We, the wide sector of live events, have a key date, our zero day, February 12, 2020, the day of the announcement of the cancellation of the Mobile World Congress, that day everything changed in our environment, everything starts to transform, although, at that time, we are not yet aware of the significance of that fact.
Like the day when live events are limited to zero, that day, that placed in confinement a whole territory, our territory, the space where we celebrate experiences of the encounter between people and values.
That’s our zero day and this is our territory. And as of today, we could not guarantee that the next MWC edition can be held in the format that we know.
Although some first speculations lead to a scenario where we could return to a “normality” for January/February 2021, in fact, we still don’t know for sure the dimension or the real scope that the pandemic will have on all areas.
We are living in real time, a storm we have never seen before, an extraordinary event, still there, still active, an unprecedented experience, that we never could have imagined.
Without a roadmap and that will transform our perception of things.
However, we must be able to expect, little by little, what will that transformation be, that landscape that we will meet, in order to begin to see how best to prepare ourselves and how to better adapt to that future new habitat.
And in that reflection of how this new landscape will be, we are already beginning to observe and wonder what the events will be like when this is all over and we can get back togethers.
How people feel about events, what imaginary will design those events, what changes will occur in our scale of values, etc.
We can start guessing which directions its gonna take.
New trends or trends that strengthen, like:
- Sensitive and responsible events with regards to sustainability and the environment
- The fusion of online and offline concepts
- The use of gamer technologies
- Small formats
- Minimalists
- New security and control rules adaptations
- In-house or online events experiences
- Etc
And we will have to follow these trends closely and see how they evolve, how new ones emerge or how we are preparing for that future scenario, depending on the evolution of this global situation.
In fact, we are still immersed in the middle of all this phenomenon. And it is clear that it is and will be a time full of challenges, discoveries, searching, creating and inventing new solutions and a renewed vision of innovation and creativity at all levels.
An initiative that we found very interesting due to its capacity to integrate many different disciplines and ways of thinking to imagine new futures and solutions is https://theglobalhack.com/.
The Global Hack is a hackathon designed to share and develop urgent ideas for the current crisis, such as building post-Covid19 resilience. We believe that the interdisciplinarity and networking will be a living and interesting source to follow to re-build us post day 0.
And here’s a bit of additional reading to think about the possible future of the events industry:
Forbes: The lockdown live-streaming revolution from the djing priest to radiohead
Engadget: Asics Meta Sneakers VR launch
Eventbrite: Immersive experiences
Event Manager Blog: 9 Practical Tips for Staying on Trend in 2020
MCI Group: 7 major trends in the event industry for 2020
In any cases we can imagine that events will be better, so..
#volveremosmejores
Regarding the economic aspect, we’ll discuss that another day. 😉
By Agus García