Anna Valley's Inspiration Showcase at Tobacco Dock this year had a stated aim of bringing back the fun to live events.
M&IT editor Paul Harvey caught up with business development director Nigel Stanton and account manager Ben Macrow to find out how they approached the task, as well as exploring engagement with purpose and the current state of the hybrid/live/digital debate.
Transcription
Paul Harvey: Hello and welcome to M&IT Talks, my name is
Paul Harvey and I’m the editor of M&IT and I'm here today with Nigel
Stanton and Ben Macrow of Anna Valley. Nigel's the business development
director and Ben’s an account manager, and Anna Valley is a full event services
provider which has grown quite a lot recently, since an MBO five years ago it's
gone from 70 staff up to 168 today, over seven different sites. Welcome to the
show, both of you.
Nigel Stanton: Thank you.
Ben Macrow: Thanks very much, Paul.
PH: Now we got you on because I was at your inspiration
showcase at Tobacco Dock this year, which made good on your promise to bring
back the fun to live events. There was fairground games, a haunted house escape
room, pinball, a dance off and everything like that. Why do we need to bring
back the fun to live events?
NS: Throughout the pandemic, everyone sort of learned to
adapt with sort of virtual and hybrid offerings, but of course they're never
the same as a face to face meeting. So with live events coming back in quite a
big way, we decided that let's bring back the fun. Let's make it's fun. It's a
fun environment. So we decided that we would come up with a theme that we could
then develop all of our interactions and exponential activations into following
that theme throughout and taking what can be quite a mundane event, but
actually showing what you can do to actually make it fun to be part of.
PH: Did you hit the brief? What was the feedback from the
people who attended?
BM: Exceptional. The whole aspect of rather than just
showing agencies technology, but actually making it relevant to their guest
experience, I think went down really well and we approach our showcase every
year as an event rather than just the technology showcase. So although we do,
we do approach it in a slightly reverse way in that most events are planned
with a guest experience first and you work out what technology you need to support
that event. We actually started with the technology we wanted to showcase and
we created a guest experience around it. But the feedback we've had so far has
been really, really great and we're really proud of what we've done and we're
really looking forward to now taking some of that technology and applying it to
relevant commercial agency events.
PH: Which bit of the Inspiration Showcase did you most
enjoy?
BM: I think one of the things that our advanced technology
team really excelled with was our ultra personalization aspect. So rather than creating
a personal experience for the guests based on a guest list that we had two
weeks in advance, we were getting people to register at the registration desk
and then they would being greeted for example by name, by company, by a virtual
presenter. Literally 3 minutes later we used a series of technologies like
Google Voice API to do custom generated text and I think going forward, we're
really excited about the use of AI and some features like ChatGPT in the
future, sort of take that to the next level and take that ultra personalization
aspect of an event to the next level.
PH: You think you'll be able to use AI to do that?
BM: Yeah, absolutely. I think what we were doing was simple
Google Voice API integration. So we were taking details that were already known
about the guests. They've registered them three or four minutes earlier. But if
you look at some of the features coming through specifically with ChatGPT and
how Microsoft are are now integrating that into Bing search, you can actually
we could actually use some of those details to run a ChatGPT search to find
other relevant information about a specific guest or about a specific company,
and then insert that into the into the virtual presenters script in real time.
And I think for for certain events, especially expos, that could be really,
really quite cool and interesting to play with.
PH: Nigel, from your point of view, what was the reaction
like?
NS: The feedback has been really, really positive. We've had
agencies, some agencies have actually offered their own creative input, cause
they'd like to be part of it next year, which is very positive. We're now going
to do a series of workshops as a result of people wanting us to take the
showcase to the wider teams back at the agency. So we'll be putting together a
program throughout sort of end of April, May onwards doing that.
We've already had many briefs as a result, and requests for
further information about different technologies that we've used. We've asked
people we've had people asking whether we can do different versions. We had a
tin can alley. We've had requests. Could we do that for a brewer with bottles?
Could we do different skins on different things? So yeah, they could not have
been more positive.
PH: I guess there is the scope for event tech providers like
you to work closer with agencies and make it more of a partnership?
NS: What we what we like to do and and there's a couple of
agencies in particular who have actually been to previous showcases where they
realized that there is considerable benefit to them by taking back a stage. So
rather than an agency that typically the way it works at an agency, creators
will come up, a brief will come in for a client’s event. The creatives and the
designers will come up with a look and feel and some ideas. And then that will
get sold in and presented to an agency. The agency will then win the job. The
client will expect that to be delivered and then the production team have the
delightful job of making that happen within the budget that the client has
agreed, which is not always a viable proposition. So what we try to do and have
been doing quite successfully, it's collaborating with the agencies much
earlier. So going back to working with their design and creative teams. So we
can actually come up with a way of delivering what they would like to achieve
in a very cost effective and in a way that will actually work and within their
budgets.
BM: I think it's quite interesting the role of the
technologist and the creative is starting to really merge as events get more
technology led. And if you look at the theme park industry, Disney have a set
of a set of employees they call Imagineers and they really are the embodiment
of a creative technologist. So they go and they think about a creative brief
and they come up with new technology to work to that brief. And I think because
there is a split between agency and technical supplier.
We don't have a similar role in the events industry and
that's something that Anna Valley is really keen on encouraging. So by getting
a technology supplier in before you've even started pitching a job, you can get
close to that Imagineer effort where technology and creativity are working from
the beginning of a pitch process.
PH: It sounds to me like a change in the relationship between
suppliers and agencies, is that right?
NS: I think you become part of the agency creative team. I
mean we have within our company an Advanced Technical Department who their
whole job is making things happen, they're sort of I call them the geeks, but
they are the ones that you give them a problem and they take the great delight
in making in in finding a solution and making it happen. I mean we did an event
up at Wimbledon last year for an agency.
BM: We were using a mixture of of light tracking, touch
screens and and motion tracking to deliver a couple of different activations
within one space. So we had a throw a ball down a channel and collect points
depending on where the that ball was collecting strawberries, we had a an
almost a Where's Wally feature where guests were invited to find a specific
piece and depending on how quickly you did it, depending upon the score, and of
course, all of those can then be scored and you can scoreboard them, which is
which adds a level of competitiveness which can be really, really fun as well.
PH: Do you think that competitive element and gamification
kind is a really big thing going forward?
BM: Yeah, I absolutely think so. It's about guest engagement
and whether you're on a virtual event or you're in a physical event, you're
trying to keep your guest engaged and we all know that it is slightly harder in
virtual events as well to keep that guest engagement throughout an entire day.
So by adding a competitive element, you are giving guests a reason to remain
within the event either in front of their computer screen or in the room that
you want them in. And that's really important.
And I think also from an agency perspective, depending on
what you do with that scoreboard, can actually unlock extra budget for the
event if that scoreboard is the winning team on that scoreboard results in the
charitable donation. There are certain businesses that will then be able to
access their company CSR budget and pump that into the event as well. We all
know that CSR budgets tend to be quite a lot, quite bigger than event budgets,
so that's a really good way of unlocking extra funding to to really add the
extra pieces in an event.
PH: It’s engagement with purpose, would you call it that?
BM: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. You know that purpose might
be completely selfish and the winners going to win a car or a weekend away, or
it can be a lot more on the charity side and a lot more beneficial to the wider
community by saying, you know, we've got three or four local charities say
you're doing a multinational event. You could have your scoreboard globally and
then the winning country secures a charitable donation for the charity of their
choice within their country or within their locality. And that can be a really
nice thing because it gives you competitiveness without the ultra
competitiveness of if I don't win, I lose out.
PH: One thing I wanted to talk about was live and hybrid
events, what are you seeing with hybrid events at the moment?
BM: It's interesting. Hybrid events have really been around
for a lot longer than even 2018. You put a camera at the back of a room and
you've created a hybrid event. During that period where the live industry
really shut down, we moved into the virtual and then came out into this mixed
sort of new type of hybrid. What we did learn is a lot about audience attention
span in front of a laptop screen versus being in a plenary room and we've all
worked out that actually you have to work a lot harder to keep the attention of
your audience when they're sitting at their laptop screen and they can just pop
off and get a quick drink whenever they want. So you have to give the audience
a much bigger reason to remain in front of the screen than you do when they're
sat in a room with their peers. And I think that's one big learning that the
whole industry came out of that COVID period with.
PH: What we're doing now is making that hybrid experience
better for the people at home?
BM: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, adding interactivity to
the hybrid element, especially if there's a competitive nature as well. If you
finish your half an hour session in your in your virtual environment and you
tell people that we're gonna go off for a 15 minute break, but come back in 15
minutes for the next round of the interactive quiz that we're running, you have
given people that reason to return. And so you don't get some of the drop off
that we typically saw. And for virtual events where people would watch the
keynotes and they're not bother returning for the rest of the day.
PH: What's the demand like for hybrid at the moment?
NS: Well, it's mixed demand. More and more events are
actually live events. We've done a number of hybrids still but more and more
they're becoming just live events.
BM: I think what we are seeing is a lot more of, even if
it's a purely live event and agencies are finding that extra little bit of
budget to put a camera and a switcher at the back to allow last minute people
who can't make the event to still tune in virtually even though the entire
event is planned as live, they still want the ability for people to dial in if
they can't make it anymore because we've proven that we can do that now.
