Trade Fairs International 01| 2011
Event 3.0 – how does live communication have to reinvent itself?

Following the financial crisis, business in events collapsed all over the world. The terrorist attacks of 2001 had nothing like the same impact on the event industry as the demise of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. It’s not just agencies that have suffered as a result of clients tightening their belts; venues, hotels, restaurants event service providers and artists have felt the effects as well. Many things were dropped without replacement and haven’t been revived since – even though the economic recovery is well under way. Many clients now believe that live communication is dispensable and are reducing their live communication efforts to a minimum. Costs are blamed for most of the decisions, but, astonishing as it may seem, some decisions have been taken because of doubts about the efficiency of events.

New thinking indispensable
In the 20 years or so in which we have had a professional corporate event industry, the relationships and roles between agencies and clients have hardly changed: the client places an order and the agencies deliver. The ultimate criterion of success  has always between the satisfaction of the client rather than the satisfaction of the target group. This has to change – the measures used need to be examined in terms of both content and form. The economic crisis, in particular, made it clear that there are motivational deficits. The renowned Gallup Institute found that only 13 percent of employees in Germany in 2007 had strong emotional ties to their company. And that percentage is unlikely to have increased as a result of the crisis (reduced working hours, pay cuts, redundancies, fear and so on).

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