The next generation of buyers and exhibitors will come from a place where information and communication is free and easy online. Steering them into our exhibition halls will require a new approach, with event marketing and continuation online key to the success of our businesses.
Claims that Generation Y seems happy enough staring at their screens, communicating via digital means and fabricated identities, is another unjustified fear for face-to-face event organisers, says Thimon de Jong (pictured), insights and strategy director at Dutch company TrendsActive. The clever play is to simply ensure it sits in a broader, carefully thought-out and implemented digital offering.
“A commonly made mistake is that this generation wants everything digital, that they’re just going to sit behind a computer at home and experience a conference from a screen,” says de Jong, who works with companies including Amsterdam RAI.
“But they don’t. They would like interaction before the event starts, they want to meet people during it, and after the event they want some digital content. Most importantly, they want to meet physical people as well; that’s not changing.
“They have bigger networks than us. So if you meet people online at some point, then you want to meet them and be able to see and touch them. That’s very important. It’s a deep human need. So it’s not digital OR physical, it’s both at the same time. They enhance each other.”
Marcus Maleika is general manager of Munich One Live Communications, which caters for corporate events such as car launches, product launches and incentives. He claims the need to cater for Generation Y has made a huge influence on the way his company does business.
“The biggest challenge we face is keeping the attention of this generation and focusing on the message, because this generation is used to getting this information at any time, consuming it and sharing it,” he says. “We recently did a car launch and the majority of visitors were Generation Y. After a few minutes the first of them started to go on Twitter.
“First of all you think that’s not so bad; they do our job for us, increasing the participation of the target group. But on the other hand we cannot control what the message they deliver is. We have a big problem these days with how to focus the message we want to deliver. So we focus on the key facts we want to transfer and repeat them.”
Getting them involved
And of course, with an army of short-attention span teens seldom parted from their mobiles, the need to create compelling content is more crucial than ever. “One thing we try to avoid is a break of five seconds in an event,” says Maleika. “If you have a break that long, you can guarantee they will stop focusing and use their mobiles.”
Involvement becomes a key element of this, giving them catalysts for interaction that exist beyond the little screen in their pockets.
“The strategic battle is for user attention,” says digital strategist David Worlock. “And that is one I think we will only win outside of the event, holding our audience throughout the year and working within their workflow. That means our presence, our image, what we give and our branding, is going to have to become larger in the way our users see us.
“We’re going to have to look at our customers and see what they do when they come to our door as exhibitors, as attendees,” says Worlock. “We’re going to have to see what their ultimate requirement is so much more clearly, and how they want us to behave in delivering that.”
And once that desire in our attendees has been established, the drive to capitalise on it must start outside the physical realm, online.
“If we do not put ourselves on a digital platform and embrace a networked society and work in digital terms with that society, we’re going to be overtaken by changes leading to transformations in other players. Physical events will always be a component, but they may not be the core.”
This desire for involvement is something that can be tapped by savvy event organisers, says Amsterdam RAI’s Ids Boersma.
“Generation Y wants to be involved. We asked the help of younger people to make a campaign proposal, launching a show with a temporary working title and asking people to come up with a name for the show.
This is called ‘crowdsourcing’. We got a good name out of this and it was an inspiring process.
“Our job is of course to transfer this message to the target group of the customer. But most of the decision-makers are not from this generation, and they may not have experience of this generation. In the end it’s always a compromise, if you are lucky,” he adds.
But de Jong claims you can easily address both Generation Y and the older demographics simultaneously, without creating a conflict in the marketing of your event. “It’s not Generation Y or the older generations; it’s both,” he claims. “You just add an extra Generation Y layer to it. And the older generation will like a lot of these things as well.”
“There’s a dangerous feeling that we’re doing the same thing year after year, because that’s what our customers want, and by the time we’ve re-examined those strategies, our customers may be somewhere else or doing something else,” he says.
We have to understand that the way in which people behave in a network is different from the way people behave in a real world, says Worlock, and this most certainly applies to the development of networks populated by Generation Y. “We might say our own behaviour hasn’t changed, that we might have a mobile or an iPad, all sorts of devices, but that ‘we remain the same person we always were’.”
But that isn’t the case, he adds. “We expect to communicate with people in a different way; more often but with less ‘touch.’ We expect them to express to us in a much more direct way. We think those connections are as vital to us and to our lives as meeting people physically.”
Getting creative
Margaret Ma, MD of UBM China, says that with some creative saving, UBM is capable of tailoring a certain part of the service offering to the need of its audience. “We do have certain part of our audience, for example, that would still prefer to receive printed material, in addition to the mobile app. Some day in the future I believe the printed material will entirely disappear, but at this moment in the near term, we need to cater for a different audience so long as there is a need for it,” she says.
“We ran an event called the Game Developers Conference and its App allowed you to not only add to your agenda, you can also share views with other users at this conference. As a potential attendee I can say ‘It would be good if the panel can cover this topic’, which makes their involvement a lot more interactive and makes the conference content potentially more relevant to the audience.”
“It’s an evolutionary process, not a revolution,” says Ma, pointing out that the process is step-by-step in synchronisation with the step-by-step changes in the demographic and technology. “It’s always important for a commercial organiser to try and do the right things at the right time. Not really do it for the sake of being tech, being cool – and someone from a tech background could be driven towards that but that could also be dangerous, commercially. Some are more successful than others, but we are willing to experiment.”
Boersma says that while one of the worries with the next generation will always be whether they are actually interested in the physical get-together, it is unsubstantiated. The physical get-together of people is not solely the domain of the older generations.
“It’s different, it will not disappear but things will change,” he says. “We are still in the process of understanding all the data and information we’ve got at the RAI. We now make sure that our ICT boards always contain someone in Generation Y, because we want to make sure that the policies made by these boards are not being made just by the older guys.”
Worlock believes people attending our events may soon do so in a capacity of their choosing, represented online by ‘avatars’, virtual instances of themselves, conceived in accordance with their corporate mission or personal preference. When we Tweet, for example, it’s from behind one of many masks we create for ourselves; as ‘marketing manager for Company X’, ‘humourous industry observer’ or as ‘target-shy sales account manager’.
“People will appear as they wish themselves to be, and our interaction with others will become a part of the record,” says Worlock.
This was first published in issue 2/4 of EW. Any comments? Email Annie Byrne
