What future holds for the events industry? Will hybrid events take the lead and replace live events?

The fact that the whole world is currently struggling in fight against corona virus caused so many problems that no one knows what should be done in order to end the chaos and reestablish order. It has impacted almost every industry and the government cannot support all of them to allow them to survive this crisis. Although this obstacle could not have been predicted it is time for us to stand firmly and adapt top these new conditions and exploit new opportunities. If we are not strong enough to change current situation we need to adjust to it.

Event companies started this vision of hybrid or pure online events already before the Corona virus hitted and in so it is much easier for them to start doing things in a different way. However, no one expected that this crisis would last for so long so from quite short-term contingency plan became long-term strategy plan on how to run events in the future. So as we all can see now the contingency planning is key and in the next few months perhaps years will be priceless.

Although this new vision of events starts to claim its place in the world it seems it is not a solution for every kind of event and many organizers do not believe it can become a full replacement for live events. For instance, to go on a concert or music festival and feel the atmosphere of togetherness means to fans as well as performers a lot and we all agree it cannot be fully suppstituted by online concert. I believe there is a lot of creative ways to enhance this experience and get just a little bit more closer to live events yet it is a hard journey. For starters, focus on younger generations would be an appropriate step considering that elderly people will be too afraid of the crowds.

To sum up, watch news, focus on younger generations and try to find new approches of usage of technology that can help to achieve similar experience to live events. It is a new unexpected era and we should seize the opportunity and turn sudden change in our favor rather than clinging to previously functioning, captive processes.