THE RETURN OF THE LIVE EVENTS INDUSTRY

Hello, this is Les Goldberg, and welcome to The Road Ahead. The Road Ahead podcast is dedicated to the future of the live events business, bringing together industry experts. Hello, production world, this is Les Goldberg and The Road Ahead. Today I have two amazing guests. I have Kevin O'Shea, who is the Senior Vice President and Director of Technical Services for Jack Morton. And I have Mark Herring, who's the owner of 3D Technical Direction. He is the technical producer and the creative realizer. Guys, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you, Les. Guys, today we're going to talk about the return of live events. And and we're going to get you to opine as to the future. And we're going to give you each a crystal ball. And maybe out of your crystal ball, you can kind of predict what you think the future might look like. But I want to before I go down that path, I want you all just to reflect on the last 6 or 7 months since the kind of when the world kind of stopped in March. And I'll throw this question to Kevin first. Kevin, how can you describe the last 6 or 7 months and the kind of things that you've had to do and the type of events and, and all the things we've had to learn? How would you some that up? Everything is prerecorded or Vmax or open reel or you know, name the name the platforms out there right now, it it's taken a toll emotionally on people because, you know, I've actually yesterday I was on site with our good technology, the partners, they are doing some smaller socially distanced events. I mean smaller when I say it literally. It's a total of 12 people on site, including the clients. It's. It has changed. It has changed the world of of live events. Okay. Well hopefully. Well your crystal ball maybe have a we'll take it up and maybe we'll get a different answer. So so Mark, let's ask you the same question. How can you reflect on the last six months. And I've been in places where we've done shows together in studios and, and how could you sum up the last six months of your, you know, show experience? You know? Well, I mean, I have to agree with Kevin. It's been a vast wasteland and it's been very, very tough on everybody in the industry, including myself. You know, I've been lucky to have some virtual events that have been able to keep us alive. But, you know, all of my stable of technical directors that I, you know, I'm normally keeping very busy. I haven't had to call any of them for anything. And they're all struggling to make ends meet. And I feel terrible about that. And it's just a it's a rough it's been a rough, rough 2020 and I. However am positive I'm optimistic for 2021 I think I think there's the end of the tunnel is in sight, not necessarily of the pandemic but of the drought of live events. Okay, well, you know what? I'll take your optimism, because in this day and age, anybody who is optimistic is a friend of mine. And so I want to I want to reflect on, you know, we've gone through this experience. We've had to learn how to do this virtual stuff where we're living dependent so much on the internet, on whether it's ingesting or broadcasting and, you know, live events at some point in the future will come back, right? There's just a day in time, whether it's a year or six months. And so what I want to ask you this is to Kevin. Kevin, let's just say there's going to be a return to live events, and let's go into the premise that there's probably some type of vaccine or therapeutic. There'll be a solution that'll come out, you know, in the next, I don't know, 2 to 4 months. I have to imagine that I could be completely wrong on that. But let's just say that it's when you see live events come back, what size will come back and what will they look like in your opinion? Well, I totally agree with you that, you know, with all our pharmaceutical clients working 24 hours a day, I we will have the vaccine and I believe sooner than later we'll have a hybrid event where we're getting the message out real time to everybody around the world. That being said, that's probably going to last. I'm going to say that's going to really be from mid next year, 2021 until the end of 2021. Well, Mark, maybe let's use some more of that optimism. And how do you see live events returning. And and I'm prefacing it with the therapeutic or vaccines you know is is a size is it a scale. Is it a geographic location. How do you see the world of events coming back? I see them coming back. You know, obviously a vaccine is in the works and will probably be in the pipeline pretty quickly, but this virus is not going away anytime soon because not everybody's going to take the vaccine and it's just not going to go away. So you're going to we're going to be in an environment I think probably for the next 2 to 3 years, where this virus is still going to be a real threat of popping up and and having, you know, hotspots around the world. That being said, I have been fielding a lot of calls from clients, from agencies that are looking to that are getting requests from their end clients to, you know, pivot to small meetings, hybrid meetings where, you know, there's still an at home audience, but they're getting people together in rooms 50 people, 100 people, whatever the you know, the situation in that city will allow because there is a value of putting people in a room together and there is much more engagement that is happening. And procurement does swing a big bat, but the C-suite swings a bigger bat, and when they see that they're losing engagement with their employees and their customers, they're going to want to get back together in a ballroom. And that may be a hub and spoke link connection with a bunch of regional ballrooms and smaller environments. That may be a roadshow of, you know, small ballrooms where they're going around and doing that so that they don't have to deal with the connectivity. But I think all of these live events for the foreseeable future will have a virtual aspect to them. I think we're going to have to get creative as producers and technical people on how we curate the offering that we're giving to the at home audience that's not coming on site. That is, it's bespoke and different and and unique to them that we keep them engaged, that we're not just sending our program cut on an encoder out to the web, and they're just watching the camera cut, because that's not going to keep them engaged. They're going to tune out. So what I hear from you is small meeting size, hybrid virtual audience, live audience. And we're going to be doing that for a while. And depending upon what the location is, if we're in an open state or a closed state or whatever the geography, the boundaries are. So, Kevin, this question is to you, what are you if you're the meeting organizer or the producer, what are the concerns that go through your mind about doing anything, whether it's either a live event where you actually putting people in a room or how you tackle a virtual event. What would love to the top five things that you have to either be concerned with or you know would be your, let's just say, your hot buttons for success? Well, I mean, we're seeing it now, even with the virtual events that we're doing at the studio. It is, you know, the virus is still here and it's it's it's testing every day and it's it's having backup personnel on, on hand ready to go because, I mean, we're we're in the midst of doing an event right now out of Chicago, and we've had to send, you know, we could test it every day. And even the clients get tested every day. So that's the one thing. The other the other issue is, you know, when we're when we're sending signal out, you know, once we're up and running in show, it is it's the web. It's it's the internet. We don't control the internet and especially the last mile of connectivity for any attendee. Okay, Mark, Kevin's already got me shaking in my boots here. And and I do believe they're going to be putting people in rooms, you know, in in 2021. I know in currently in Orlando you can have events and in Seattle there I think it's 200 people in Las Vegas. It's 250 right now and it's changing on January 1st I think. But but Mark, take me through the eyes, in your opinion of the meeting organizer or the producer and add on to whatever Kevin said, what are the concerns that would go on the top, top list for you? I think, you know, one of the biggest hurdles for the meeting industry to get back to work kind of kind of off of Kevin's concerns, you know, as a, as a meeting organizer or in client is some liability protection. You know, if we have meetings together, even if we're socially distanced and sanitizing and all that stuff, there's there's potential that someone's going to get sick. And for the end, you know, whoever the agency is, whoever the client is, to have some liability protection for that, I think is really, really important. And that's going to be something that comes from Washington that's, you know, that I think is step one. For us to get back to work is creating some liability protection for them, some kind of cover, you know, but, you know, the events that that I've done, the events that that you were on with me, the PPE and the distancing and the sanitation, it worked. We had we had someone get infected and we had to shut down our site and nobody on our site got sick. Everybody, everybody tested negative. So, you know, if we put the right protocols in place and you're diligent about maintaining them, you can effectively have a safe work site. And I think that's the key to moving forward. You know, the concerns about the internet are definitely a concern. You know, I have serious concerns when someone comes to me and say they want to do a show because I don't trust the entire show on one computer box. And so I, you know, we want to have backups and redundancies and things like that. So, you know, those kinds of technical logistic hurdles, you know, there are some things that concern me there. But I think we can overcome those with thinking creatively out of the box. When somebody says they want to do a show, I usually send them to somebody else. That's that's something I'm interested in because I think there's just too much liability in one box. You know, whenever you have no backup, you're, you're it's like flying a plane with one engine. And as long as that plane, the engine keeps running, you're good. But if that engine doesn't keep going. That's not a good place to be on that plane. So. So let me ask this question. Will there be a health and safety officer for every show with a live audience, besides the studio kind of protocol, do you think that is going to be the next added position to our crew? That's already in my workflow for the foreseeable future is having, at least for the crew, having a health and safety officer, that's that's making sure we're maintaining distancing, sanitation, masking, you know, the the event we had in June, we didn't have one. And we realized that that was a necessity. So yes. And so I'm throwing this question to Kevin. Kevin, if you're doing a virtual show, how what percentage of virtual shows have a live component or most of them just prerecorded being played back? What's the percentage or what's the experience that you've seen? In my experience, it's it's a mixture there. There is always a live a live portion, whether it's it's whether it's a cold opening with the CEO coming on and welcome everybody or, or even, you know, we've been done we've been doing live portions where we're doing panel discussions from different cities. There are prerecorded elements, you know, ins and outs between segments. But we're seeing a lot of live elements within the shows. And I completely agree with Mark about the health and safety. Interesting. Okay. So Mark, this question is to you. Will meetings and events be fun again? Because gosh darn it, we used to have so much fun. We whether there was a gag a bit, you know, the the CEO got shot out of a cannon. You know, someone came flying in. You know, we've done all kinds of gags and bits. And it was always fun. And we got there and we heard that applause. It's very hard to hear the applause on your computer screen when you're in a virtual audience. So tell me, will we be having fun in 20 2021? That rhymes. I think we will, because I think every producer I work with is super fun and creative. And, you know, most of the the lead positions that lead players that I work with are fun and creative and, and I think we're going to have a just a ball basically, you know, instead of doing corporate theater in a ballroom, we're doing live TV now, and there's a whole new bag of tricks that we can we can access doing live TV. And I think we're going to we're going to really, you know, open that toolbox and use everything in it. Kevin, what do you think? Are we going to have fun in 21? That's my hashtag. I certainly I certainly hope so. You know, I'm hoping that the book shows of years past come back, you know, the old State Farm and the McDonald's. And, you know, I mean, Bach is absolutely right. You know, TV has been doing this for years and years and years. I mean, we could be it's the the creative toolbox is wide open at this point for our clients. And this is kind of my my final question. I'd like to mark utopian first and then Kevin and Mark. The question is this will the industry be changed forever from the experience of 2020? You know what we've learned, what we've had to deal with and how to how we've had to change and adjust our, our our approach towards communicating with live events and whether it's broadcast and meetings or virtual stuff. So so my question is, is the industry, has it changed forever? We can't go back. Yeah. I don't think there's any anybody that would say it's not going to be changed forever. You would be you'd have your head in the sand to say that we're going to go back to normal at some point. I think, you know, we will be constantly evaluating if the environment is safe from an infectious disease standpoint. I think even when there is no talk of COVID, there's no threat of any kind of pandemic in the future. Everything is very calm from a CDC standpoint. I think everyone's going to be saying, you know, where is the sanitation station? You know, where, where, how many, how close are people sitting together? I mean, there's going to be talk and considerations for this forever. Forever. Okay. Kevin has 2021, 2020 changes forever. What's happened this year for our industry I Marcus absolutely correct I believe it has. I think the hybrid is really never going to go away. And Mark's absolutely correct. People are going to look for the hand sanitizing stations. They're going to there. They will be leery for I'm going to say at least half a year, six months, when when we start opening up. But it is going to change because, you know, people are people don't have to travel. You know, technology has taken over. So I'm we will have big meetings and we will get back to the ballroom. But that hybrid solution is always going to be part of the mix. Guys. You know, it is so good to hear from two of the smartest guys I know in the technical direction field, and to get your thoughts and ideas about what the future looks like. I hope your crystal balls have some. You know, I hope that we actually get to go to a ballroom and use some of the safety standards that, you know, that new position is going to have to protect. I think companies are going to have a challenge forcing their employees to go somewhere, kind of like what you just mentioned, Kevin. So so I think first rules here to stay. And I, I have heard so many people talk about how 2020 has been such a challenging year. And I could say I don't want to wish our time our lives away, but I'm ready for 2020 to end so we can start a new year and have a year that we won't blame. Everything bad happened in 2020. It'll be something that we reflect for a while. But guys thank you again. I appreciate you joining. And this is Les Goldberg and The Road Ahead. And everybody guys good job. Thank you. Thanks Les. Thank you.