David Worlock has worked across media businesses for 40 years. He spent 25 years as a digital strategist and built a digital business in the 1980s. He built the first classified advertising database for the newspaper industry in the UK, a tool dependent on the input of 800 papers across the country. Five years later it collapsed because the newspapers could not decide on investment levels or how fast they could go. Today we see these newspapers disappearing from the scene all over the place.
Here, Worlock shares his views on the need to embrace online communities and evolve our businesses as our industry overlaps further and further with the digital arena, a place where he who handles data most proficiently is king.
The events business is one of the great heritages; one of the dependent areas of our working lives, business or consumer. Events are something that many, many people depend upon as an integral part of their annual calendars. The great game we face today is that of working in a society where the primary means of communication are changing and relationships between individuals are becoming increasingly networked.
The industry has to change. Unless we create a digital base in our industry and transform this industry into a digital environment, then the future looks to be a bleak one. If we do not put ourselves on a digital platform, if we do not embrace a networked society and work in digital terms with that society, then we’re going to be overtaken by changes leading to transformations in other players, and changing our competitive position.
Physical events will always be a component, but they may not be the core. The strategic battle that we’re in is the battle for user attention. 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, our branding, is going to have to become larger in the way our users see us. We have to become more effective. We have to offer our clients a great deal more value in the experience they have.
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, as members of a conference on a conference floor. 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. We’re going to have to move – in the world of data – not from passive to active exactly, but from active to new levels of activity.
What happens in terms of data? Well, everyone tries to claim the community. I have seen examples of events companies who say they invent communities. This, with all respect, I do not believe. A community exists: you can adopt it, you can develop it, but you cannot invent it.
The event organiser is, of course, a data gatherer. No event can take place without pulling together huge amounts of data. But that is just a speck in the ocean of the data available on the participants in event marketplaces.
I don’t believe that people have to pull all that stuff together. I think you have to make it accessible. You have to make yourself the gateway, the front end, the interface to huge amounts of data available in the marketplace. Connect the people who are attending your events through your brand. The physical event may well be the figurehead, but an awful lot more things are taking place. And those things are all data-driven. And yet, it seems to me that event organisers are not data-driven; data-users maybe – but not data-driven.
The harvesting of useful data
So how are we going to get ourselves into the data management world. I would make the argument that platforms are cheaper and easier to manage than ever before.
As I studied this industry I consulted a leading software platform manager, a US company called MarkLogic. They told me around 20 per cent of their customers are in the events business. Getting events content onto a platform where it can be analysed, where predictive analysis can take place, where you can pull out leads that can shape future events strategies – that seems to be very much state-of-the-art.
One could question whether players in this marketplace can gather, interface, edit and re-use content effectively, but the content is there. It is not simply a matter of saying ‘Well we’re not able to harvest content from our attendees’. All that data is there, it’s in the marketplace and it’s on people’s websites. It can be effectively gathered and it can be integrated. You can be leaders in this sector. And you don’t have to wait for somebody who has a media brand and wants to get into to physical events to come along and compete with you. 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, doing something else.
Again, that engagement in the network play seems to me an essential part in how an events company is going to face the future. Live video streaming from conferences may indeed become not an option, but a necessity in the next two to three years.
The nature of networks
In order to do all this you need to understand the nature of networks.
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. 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’. My point is that we don’t. 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.
We have a saying in my branch of consultancy: ‘Nothing will ever succeed unless it has first failed on the web’. Let’s work with the idea that what we’re doing is prototyping. What we’re doing is experimenting. Beyond every prototype we move then to a finale, to a more developed product. But perhaps we never stop prototyping. Perhaps what we do in the network is always reiteration. We have the technology.
Then let’s envision the future. This will be a world populated by avatars [virtual instances of ourselves]. People will appear as they wish themselves to be, and our interaction with others will become a part of the record; maybe a confidential part of the record or perhaps a part that we wish to share with the people we didn’t meet. In this environment the things that are annoying in today’s world will become more certain. Uncertainty is something we try to eliminate.
This world begins by getting our data at home right, getting it onto a platform and being able to manipulate it. It may seem like a long journey, but when competition heats up it will seems like a short haul. The future is much longer than that.
This was first published in issue 75 of CMW. Any comments? Email Zoe Vernor
