FOR A HYBRID EVENT
A hybrid event is a physical event that has a portion or the entire content program available online; bottom line, there is always a physical element to a hybrid event.
The obvious and immediate appeal is the expanded reach you have to engage a larger audience that doesn't attend the physical event. We know for the foreseeable future, events will be virtual and even when we go back to physical events you will still see a virtual/hybrid portion of the program included; the world has changed forever. Think of the hybrid element of your event as your event insurance policy going forward. It is your continuity plan in this unpredictable world we now live in. When I first got into the world of streaming and virtual events, a lot of event organizers would be worried that if they offered their event and programming online, that they would have fewer people attend the physical event because attendees would decide to stay home and watch online and they would make less money from the event.
I used to tell clients, prospects, and anyone who could hear my voice, that virtual events do not cannibalize physical events. In fact a good virtual event will make the virtual attendee want to attend physically and it would give you the ability to grow your audience and keep your event going after the physical event ended, but a lot of event planners were still too scared about the risk of cannibalization of their event and could not see the value of bringing their events virtual. Well guess what: it's not that virtual events are cannibalizing your physical events, it's that the world has now cannibalized your physical event.
Many forward‐thinking companies have and will use hybrid events to increase their audience across geographical divides and further their education and communication. Despite fears of dropping in‐person attendance, data suggests that physical face‐to‐face participation increases with hybrid events. Hybrid events also extend the reach and life of your content, allowing companies to tap into new markets, acquire new attendees/users, and open the doors to more business opportunities and engagements. As we think about going back to some sort of physical event, I believe you should add a virtual or hybrid element to any meeting or conference you are planning now or in the future; the technology is finally here to enable you to easily do it.
As I look to the future, I believe we will start with smaller physical events, let's say audience sizes up to 100 or so people meeting simultaneously in various cities around the country or even around the world at the same time, and you will be streaming/broadcasting to and from each of the locations and to a virtual audience, all at the same time. I believe even when you plan meetings with thousands of attendees, you will have satellite/hybrid audiences at various physical locations and a virtual audience participating from home or their offices.
LEVERAGING THE POWER OF VIDEO AT HYBRID EVENTS TO ENHANCE AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT AND SATISFACTION
I have had the honor of working on a lot of truly innovative and amazing virtual and hybrid events, so I asked a former client and collaborator to give an example of one of his hybrid events from the pharmaceutical industry. This is a hybrid event that I had the privilege of working on with Spiro Yulis, CEO and Founder of SkyArx, a pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing and event company.
A global top 10 pharmaceutical company was launching a new respiratory product and wanted to include virtual events as part of its promotional strategy for communicating with health‐care professionals. The marketing team had experienced limited success with traditional webcast programs for other product launches and was looking for a more innovative, engaging, and personal virtual solution.
After consulting with the client on a variety of approaches, they decided on the delivery of a hybrid solution broadcasting to live and virtual audiences.
The primary speaker for the series, an international thought leader in respiratory medicine, presented as part of a live dinner program in front of 75 physicians at a restaurant in a major market. His presentation was broadcast to audiences at 15 other live dinner programs across the U.S. as well as hundreds of at‐home viewers.
We featured all these remote audiences across the country on‐camera as part of the broadcast to create a sense of connectedness among participants and foster a more personal and engaging question‐and‐answer session. We also enabled audiences from their homes or offices to participate and ask questions as well.
Each live program site was staffed by a single‐camera broadcast crew to capture audience activity that was integrated into the broadcast. The show opening included a “round robin” of live introductions of each location, where the local pharmaceutical representative program host shared a greeting from their audience with some local flare. Live footage from the sites was peppered in throughout the broadcast, with a fun and lively second screen gamification activity mid‐program to keep the audience energized.
Participants from all sites were invited to ask the speaker questions live, on camera, at intervals during the broadcast, showing in split‐screen with the presenter. Offering a real‐time, on‐camera, verbal exchange with this national thought leader was a big draw for them, and a differentiator from typical webcasts where audiences are limited to typing their questions into the perceived “great abyss” of a webcast platform, only for them to go unaddressed during – and after – the program. The “1:1” live interaction with the speaker and the ability for each of the live sites to see each other on camera were definite keys to success.
The final participant total (live and at‐home) was a record for this company's virtual events in the respiratory category.
Results:
Registration for the event was 77% higher than that for the company's previous product launch webcast. The program format created significant buzz with physicians, who then recruited colleagues, including some from practices previously flagged as inaccessible. The program also opened many doors for the sales team.
64% more participants joined this event than this marketing team's previous satellite national broadcast.
In a post‐event survey, 82% of participants reported that this was the most engaging hybrid virtual event in which they had participated. The real‐time “face‐to‐face” interaction with the speaker and a feeling of connectedness with the other live sites were cited as the top two reasons.
The company's leadership team was so pleased with the event and resulting product inquiries that they replicated this model across three following product launches.
ADDRESSING COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS AND MYTHS ABOUT VIRTUAL EVENTS
When I started out in the streaming business in 1998, people still had fax machines, high‐speed internet at home was a luxury and didn't exist in many locations, and streaming video was not HD quality and was the size of postage stamp and then a playing card. When you started a new job you probably got a desktop as opposed to a laptop computer. Oh, and to give you some context, the iPad was still 11 years away and the iPhone was still 9 years away. Also just to give more perspective, Joseph W. Lechleider, who is credited for being one of the inventors of high‐speed internet, was probably never thinking about sending video over the internet; 4G internet was not launched in the United States until 2010. With 5G launching globally now, the ability to receive amazing quality content anywhere in the world is now well within reach.
In the early days of the internet, online events and webinars were a small part of the events business and, quite honestly, an afterthought for event planners and conference planners.
Cutting‐edge advancements in video, audio, and integrated communication technologies have made it possible to do much more online. Gone are the days when companies were forced to deal with
