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In Conversation With Hubilo: Why asynchronous is in
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The pandemic has upended how events and work gets done. Where work is done is no longer a one size fits all; and when work gets done is also debatable since companies have shifted to remote working. Cathy Novelli, CMO at Hubilo, shares how the industry can rethink what events can and should look like in this new landscape.
Hi everyone, thanks for tuning in to another episode of In Conversation With. My name is Janice Khan, and joining us today is Kathy Novelli, SVP of Marketing and Communications at Google. From the pandemic, we know that where work is done is no longer one size fits all. When work gets done is now also up for debate, as companies quickly shift to remote work and now allowing employees towards eight different schedules. As a result, the rules of which day and time is best to vote to an event may no longer apply. It's no longer about expecting people to meet us where we are, but rather align events with people's journeys and psychographic needs. Today, Kathy will share how the industry can rethink what events can and should look like in this new landscape. Hi, Kathy. How are you? Hi, I'm great. How are you? I'm doing great. You know, super excited to learn how companies can align events with people's journeys and psychographic needs. But before we get started, can you tell us a bit about yourself and what you do at Hubilow?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so um, as mentioned, as the SVP of marketing and communications at Hubilow, um, I see all of our marketing and communications functions. And so really, you know, beyond just helping to build the brand and building demand for Huberlo, what I equally see my responsibility being is building this whole new category of virtual events.
SPEAKER_03It's no secret that traditional boundaries are not shattered over the past two years. Um, you know, work venues and time frames have also completely changed. With that in mind, Kathy, what are some of the biggest changes you are seeing in terms of people's attitudes towards events?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's interesting. So I think it's going to be a pendulum swing for a while. Right now, with parts of the world opening back up, I think a lot of people are clamoring to get back to in-person. I know I was. And then I went to two events, and now I'm really keen to stay at home again and join more events virtually. You know, but I do think there's going to be this pendulum swing. And what I think the business world and the consumer world around events is realizing is there is a perfect format for different reasons for different occasions, right? I think for some cases where in-person is really necessary for that next level of engagement or networking or whatnot, then in-person will make sense. It might have to be for safer purposes done at a smaller level than one might wish to. However, you know, on the flip side, if you're looking to really open up and educate the masses and really um democratize education and knowledge across the globe, then virtual will be a lot more cost effective and you know, drive the demand that you need. So it's really about figuring out what's your ultimate goal and then figuring out the format that works for your economics or the resourcing that you've got. So there will always be a different answer. And I think adding virtual and hybrid into that mix of what an event is just gives marketers a lot more tools in their toolbox.
SPEAKER_03I'm glad you talked about, you know, having a perfect format for different types of events, right? Because this kind of leads into my next question. So we used to have a set rule book on what's right to do in an event. So we have like what a right amount of time is should be for an event, the days that worked best and seasons that best fit the mood, right? But all of that has shifted quite a bit as a result of the pandemic over the past two years. So, how do you see the events scene being impacted by this?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's interesting. So I think we're going to continue to learn. Um, but over the last two years, we've learned a good number of things. One, that the definition of work-life balance has fundamentally changed. Previously, it was sort of what can I fit within my nine to five? How can I escape work to go take my kids to their soccer practice and whatnot, right? Is how do I fine-tune it? Now, more and more people are working from home, truly having to balance 50-50, you know, during the day and then squeeze in more work at night. Um, and with that becomes a new view as to what the audience will tolerate with regards to traveling to an event and actually going and being somewhere for four days. And if that isn't highly, highly valuable of with their time, I think people, their tolerance for what they're going to put up with, what they're going to travel away from their families for, has changed. And I think that continues to change, you know, a little bit more. Like, as I mentioned, when the world first opens up, people are very keen to get out of their homes and get into the real world. And they do that, they see people getting sick, and they're like, no, I don't, I don't want to travel again. So it just continues to be that pendulum swing. I think a lot of learning. And I think, you know, with brand new workplaces becoming hybrid as sort of the go-to model, the way that we engage our employees has also required, you know, breaking out of faces and boxes and really finding platforms that really engage them so that we can um sort of muster up that company loyalty again and why someone would want to love where they work, you know, because it isn't just a clocking in faces in in boxes. There's actually some culture that's possible with like an evergreen engagement platform.
SPEAKER_03Do you see this change in attitude in both the B2B and B2C industries?
SPEAKER_00It's interesting. So what I'm seeing at Huberlo is a lot more on the B2B side. Let me first talk about external use cases. So, from an external event perspective, I think that B2B is the more pervasive use case. Reason being is that events with consumers are often very easy to activate using social media channels. They can have, you know, tomorrow if they wanted to, a live event over Facebook or over YouTube with the community that they've already created online through social media channels. B2B companies are a lot harder, right? Because you've got different levels of stakeholders that are needed and a different type of engagement platform. So, with that, that's why I think Kubelo is seeing a lot more external use cases through from B2B companies. Internal is where it's getting a little bit different, right? I had mentioned this new trend of creating engagement platforms for employees to create a universal culture. That's where we're seeing it sort of equal across the board. Companies of all sizes, um, of all types are really thinking how do we engage our employees in a more meaningful way?
SPEAKER_03Okay. So I know you mentioned the activation methods and the platforms used, right? Are kind of different between B2B and B2C industries. What other start differences do you see when it comes to events from these two industries?
SPEAKER_00From B2B versus B2C. Yes, that's right. B2B, they generally have, um, in my experience, a regular cadence of events. You know, oftentimes there's um sort of a model, right? Where they've got, for example, two tent pole events each year masterfully planned for a whole year, right? And then a whole bunch of micro events that are smaller in nature, maybe 100 to 500 people, you know, much more sort of webinar-esque based. But B2C companies, usually when they are activating events, they're doing it in mass at scale, you know, to the largest community possible in one bang, unless it's sort of a a niche, you know, sort of niche contest or something. But more often than not, when they're pulling off an event, they want to be able to support a million people, if if that's how many people want to show up, right? So when they're when they're activating, you know, in my experience with a lot of the B2C companies, they will start out using our platform um for the first time for internal use cases. So if something goes wrong and they want to practice using it, right? They will practice it on an over an all hands and then really like get comfortable with it before they have an event that might have 500,000 people, you know.
SPEAKER_03I see. Okay. Thanks for sharing that difference there. Um, pretty interesting to know.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, lots of little nuances, but yeah, it's it's it's interesting.
SPEAKER_03I would now like to switch gears to talk a bit about content. People today are tuning in to content from all over the world, right? Or seeking experiences from across the world also, with so many people from different parts of the globe. How can event creators cater to the different needs and expectations and their psychographic needs?
SPEAKER_00That's such a good question and lots of layers to that. So I'll start before I dive into psychographic, I would actually touch a bit on demographics.
SPEAKER_01Sure.
SPEAKER_00Because what's really interesting is the expectations of audiences today are very different by generation. Someone like me who is a Gen Xer, I grew up in the world of boring webinars being the first form of virtual events, right? So my expectations of engagement and entertainment are very low. And when it is entertaining and really engaging, I'm blown away. But if you talk to my nephew, who is a solid Gen Zier, if it isn't actively engaging within the first 15 minutes, he's gone.
SPEAKER_03Yep.
SPEAKER_00Done. Right. And so things like gamification, leaderboards, all of those sort of ongoing activities during an event, he's actively engaged in. And I think quite talented more than I am at being able to listen to the content, engage in these side contests, like leave a session to go do part of a scavenger hunt, still come back to the session, like really multitask at an event. I'm not like that, but you know, it really speaks to the expectations of different audiences based upon, you know, their region, their age, um, also sort of the segment that they are within. So for at Hubelow, you know, our our three top um sort of segments or cohorts of audiences, if you will, are event management companies versus corporations and associations. And associations tend to be more of that traditional business model. They're not often injecting a lot of these gamification elements. However, Ian event management companies and agencies who are hired by companies to activate next level events are very much, you know, trying to test and like put in new features all the time to see what's really engaging. Going back then to your first question, which is around psychographics. I think psychographics have emerged during the pandemic. Before, events were very much sort of you had your more engaged attendees and you had those who are more passive, right? People who are really engaging with the networking, with the matchmaking, going to booths, right? They are there. And then there are others who their boss got paid for a ticket, so they went, they're listening, but they're not really engaging beyond that. During the pandemic, you actually see a lot more slices of psychographics. The people who are generally shyer, but you see them actively engaged in chat and contests at a virtual event. Um, and you see that same person actually downloading a lot of the content from the event. Like the people who were very much not engaged in person are much more engaged virtually. You will also see people who never had access to going to certain events, either because the ticket was too high, their company was not going to fly them out to the location, but now that it's virtual, they're able to go and they are all about, you know, sort of absorbing what is possible. And, you know, you're just seeing these new psychographics of very engaged virtually, not in person. If you give them hybrid options, they're no longer. So what's interesting as an event marketer, getting all of this real-time data about our audiences and really understanding how much of our audience is interested in receiving content in one format versus another. And when you're testing out different formats in different regions, you're actually realizing the difference of different cohorts, different generations, different psychographics, that it's really so um, as a marketer, I get so excited because very few times in my history in marketing has a technology rolled out that has fundamentally changed the way that I think about marketing. When search came, when Google came, upended the marketing industry.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
SPEAKER_00When social media came, total 180. And it's happening again right now with events of giving us this real-time audience data that is making us rethink our entire digital strategy.
SPEAKER_03So, how can event planners then bring together all these real-time data and create specific experiences that really cater to all these different audiences? And what are some challenges you think they will face?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so I would say the opportunity is endless. The challenge is the technology really quickly providing marketers the entire tech stack that they need. So, right now, for the virtual event space, every virtual event platform provides a degree of analytics, right? Here's the number of people who registered for your event, here's the number of people who attended, here's the amount of time that they stuck around for your event, you know, a few table stake sort of um data points. However, where I think the market needs to go, um, Hubert is already, I think, very much ahead in this area specifically, is providing much more rich 360 real-time analytics so that I can see of everyone who came to my event by region, by cohort, what content were they most interested in? How were they most engaged listening and chatting online? Were they most engaged watching for a little bit, leaving, but downloading a lot of content? Did they come into one piece to listen and watch? And then the rest they watched on demand. And who did what behaviors? By giving me that information in real time, I can actually see: hey, if we're talking about the technology needed, for example, to drive more 3D immersive virtual experiences, I know that mid-sized corporations in Asia right now are going crazy for that topic. And so tomorrow I can actually take that cohort of attendees, actually push that into my CRM and deliver a campaign against it if I have content ready to go. And generally, marketers do, right? They have content ready to go for any topic, for any cohort, for any region. And if they are queued up for that, their event can tell them in real time here's 500 people who are deeply interested in that, who, by the way, are not customers of yours. But if you send them the right piece of content tomorrow because it's top of mind, there's a very good chance that you can turn those audience attendees into warm pipeline, right? For your sales team. And that's a power that no other marketing source can provide as quickly.
SPEAKER_03It's true. And I think like even for in-person events, also, you wouldn't get that detailed a data set from what you just mentioned. You know, it's probably just number of attendees, where are they from, you know, the demographic.
SPEAKER_00But to take action and to build a campaign and activate it while the topics that they had heard at your event are still top of mind, there's nothing more powerful than that right now because you know, almost any other real-time data set that marketers have are more often than not modeled. They're not real, right? It's real based upon a cohort of 10 people and then they modeled out the rest.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Right. So it's really powerful.
SPEAKER_03Okay. I'd like to talk a bit about um the struggles that you know the industry has faced. So I would assume that tech would be one of the struggles since we have to pivot pretty quickly to virtual, right? But what would you see is the biggest struggle for the event industry as you know, we have gone through the world of virtual over the past two years?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'd say um it's twofold. Um, one is the reality that the that the market had to pivot, right? And you've got these event organizers who are not organically technologists. They are organically what I liken to half creative genius and half OCD master, right? Like they have to be intensely creative, but also intensely organized and detail-oriented to activate and manage all of the spinning plates. Um, and so they had to dive into a very uncomfortable world of technology in order to still hit the KPIs that their business needed from an event perspective. That itself was a huge pain point. But with that, I think what is happening now is a lot of event organizers, obviously, with the world opening back up, are like, yes, we're gonna go back to in person. Now comes the pain point of the year 2022, which is the CFOs of the world and the CMOs of the world now telling their VPs of events, whoa, what happened to the great ROI that we had from events last year, right? We're able to reach a lot more people, a lot more cost effectively. You're spending way too much money, and we're not seeing the ROI again, the pendulum swing. Yeah, like it or not, I think more and more people in events are going to have to, whether they love the technology or not, have to embrace that they're gonna have to use it more often than not, more often than maybe they even want to, um, in order to drive the business results at the K at the ROI that they need. This is why I always talk about the marketers' absolute need to become early adopters, whether they like it or not. I talk about my own pain when I was a media planner back in the day when Google came out. By coming out with their solution, or making me have to rethink my media budget, rethink how I staffed my media planning and buying teams, had to rethink the way that we allocated all of our resourcing internationally. And I was like, that's okay. Yahoo's search is working fine. I fought off Google for the longest amount of time because I was gonna have to retrain a team of 40 people on what search means and how to do it. And I was fighting it tooth and nail. You know what? There's only so much you can do when the rest of like the world is pushing you in a direction. Of course, finally we adopted it and we had to really learn it quickly because we were then falling behind the industry. So I think events were the last non-digital channel for marketers. And I think we're starting to see like some of this push and pull with the technology and sort of wanting to get back in person. But, you know, if there's one lesson that I always say is like, you don't have to love it, you don't have to adopt virtual 100%. But, you know, it's going to be a good idea for all of our careers to embrace it, see the benefit of it, and try to meld it into, you know, a cohesive event strategy that that drives all of the business results that we need in a cost-effective manner.
SPEAKER_03You know, I think most of us can agree that hybrid events are definitely here to stay, right? But the world is still pretty uncertain. And it seems like, you know, whenever we take two steps forward, it's one step back again. So, how can event organizers keep up with this uncertainty? And what advice do you have for them?
SPEAKER_00Um, I'll tell them first. I just completed our very first major hybrid event where you know, we had thousands of people virtually, and then we had five live um watch parties. It was in San Francisco, New York. London, Bangalore, and sorry, four. It was going to be five. We had to cut Singapore because we could not get a location that would allow more than 10 people. It was impossible. But A, I would say hybrid is hard. So do it when you can do it right and do it when you can do it well. I would say beyond that, virtual is really powerful at informing what your in-person should be, and vice versa, using in-person, sort of the real-time engagement and networking to get the feedback and hear what they want more of in virtual, right? The things that they won't travel for, nor should they travel for, right? And so I think it's utilize the different formats to inform the others. Hybrid, I can tell you from experience, it's popular, it is here to stay. It is the hardest format of the three. So Hubelo is actually right now from our learnings from our very own hybrid event, creating a playbook that actually shows like here's a video of the full event. So you can see how much went into it, how much, you know, studio production went into it, the green screens, the pre-work, the post-work, all of it, right? All of the technology testing to bring in Bangalore Live, to bring in San Francisco, you know, to make it all work. And we're literally sort of creating like, here's how we did it. Here's the cost you should plan for, here's how much time you need. Because hybrid doesn't mean a lot to many people right now. And so we want to, you know, we are the platform as we like to position for the event planners who plan it all. Right now, the industry is like, what is hybrid? What is a best practice? Where do I start? What technology do I need? What vendors, services, everything. And so we're literally putting together a very tactical playbook because everyone we talk to is like, what is truly hybrid? Right. And so we decided to go pretty big, connect the globe, have five, four live watch parties and see how that goes. And it was amazing. It was very hard.
SPEAKER_03What were some insights you gathered from that hybrid event?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So first getting people together in person is still very hard because when we were planning this hybrid event was when Omicron was on the rise, right? So at first we had people saying, Yeah, I'm gonna fly in. And then, oh no, I'm not gonna fly in. And then, oh, the world is opening back up. But now gas prices are 5x what they used to be. Yes. And now the flight to get there, even though it's a one-hour flight, is way too expensive for me to go there for a three-hour event, right? So we went through a roller coaster of attendee when really they're just five small watch parties, but we really crafted these watch parties to be VIP experiences with our top customers, top partners, you know, great prospects. And it was just so hard to nail that during the time at which it was happening. So I would say if you're going to do it, put in a lot of contingency plans in the case that COVID waves continue or erupt out of nowhere. Um, you never know when things like a war and gas prices are going to affect also attendance in person. There's a lot of testing and what-ifs. We had issues with monsoons in India that could have impacted our live telecast a lot. So, what I would say is a hybrid event is very much a marrying of your understanding of virtual technology, the tech stack that you need in place, but you also have to realize that it is like live broadcasting. It is live broadcasting, right? So having teams who are skilled in working at the CNNs of the world and dealing with all possible contingency plans are a great team to have in place for a hybrid event.
SPEAKER_03That's a great tip. And you know, I also like the point you made about how um you are using your virtual events to inform what you should do in person. That's very valuable for sure. So, based on that, Kathy, what do you think the future of events would look like? And how can we rethink the idea of events?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think my answer to this is going to change quarter by quarter as we continue to learn, in all honesty. But right now, being on the sort of heels of wrapping up a hybrid event, I would say the future of events this year is going to look a lot more virtual with in-person aspects and hybrid being tested out and learned. And I think when we people realize how hard hybrid is, because you have to do the best of both worlds and then marry the experience. How do you marry people who are there in person with people who are there virtually and make that a meaningful networking exchange? That's hard. All of these challenges are hard. So I think that what we're going to do is learn how to do hybrid in the right way that isn't so hard over the next two years. And to me, I think the future of events will continue to be virtual becoming exponentially more immersive and engaging. So that my original vision has always been that virtual events will somehow become virtual in the same sense that sports has. So sports, you can watch it on TV, you can go there in person. They're very different experiences, but you get something different out of each experience. It's beneficial. If I'm watching from home, I can rewind, I can, you know, see replays of where the foot landed versus the line, right? Like I can hear the commentary. But if I'm there in person, I get the fan experience and that energy. And that's, you know, so there are different benefits. And I think what virtual events have to do is find more of those unique, immersive um uh sort of experiences that you get only virtually that can only happen virtually and should only happen virtually, but maybe are not available in person. And so when you've got got that great, like, hey, you know, for this event, I really want X. So I'm gonna go to the virtual, you know, because I can't get that in person. I think that's where the future is. And I think we're sort of ideating and crystallizing all of those ideas in real time still.
SPEAKER_03Okay, Kathy, I have one last question for you. So, what advice would you have for any brand looking to craft out a new experience this year?
SPEAKER_00That's really good. You know what I would do? I find a lot of inspiration um outside of the usual. So instead of looking at similar companies and what they are doing, I would look at other industries. I am really inspired by the Twitches of the world. So Twitch, very popular gaming website. Um, and they are doing events in a hybrid manner like no one else at the next level of engagement. And they're really building it for the next generation. And so I get a lot of inspiration at looking at, you know, events that are very different in industry and demographic and psychographic from mine to sort of gauge ideas and think about how I can make my next event more immersive and like have everyone walk away from that saying, okay, that was next level.
SPEAKER_02Well, thanks for sharing all the tips and tricks today, Kathy. Totally. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening.
SPEAKER_03To learn more about Hoogelo's services, visit www.hubelo.com. Interested in having a story told? Reach out to us at www.marketing directive.com.