Thursday 10th December: Connecting after Covid - what’s next for events?

December 10, 2020

Good morning! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Peter.

We've shared a lot this year on the adoption of virtual events, after lockdowns and social-distancing regulations halted real-word events in their tracks. Vaccine roll-outs have given us hope for the return of some face-to-face events in 2021, but this comprehensive article from FIPP says don't expect things to return to how they were.

Patchy success for virtual event organisers guarantees that experimentation will continue; 'copying and pasting what worked in person to an online platform' isn't working according to Rob Ristagno, CEO at consultants Sterling Woods Group.

That means publishers need to work out how to keep audiences engaged with speakers presenting from their own living rooms. Training to help speakers deliver in this new, remote context is already on the agenda. And TV style production values are coming.

Possibly the biggest hurdle to overcome is effective networking. Chatrooms are great for introductions, but properly structured follow up is needed if exhibitors are going to do any real business. Don't be surprised if the future of event organisation includes scheduling Zoom calls between delegates and sponsors.

The New York Times has spent three years developing a direct-to-consumer e-commerce operation with its NYT Store. It looks like that was time well spent - in the five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday the site took more than three times the number of orders it processed in the same period in 2019. Interestingly it's not all about the money... community is a key currency.

On this week’s episode of the Decoder podcast Substack CEO Christ Best answers all sorts of questions about the newsletter platform's business model. Most interesting is the idea of scaling up using newsletter bundles curated by writers. If this puts people instead of platform algorithms in charge, I'm all for it.

Huge investments, mergers and experiments prove that getting into audio content is a lucrative move for publishers – but 2021 could be the year the dream of the open podcast economy dies an ignominious death. Mr Chris Sutcliffe rounds up the year as part of our Media Moments 2020 report.

This week's podcast:

This special episode includes the audio of our launch presentation for the Media Moments 2020 report. We examine one key stat of each section within the report, from diversity and advertising to platforms, trust and more. In the second half, the team is joined by a panel featuring The Atlantic's Jemima Villanueva, Permutive's Aly Nurmohamed and The Week Junior's Andrea Barbalich.

Between The Publisher Podcast Awards, this newsletter, the podcast every week and our other projects and full-time jobs, we can sometimes feel a little exhausted. If you want to kick in to buy us a brew, we'd really appreciate it ☕