind-blowing, but it has to be really focused on what the audience needs.”
They closed the session with 10 helpful survival tips for the audience to take away to help market events in 2021.
To watch the session, which can be found here, you must have registered for IBTM World Virtual (registration is free via. www.ibtmworld.com)
If you would like to join us for Day 3 of IBTM World Virtual and experience all the live content we’ll be sharing throughout the day on our IBTM TV and Exceptional Experiences content streams, simply click here to register.