Why should you consider B2B Digital Broadcasting?

Why do you do this? Tell us the why. And how did this all begin?

Well, I think it's probably fair to say, Ricardo, that, you know, if you spin the clock back, you know, 10, 11 months to January, and you'd asked me then, you know, would you like, how do you fancy building a virtual studio? You know, I would have laughed you out of the room. Right. So, you know, it was clearly born out of necessity and sort of, I guess, sort of to go a little bit deeper than that. From our perspective, you know, we've always, you know, we've developed over the last few years through our community. We were community first, so we were always a membership first business and sort of. We built that off of strength of editorial and strength of insight into our. Into our market, which is the renewables market. But the events for us were really something that, you know, we only kind of, I guess, discovered over the last couple of years. You know, we're very new to it. In fact, I'd say that, you know, in many respects, you know, I'm an accidental event owner, you know, really more than anything else. And. And so we were kind of. We spent many. We spent the last few years really kind of stumbling through the undergrowth, you know, trying to work out how to build an event and so forth. And we got to January and we were all set to run a physical event in Boston. You know, we had the sponsors loaded against it. You know, we were booking out the delegates. We were on that classic path. And then Covid struck. And from our perspective, we really had a choice, you know, at that sort of very early stage, which was do we effectively rebook everyone on to the following year, or do we look at a way to draw down that revenue and to make it happen? And I knew pretty early on that the energy that we got from that event was really important to be able to drive that energy and that sense of theater and that sort of emotive connection that for us was really important. And it felt that. I felt very strongly at the very beginning that to do that, you couldn't do that necessarily through a traditional zoom call. You know, my sense was that, you know, we were going to get. We were going to get zoomed out on that. And the idea that we could perhaps bring it to life through a sort of a TV studio concept was very appealing. And, you know, full disclosure, 20 years ago, you know, I studied theatre performance at university, and I distinctly remember my parents at the time saying, that's wonderful, but tell me when the hell you're going to Ever find a use for that degree? Well, you know, I like to think that maybe, if this year has taught me one thing, Ricardo, it's that, you know, there was possibly a use to that kind of that theater and performance background, and it did certainly help with the studio. But, you know, for us, it was an obvious choice. It was like, do we defer those events because I just couldn't see them working as a flat. A flat environment, or do we try and do something different? And I guess because I never read the rule book for how to run an event or how to build a conference, naivety wins, right? And it was kind of like, well, what could possibly go wrong with building a studio? Surely we can do that. And we very, very quickly took that decision to do it and communicated that to our sponsors before we knew how we were going to do it. I mean, that's the truth. Okay. But, you know, there's a load. There's a lot of reasons why that was important, but for us, it was about. It was about engaging with our sponsors really early and finding out what they wanted and understanding why they wanted to work with us. Ricardo, that was key. And really that was the start of it. You know, it was the fact that they were looking for something different. And I thought that that was something we could do.

And I think that what I like about this is that you did not have or you do not have what we call the event industry baggage that we highlight all the time. Because many eventrepreneurs, as I call them, they are now or have been in the process of, okay, how do we transfer this to digital? How do we. And then there are certain boundaries that, rightly or wrongly, they all have been kind of framed under these boundaries, and then that creates a lot of problems. And I liked a lot when you say about. Is about the emotion and is about how you're going to foster that kind of interaction even with the viewers. And I think that's a really, really important part that I wanted to highlight to the people out there is that having a studio in a studio environment, then you have that element of interaction. Yes, probably people are in lockdowns and all that, but there will be ways in which you can, keeping a safe distance, kind of have that kind of studio environment.