ST. PETERSBURG, Florida. — Ken HolsingerSenior Vice President of Data Solutions at Freeman, and Kimberly Hardcastle-Geddes, President and Chief Marketing Strategist of OMD, rocked the room with a premise of their own session during SISO recent CEO Summit.
“We’re not going back to 2019,” Holsinger said, and with Hardcastle-Geddes, presented research supporting that fundamental societal shifts have radically altered the business events landscape.
According to Holsinger, there is no point measuring an event by the last full year of trade shows before the pandemic. “The discussion keeps coming back to the comparison with 2019. That is simply not the case, we are not going back. We need to move forward and assess this new environment we are in, make changes and adapt accordingly. — and it is painful for us.
As a researcher who has been in the industry for a long time, he has 10-year benchmarks that go back 50 years, he said. “We’ve abandoned them. That’s certainly where we came from. We’re not abandoning them, but we have to understand that a lot has changed with our audiences, consumers and the environment.”
“We’re seeing a frantic, emotional and logistical need to make up for lost time and that’s a big danger,” he added. “On the association side, we’re seeing content clutter in schedules when in reality, research tells us that the No. 1 complaint from attendees pre-Covid was that sessions were too long, they were too busy and there was too much content all day to absorb. In fact, attendees are saying they don’t need more learning time, they want to spend time with their colleagues.”
While we are seeing a massive reintegration of people into society, Holsinger said, they are looking for quality experiences, whether it is in sports, restaurants or travel. “If people are willing to risk their money after the pandemic, they are not going to do it at a substandard restaurant. Fine dining and chef tasting restaurants are booked up for months. If people are traveling, it is not trivial, they are taking epic trips. The destinations they are visiting are richer in experiences. When we look at events in this context, we have to understand that we cannot go back because the world has changed,” he said.
The final shift is among the participants themselves: audiences are returning younger, less loyal to specific industries, and more digitally savvy. The Great Resignation and the Great Retirement have lowered the average age. An estimated 70 million people changed their email addresses in 2021 because they lost their jobs, retired, or quit, which has significantly impacted email marketing results. Add to that the millions of women who have had to leave their jobs to care for young children or aging parents, and the fact that younger children still can’t be vaccinated, making travel difficult if not impossible.
“All of this involves different audiences, different preferences, different ways of communicating with them, and we’re just beginning this cultural shift,” he said.
Contact Ken Holsinger at [email protected]
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