PILOT

Hello live events. World. This is The Road Ahead. The Road Ahead podcast is courtesy of LMG with your host Les Goldberg. The road ahead. The world has changed for the live events business and what can we expect? Today I wanted to come out and give you some of my thoughts and add some of my team's thoughts about where we are and what we can expect. The current medical situation in the United States and the world is limiting large gatherings. And while we look for medical solutions, you know, we also wonder what is our path forward for our businesses. The live event space of staging events with lights and sound and cameras and large screens and and big audiences has been around for many, many, many years, for decades. And the business won't effectively go away while we re-engineer our companies and have to figure out what we can do in the interim while we're doing some alternatives for live events. So, you know, the dilemma is that business transactions happen at exhibitions. They happen in in large ballrooms, convention centers. They happen in in breakout rooms. They happen in all different types of environments. And what people have to realize is that big, large transactions are typically not done on a on a video conferencing platform. They're typically done in person. So the in-person live event, the tools that people are able to deploy, the emotion, the ideas that when people gather together, they create a certain energy among themselves, which gets people jazzed up and motivated to go out and roll out a product, or to recognize great performances of people for for companies. But alternatively, there's the concept of doing real virtual meetings and trying to engage a virtual audience. I would like to ask Sean Borowski, who is head of video services at LMG, maybe could you explain the difference between a webcast using the typical methods or a virtual meeting? What are the fundamental differences and how do the the WebEx and and Zoom's and Teams and go to meetings? How do they play a part in that last? Those tools are very powerful, especially in this time where we're all having to meet virtually and we're having to have conversations with our team members, and we're having to do training. They're all independently very powerful. They all have their pros and their cons. So, you know, with video conferencing tools, they tend to not be for a very large audience. Webinar tools are meant to be driven by a teacher, and so they're not really great at bringing in multiple presentations or conversations, you know, so standing on their own, all are very useful in this time. But when we're trying to put together a live in-person event meeting, we want to we want to be able to feature more than just what these tools can offer. And we want to take advantage of some of the strengths of those tools in our workflow. And so, you know, one of the biggest things is, is in a live event, we want to have a production environment, we want to have a backstage. And so we have producers and we have team members and technicians that are all having a conversation and leading and moderating this workflow together. And that's something that you don't get in any one of the individual tools. Oftentimes our clients are coming to us, and they want to be able to institute paywalls or enhanced security and encryption. So these are things that go beyond and above most of the standalone experiences. But in virtual meetings, what we're talking about is collaborating all of those tools at times together in order to pull together a cohesive event. What we aim for in virtual event is to have a higher level of production quality than just me sitting in front of my web camera, talking into my web microphone. It's much more intentional in when we're showing presentations, when we're playing back videos, if we want to have conversations back and forth with our audience. So we want to use tools like moderated chat. We want to use tools like polls and questions and pull in conversations from our audience. And then just like in video conferencing tools and utilizing video conferencing tools, we want to be able to have conversations with each other. We want to transmit those conversations to our audience, just like we do when we bring somebody up on stage and we have maybe a moment where we're sitting there having an interview or having a conversation. So just like when we do events in person, have a very controlled environment for our audience. Now I also have Matt Hayes with me from LMG show team. Matt, obviously a client can just go line up and organize a Zoom meeting and can do it literally, very simply in minutes. But maybe you can talk about it from how we're dealing with production companies and how they're trying to add value and produce these events. Kind of where Sean left off was a webcast seems pretty simple, but a virtual event has some level of production. What are the tools that we offer for production companies to use and and how do they get deployed? So we have the tools. They could be used in one particular way. You know, we've had things from trying to get prerecorded sessions so they can be live on demand, but being able to bring content together and bring all those elements in one place so that post editing doesn't have to take a lot of time. If you have 300 presenters, you're not going to want to have to go through and edit 300 presentations where some solutions from other companies have been just all post editing, you know, we're happy to record and do that kind of thing. But, you know, when you're talking to your attendees of, oh, did you did you get these delivery points? Also, seeing the interactivity and the analytics that are being able to pull, that's the one thing that, you know, we have live information now is seeing the analytical information off of these virtual events. You can see where a presenter joined from. You can bring in login information if you have that part, you know, pulled into the system. But also you can see where there's trail off, there's engagement levels on these events. So there's a lot of different ways to measure engagement and the end effect of these events. So coming up with unique solutions of combination of studio space, being able to have a unique view, you know, we were already using the Ross virtual solution for augmented reality and on screen graphics for live events, but we're now bringing that into play for virtual studios. So at the end of the day, really, it's just been an overall conversation with our clients on what are they trying to achieve? What is the setting? Is it 100% remote? Is it from a studio? Is it going to be a live event? And, you know, the conversation that we thought was happening before about what it is for the live audience and the remote audience? A lot of times it was really just about the live audience and the solutions we were providing for the virtual audience. We're just kind of going by the NASA now that we're having these conversations. It's becoming a much, much bigger part of the conversation when we go back to even live events. Matt. Thank you. Also, it sounds like these this virtual component will be around for some time. I have Rich Tate, who is head of our show team in Orlando, Florida. Rich, hey, I want to know what are our clients asking us for right now in regard to any type of virtual events? Well, that's a really good question because they don't want to compromise and do something completely different. They have sponsors that they need to speak to. They have messages that need to get out, and they realize that there's an option out there to do this, but they don't want to take a step down. They still want to present their content in a meaningful way and providing the experience for their clients. So they're asking about how can we have multiple presenters? How can I still do my slideshow? I need to do video roles. Can we pre-record information? How do I need to present it? How can we interact? How can I bring in people from different parts of the country and still have a moderated panel? How can I do all the things I'm used to doing? Because our clients are used to having a script and a show flow and have everything organized, and they have an order to how they want to do things. They need to do awards, presentations. They need to figure out the technical aspects of doing those kind of things. They still need to have their show, and it's to provide them those solutions moving forward so that they can still do what they need to do and not feel like they're compromising. Production companies add production value, and producing an event provides a better outcome, higher engagement. It's about, you know, playing back content and interacting with the content. And you know, it's all of those solutions. Don't do that. And some of our solutions will let us bring a Zoom call in and we'll bring them in. We can we basically want to take a boring old webcast and make it into a show. That's the story. I'm going to throw this back to Sean. Sean, what is the risk when you do a virtual event of what technically could fail in the process? Well, the biggest component of failure in this type of environment, less is the fact that we're all relying on the the open web, on the internet. And right now is an unprecedented time of utilization as people are having to work from home, as people are having to go to school from home, as people are having to, you know, entertain themselves. Certainly in North America, our utilization of the internet as an all time high, and as we tried to pull together a fully functional, collaborative environment of a live event, we are also on that backbone of of the internet. And sometimes this comes to last mile challenges of of the internet's good up until your neighborhood and your neighbor starts downloading content. And so backing up that internet connection in is the biggest hurdle in challenge in doing live virtual events. Well, it is my belief the live event business is here to stay. The virtual event will be with us for some time, and we're just starting to value the technology that we have, you know, available to us where we can do these type of things, and we have connection speeds that are fast enough that can accommodate it. When I go into the future, the road ahead is still for the live event. Business is still positive. It's just we're we're experiencing tough times and we just have to modify our behaviors until we're able to gather in great groups again. Thanks, Sean. Thanks, Matt. Thanks for joining me on this, and I hope you all get a little perspective from our viewpoint about the road ahead.