What's Next For Events? with Bizzabo Co-Founder/CMO/CCO Alon Alroy and SaaStr GM & SVP Amelia Ibarra

It. All right. I'm going to give people, like one more minute to get in. All right. Alone. Any fun facts about you that folks should know while we have one last minute here?

Fun fact. Super excited that my kids are about to start school. I'm sure many people in the audience are excited if they have the opportunity for their kids to attend in person. So I'm personally very happy that somehow I'm in New York City and my kids are about to start school in person. That for sure will make hopefully their life and my life a lot easier. So definitely excited about that. After feeling like a nomad for many, many months.

Yeah, I know. My nephews just went back to school too, so it was a whole thing. Since we're talking about events today, I know we just have a few more people joining here. What's your favorite event you've been to? It doesn't have to be sas, just like any event ever.

Favorite event I've been to. You know, I've been wanting to go for Burning man for a while. I cannot say that I've. Okay, that's good than one. But it's on my to do list. Hopefully at some point it will get to what it used to be. Not a virtual one. Definitely a big believer in in person experiences, and that's definitely one that I want to check off. In addition to that, I had a very good experience at south by Southwest at some point, and honestly, a Coldplay concert a couple of years ago was one of my favorite events. Not the professional event, but I had a great time.

Yeah. Wouldn't have picked you for a Coldplay guy.

The best.

They really. Yeah, you know, they don't disappoint. They've been around for a long time. They're pretty good. Yeah. Thanks for everyone for joining. I know we've been live for a few minutes, so Lona and I were just riffing on what our favorite events were before we actually kicked off here. We're so excited for you guys to be joining us here at Annual at Home. Obviously, we're talking a lot about events today, so we just wanted to do a little icebreaker on favorite events. I have a lot on my bucket list that I was supposed to check off this year, but rain check for next year in person. So I'm Amelia Barr. I'm the GM and SVP here at Saastr. I'm sure many of you know me from the many emails we send to our attendees and on social media, and I'm so thrilled to be joined by Alon Here he's the co founder, cmo, cco, wearer of many hats at Bizzabo. Saster has been a Bizzibo customer and fan for many years now. We're great partners alone, like any other intro you want to give to the audience about yourself.

I think these are amazing and challenging times for the event industry and I'm very excited and happy to see many of our customers and many event professionals, professionals in the audience. This is really a time for the industry to show up, to be innovative, to deal with a lot of stress. And I really think that there isn't any other industry and profession that have that resilience to navigate through these crazy times. And in general, I think this time is a time where we see so many creative people coming up with so many different innovations. And I'm very excited to talk about what's next for events. So thank you. Thank you very much for inviting me.

Yeah, no, we're stoked to have you. Elon and I had like, about the length of the session prep call where we had a lot that we went through. So we're going to start hitting the points. So obviously, state of events in 2020, we've been talking a little bit about here. You know, obviously Saster Annual was. Was supposed to be earlier this year, had to be postponed due to Covid. We're now reimagining it here you guys are live with us as a digital event. You know, TechCrunch is going totally virtual for Disrupt in a few weeks. There's no Dream Forest in person this year. There was no Coach Hollow, which I was very sad about. You know, all the events in the Bay Area, across the world getting canceled, doing it digitally and yet as alone. And I talked about, and we know the cloud is on fire, especially for events, digital events. It seems like every day there's a different digital event happening or people are announcing their, like, you know, speaker lineup for their next virtual event. So virtual events have definitely been experienced this boom. And sort of being one of the COVID beneficiaries, as we call it here at Zaster, it's like events are not taking place the way that we imagined that they would take place in 2020, but they're definitely finding a way to not only thrive, but like, survive and thrive and like, really try and take things to the next level. Obviously, we're all used to using zooms now. We're all, you know, people alone mentioned earlier his kids going back to school in person. Like some people I know are doing virtual classrooms. Like there's a lot happening virtually these days. You know, internal events are going virtual for a lot of folks. I haven't been to an internal sko, but I know that some folks are doing that is definitely different than, you know, the usual of like going, taking your sales team somewhere nice. So things are definitely looking a bit different this year, which we wanted to just use as a launch point to talk about what's going to come next. So obviously we all know about the state of the world today. You guys are on a virtual event right now. So I think the million dollar question for all of us, and we talked about this a lot, both of us together, is when are events coming, going to return? And I want to let alone talk about the survey that he did, which I think is very interesting because we had some similar learnings at saastr. So why don't you tell us a little bit about this study and how you guys got to this graph because I think it's super interesting.

We surveyed a couple of hundreds of event professionals, mainly from larger organizations, usually organizations who definitely have the teams that are heavily impacted by this prediction because they are planning a lot ahead. You can see based on this Data that overall 82% of event and marketing professionals plan on waiting until 2021 or later before resuming in person events. You see that 29% are claiming that in person events will be back later than spring 2021. 33% spring 21 and around 20% as of now, kind of sitting on, sitting on the fence. When we did the survey in May, people were a bit more optimistic. We saw that there was around at the time 25 if I remember correctly, or even 40% thinking that Q3 would be. I'm pretty sure that even sastor at some point you guys were under the impression that potentially Saster would be in person. So I really hope that in a quarter from today we'll be in a position to actually execute those predictions and not push those because I know that most of the people in the audience are very much looking forward for events to be back.

Yeah, so we, we did a very similar survey, not as big as yours. So like let's use your data here. And you guys had a really cool graph that I was like, all right, let's, let's put this in your news. This is a launch off point. We had very similar results of people saying spring or summer of 2021, which has helped us, you know, we're, we're tentatively planning annual, definitely in person next year for summer 2021. Right now, obviously there's a lot of implications for live events for next year that I want to go into and using this data to sort of mold it. Right. So one thing I want to talk about your, we talked about is like comfortability. You guys have like a lot of, you have a lot of different customers. You know, you've got gainsight HubSpot us like running a lot of different, similar but like different events. Like what have you seen from like your customers and your clients about their planning? Like does it align with this? Like what are their implications for like attendee comfortability? Right. Because there's one thing about people wanting to go back to events, which is what your graph has here, which is great. Like a lot of people in line with like next year they want to go, they want to go back, right? So the demand is there. But let's talk a little bit about like comfortability. Like what have your customers, what have you guys seen and shared about like you know, people being comfortable going back. Like, do you think math will be involved? Like what are your thoughts here?

First, it's a fascinating topic and my personal opinion is that there will be an audience that organizers will not be able to ignore who will not feel comfortable to go back in 2021 until there is a widespread vaccine available or until more regulations are in place in regards to how to run events. I think the more innovator event organizers will be ahead of the curve and will be the one to push the industry to set those safety health standards. We're already seeing, for example, our on site team that powers on site technology at events already working on several contactless check in experiences and I think that will just become the norm. That said, I predict that towards H2 2021 we're going to see more local events taking place with a larger remote audience. Participate because of limitations on business travel or after a year of not having business travel, people are starting to see the advantages of it and not everyone will just go back to doing so just to meet a person. And maybe it's a good time to also talk a little bit. We all mention hybrid these days, which are well aligned on what is the hybrid definition? If I go to the basics, a hybrid event is one in which there is at least one virtual attendee and at least one attendee who is attending in person. That said, and from all of the insights that we get from some of the amazing brands we work with, they're all thinking about, okay, how to actually prepare for hybrid. It sounds maybe simple on paper, but we See how complicated virtual events can be. We know how complicated interesting events are. Now, mixing them two together, it's not one of those cases that it gets easier. It actually gets a little bit more complicated. And people definitely want to create those hybrid experiences, meaning to allow engagement between a remote audience and an in person audience. And I do think that it will open up amazing opportunities to expand the reach of an event like we already see now with the virtual events of attendance rates is 5 to 10 times higher than in person. Usually too many different opportunities for a remote audience to actually engage with the people on site. And the people on site will have an opportunity to engage with the people who are on site, but with a remote audience as well.

Yeah, I want to hit that next. A lot of what you're saying on hybrid, I think one thing I want to touch on just a little bit that you're talking about here and we talked a little bit on the pre show call. The comfortability thing is just so important for folks. It's like you have a lot of really big customers that are running much like Saster global events. It's like there's implications not only for the US of when will events come back, but there's also this global community factor of like a lot of people who typically come to saastr and a lot of your customer events fly from all over the world to the Bay Area to come to this event. Right? Because it's so value add for them. Like they can come to an event, they can visit their customers, they can go do a prospect dinner. Like they get multiple checkboxes when they come to the Bay Area and come to an event. And I think right now, obviously it's hard for us as an industry to sort of nail how we do all those things virtually. I've seen some people get crafty and they're definitely trying to get that sort of engagement back of like, okay, let me hit all the audience. Not just like attend the content, which I think we've been a bit slower at. And then I think in terms of comfortability, right. One of the things we chatted about was like, you know, what does health and safety look like for next year? Obviously, like, as event organizers, there's a lot of onus, I think, on the organizers, as folks know, for Saster, right. Of like coming up with health and safety standards that make all your attendees comfortable out of like overabundance. Right. Like do things that you're like. I know it'll seem like overkill to most people, but there will be People where, you know, they'll want all those extra little things like hand sanitizers, masks, social distancing if that's still around, like, you know, plexiglass, like outdoors. Because outdoors is, you know, provably safer. Like, there will be all these sort of factors that event organizers are going to have to take into consideration when we go back to in person. Just because I think, I think we both agree here that like, you know, you're going to want to make sure that every attendee feels comfortable walking in the door, that they feel safe, you know, that a. Obviously it's allowed, you know, that events can return, but not only is it allowed, but that they feel safe. Right. It's a, it's a. It seems like a big jump today, doesn't it, to go from like you're sitting in your home at a virtual conference to I feel comfortable going back to a conference with 3,000 other people, no doubt.

And I think our social skills are probably taking a hit when we're all working from home and. Exactly. Events is the ultimate social exchange. And I think we're going to see new interesting roles as part of the event organizing team will become those health and in a way, compliance experts. And there will be different, either badges or ranking of different health criteria to exactly do what you talked about before to make your audience feel very comfortable. And things are moving so fast and we all need to stay very much up to date with all of the new innovations in terms of timely checkups that you can do that people will be able to get tested on the day off instantly and get a result. And I do see that people will have certain criteria. I'm sure that regulation will be in place for you to be able to actually highlight the health or safety level of your organization in a way that will be shared among the industry. People will know what is a level one, level two, level three and so on to empower people to take the right decision for them and. But it will take time. It will take time. And for that reason, Hybrid is going to become the new king. You will not be able to ignore the virtual audience.

Yeah, let's talk about it a bit because I know we could literally talk all day about. So we have like 25 minutes. So. Yeah, I agree with a lot of what you said. You know, rapid COVID testing, you know, they've already started working on this. It's already becoming a reality. So I think by next year, you know, it'll hopefully be readily available to us event organizers. But I agree with you Like a level of system. So let's switch a little bit to hybrid because I know we both agree here that like hybrid will be the future of events. Again, for that comfortability, ease of audience. You know, it's not easy for all founders to get on a plane and come to the Bay Area for all the reasons we mentioned, which is why a lot of folks are going hybrid here. And so you're. What you guys have seen in your data is that many people are already planning their next event to be a hybrid event.

Yes. Again, most of them are talking about H2, 2021 and they already have plans in place to start in person events, which is again, great news. And it also drives event software companies to think about that day because I like to think that until March 2020, an era has ended. The in person era has ended. In a way. We're now in a transition period called the virtual era that it's not even possible to run in person event. Having said that, the virtual era, virtual being an only option. It's a matter of time. It can be. We can argue whether it's H1 or H2, but the hybrid era is coming. And in order to be prepared from a technology from comfortability perspective, from a production perspective, there are many production implications to have. Hybrid events have been run for many years. Ted or Web Summit or many people who actually streamed their event. But in my mind, the hybrid event is not just let's make sure to stream our event because the big difference is that you actually want the remote audience to feel part of the event, not just the event is taking place in Silicon Valley and people can watch it from around the world. You want people to actually be part of the event. And that's a big challenge of how to not neglect the virtual audience and how to make sure they feel very valued in our part of the conversation, part of the engagement and part of the networking.

Yeah, I agree with you wholeheartedly. Like something we've been talking about internally with our 2021 annual planning. Right. Is like whenever we have it agreed with you on like the timing here is, it has to be high. It has to be hybrid. Obviously for us it's like a no brainer. I think B for us too. It's like we almost think about them as separate events. There is like an annual in person event that will be next year that it's like it will, yes, definitely look different than like other annuals we've had. You know, again, for comfortability, all these factors we've been saying and then there's going to be a virtual event which will also be its own entity. And I think you have to treat these. Obviously there's a lot of implications for marrying the two, which I want to get to next because I know you and I had some good points here that we covered off on so well. Yeah, let me flip to that slide. But yeah, so there's, you know, there's this whole implications of marrying the two of hybrid and in person to create a hybrid event with the digital. But I think the digital, you know, is not to be overlooked. Like, you almost need to give it its own team, treat it as its own event. So it's not what you just mentioned, right? If people are just tuning in, like you can tune in to like Comic Con panels. What you were saying, TedX, like South by for years, but it's not the same, right? For years we're like, oh, this sucks. Like, I'd rather, I'd rather go to that event. Like it's not the same as it is in person. I think it's because these people just stream, like streaming from a stage does not equal a hybrid event. Right. Like those are two very different things. Like, let's just say, yeah, maybe technically by definition it's a hybrid event. But I think if you want to nail the attendee experience, the sponsor experience, the organizer experience, you have to treat these as separate events. And I know, you know, there's obviously we've mentioned like a lot of people going digital, a lot of people are planning to go hybrid. I want to hit on these implications that you and I chatted about just before we run out of time here. So I think, you know, you've seen a lot. What are, what are maybe your top implications for folks to keep in mind when they're planning their next event, you know, defaulting them to being hybrid.

So I think you're right that those are innovate to different events. But I think that what we need to do is to challenge our industry and the organizers to actually treat it as one event with two audiences with special needs. Because if we treat it as two different events, we may create a disconnected experience for the remote audience. So, for example, I think we need to look at data in a holistic manner. We need to look at networking and engagement and meetings in a way that, yes, your location is, you're not at the event, but we're going to allow you to meet a person who's on site and vice versa. You are not maybe watching the main stage live, but we're going to provide you with an amazing stream and with the many tools to actually engage both the stage and the audience. And that said, we also need to create enough advantages to attend on site.

Yep.

Because after all, I think, you know, we all, everyone was here, like, is a big believer in the power of in person. And I did hear people say, if we're going to offer so much for the remote audience, in a way, why would they show up?

Right. Why would they go back?

But that said, again, the power of in person is, will always be there. So people will always have a reason to actually interact in real life. The amazing advantages we already see with virtual events is obviously reach, which translates into more leads, more pipeline. Definitely. One could argue that in terms of the lead scoring or the lead strength compared to a live event, it's not there. Meaning yes, you get more, but the level of engagement with those leads is not like.

Right. Because you can't have a conversation with that person. You're also missing like, you know, the spontaneity that you get out of in person events. Right. It's like you can have somebody walk by your booth and have a really great conversation and have that person turn into a customer either right there or like the next day. Right. Which we're not really getting right now at a virtual. Not yet.

Not yet. But I can tell you that we're working on it and I'm sure many other of course are working on to create those serendipity moments of those random meetings. Because everything that is happening at the hallways is what is missing. Now in most virtual events, yes, you watch, you consume amazing content and you can do some potentially one on one meetings. But people attend events. In my mind, most people think that the audience attends event because of the content and because of networking. And I think that there is a third, very, very clear reason for people to attend events, which is just the overall experience to bump into random people, to bump into different experiences. And this is what we need now to create and this is our job as technology enablers to empower organizers to actually create those engaging experiences and to have people be surprised and even emotional, even if they are only accessing an event from remote. And I definitely think that when you look at the gaming world or E Games, when you look at companies like Twitch and Netflix and so on, we're going to borrow a lot of the successful elements of these platforms to then create a lot of innovation. And I think in a year, the things we're going to see on the virtual hybrid space, it's going to be almost a revolution compared to what people see now. The world had shifted to virtual in six months and I think it's amazing what the event technology industry was able to do. Think about what would happen actually in a year and a half that you see so many millions of dollars are now being invested in our space.

Yeah, we touched on earlier. The cloud was on fire. I want to end with like just some positive takeaways here, right. Like, there's obviously a lot of implications for going digital, which we could do a whole other session on of like, you know, it's a loner and I like cattle sharing. Like, it's tough. Like it's not, you know, it's not the same in person. Like we're running SaaS or annual at home and I can't see like they're doing an amazing job. But I wish like, you know, I could see them that like I could take them out for dinner every day. Like, certainly not the same. So I'm a little bummed about that. Right. But there is, you know, you hit on this great point of making connections. I think, you know, that's something that we're trying to all nail is with our virtual events as they're getting better and better and you know, eventually going to hybrid is like, you know, there's this great thing of like, you know, giving your audience access when it's a digital event now in 2020, like, you know, we've been trying for years to get Ben Chestnut to speak for mailchimp and we finally got him this morning because it's like easier for him to do it virtual than, you know, fly Fly from Atlanta SF like, you know, he's very much involved at the mailchimp, like team. Right. So it's like for him to take time out of his days is super tough. So we finally got him because we went virtual. So it's like, it's definitely great because, you know, we're getting more attendees than ever before. We're getting like these speakers that were like our unicorn speakers that we've been trying to get for years. So like, there's definitely a lot of benefits benefits here, right? A lot of learnings on, like making it easy for people with digital. You know, we try and keep it about like 20 minute sessions or so, which means we have to wrap soon. But, you know, we try and make it easy. There's some cool things some of your clients like Salesforce is doing of like, you know, we went to a Salesforce event last week. They had like a live band which is uber cool. Like people are still trying to make, you know, make it even better and better. Every time there's like a new digital event, it's like it's just getting better. So obviously a lot of good reasons to go digital now, but obviously a lot of implications too for like what's coming and what comes next. So I'll let you hit on your top takeaways here in our last minute.

I think overall and the reason that we see such a hype around virtual events is that at the end of the day, we as brands, we need to engage our audience, our customers and our leads. And I just like I believed before, events are still the most meaningful marketing channel in driving engagement, whether they are virtual or in person. Talking about pipeline, I definitely warmly recommend to anyone who has not run a virtual event before. I can tell you that we ran our own virtual event in May, one of the first largest virtual event productions since COVID hit. And that was a huge enabler to our own pipeline. It was a great reminder. Okay, let's eat our own dog food. To make sure that we also feel the power.

I say drink your own champagne, but it's a good analogy.

Champagne is always better. The fruitation attendee experience definitely is key. There are many events taking place now and we see many creative things like Salesforce use placebo and they use this jungle theme and HubSpot as an example of they understand that people are joining from home and some of their sessions are audio only, which I think is very creative. And in general, I think Hybrid is going to be that holy grail in which people will need to create an experience that is 1 +1 =3. Meaning it's not just a virtual event and an in person event taking place over the same time. It opens up a lot of creative ways to connect those two audiences. And I think there are a lot of good reasons to, to wait for and I'm optimistic about the state of our industry because I believe in person events will be back.

Yeah, well we had a, we had a lot of great points Sarah, that I'm sure we'll get to next time. Like we'll have you back, we'll do a longer session. I know you and I could talk about events literally all day long. So for folks who want to get in touch with you is Twitter. Twitter's the best way. Tweet ya.

Twitter. Yes, My email is aloneizable.com if anyone wants to shoot an email. And again Emila, thank you very much for your time. I know there's a lot of curiosity about this topic and we can definitely arrange such a session again.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Thanks. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for being here and making the time. You know, I think it's always great to hear what you guys are doing internally, what your customers are doing. Obviously us being one of them, but we're just one of many. So it's always nice to hear from you what's next on the forefront of events. So thanks again alone.

Thank you guys for running. Thank you for running an amazing SAS conference and bringing in the community together and such amazing speakers. So I know that you're a small team and you're running an amazing production, so thank you very much and great job.

We try. Thanks a lot, everyone. Bye. Bye.