Outsell Predictions about F2F
We’ve been writing about the exhibitions space since 2013 — and even before that. This week I “dug out” some of our work, including the 2017 report Digital Transformation in the Exhibition Industry, to share with colleagues. One of them sent back this comment:
“Outsell is prophetic. The following copy (p.9) from that whitepaper struck me, again, but this time with more much punch than in 2017, when I was busy, happily rolling up assets. The only thing you missed Anthea is that it is not a storm in 2020. It’s a hurricane!”
________________________________________________________________
Once digital change comes, it will be fast: The history of digital developments and their effect on the transformation of industries is not very long. If we’ve learned one thing from the past, however, it is that Digital Transformation shakes up powerful industries. It surprised the music industry, and will most likely come as a complete surprise to many other industries.
At an UFI event in 2015, a senior manager in the music industry gave a presentation that explained how digital changed her industry. She described how the entire industry ignored the problem when the first music-sharing platform went online. They saw this kind of platform as a “hole in the pipe of their business model.” They believed that fixing the hole by forcing the sharing platform to go offline would solve the problem.
They did not expect that this platform would trigger a storm of user behavior that would destroy their business model in record time. As she said, suddenly there were so many holes in their pipe that they simply were not able to fix it.
That is how the old music industry disappeared and was replaced with something new. This example makes the event industry think about whether they want to be equally unprepared when the digital storm hits them.
________________________________________________________________
I thanked the gentleman who wrote me, a long-time client and colleague, and remembered the painful lessons that have unfolded over the past 20 years of covering this industry when sectors weren’t prepared for the disruption that strikes.
It wasn’t just the music industry that didn’t see it coming. Newspaper providers didn’t see it coming. Encyclopedia publishers didn’t either. Nor did yellow pages publishers, nor textbooks publishers after that. Taxis were upended by Uber and Lyft, hotel and lodging by AirBnB — which is now, in turn, being disrupted by COVID-19 — and retail first by Walmart, then by Amazon in a double-whammy of offline and online goliaths.
Disruption has a funny way of sneaking up, and when it happens, it’s not funny at all. What’s happening in F2F events, as Outsell VP & Lead Analyst Randy Giusto says, is more like an earthquake than a hurricane. Earthquakes sneak up, eerily silent, with barely any notice at all. In minutes they can rip out foundations, tear down houses, and liquify the ground underneath everything. There is often little to repair, and it is simply hard to patch anything together for the foreseeable future.
Indeed, how companies build new foundations in this new environment will be key for the long haul. Those foundations may not look anything like the foundations that were there at the start of 2020 — in fact, we believe they won’t. However, people and companies are resilient, and so are businesses that adapt and change. We are seeing this daily in exciting new ventures being announced.
Digital events will find their place and will live alongside F2F when it returns. That said, our prediction is that just as print dollars turned into digital dimes and digital became the favored medium with print coexisting alongside it, we will see the same happen in events. Registration and sponsor dollars will be lower for virtual events, but virtual will become the favored state while physical events live alongside their new brethren as the wonderful specialty products they are.
It was just a matter of time. Whether it was Extinction Rebellion rearing its head at exhibition halls and balking at travel, or next-gen “social-media-centered” professionals happily connecting a different way, the writing was on the wall.
Now we’ll see who rises with wonderful new options and who inspires us with new ways to connect. We look forward to those experiences, and we also look forward to F2F events again. When F2F events return, our crystal ball says that they won’t go back to ever being the way they were before.