Shedding light through his wisdom and experience, Mr. Prateek Kumar – CEO & Founder of NeoNiche tells us what the global transformation will be like. Are we going to see more Phygital, Virtual and Hybrid Events?
What will our Business of Events & Experiences look like in a Post Covid-19 World?
The Covid-19 Pandemic has accelerated changes on many fronts. Firstly, the event business which is currently on pause and mind you it’s a pause and not a full stop since nothing can substitute our social experiences will focus on safety and hygiene as the most critical element of any event which will give rise to “smaller curated networking”, “Delegate time allotment” and smaller physical presence of delegates at any given point of time. Secondly, the technology adoption will increase to bring more curated experiences with hybrid events and personalized user group contents.
Some Industries are more hit than others. To cope with this Crisis, what kind of ‘Across the Board’ Innovations will they have to make?
The spread of COVID-19 has disrupted lives, livelihoods, communities and businesses worldwide and it is true that some Industries are impacted more than the others. Few early adoption of the same at a strategic level will be less brick and mortar office space and more “Work from home” culture, another positive side to the current mess will be cross geographic and cross functional teams coming together from different time zones aided by technologies which will aid collaboration across industries and workplace. Moreover, startups and SMEs will engage with “Freelancer” and outsource non critical job functions and will have critical in house resources. This will make the playing field more flatter and eventually cause a seismic shift in business agility.
How aligned is your organisation – both internally and externally – right now?
Needless to say since our business is of curating contents and experiences for brands and bringing their TG together in lot of ways we were in the business of “Social Gathering” and hence not only us but our industry has been badly impacted with loss of revenues. But as they say every dark cloud has a silver lining we too learned to adopt technologies and now are bringing curated experiences for some of the renowned brands by way of “Virtual Events”. While our Technology and content design team quickly got into curated virtual experiences our Data Scientist and Audience Acquisition teams are ensuring right messages and right experiences reach the right target Audiences.
How has NeoNiche Evolved over the last 4 months?
A lot is yet to be seen as we beat this virus together as mankind, but one thing is sure we were operating out of 3 offices before the pandemic now we are operating from more than 40 offices.
How will you take care of Employee Well Being and Safety when the restrictions ease?
We ensure that we have virtual townhall every week where everyone has a say, I am sure we will all come out of this together and much stronger.
List down your Predictions with respect to the Events & Experiential Industry.
- Hybrid events with less crowd at any given time beamed to larger community through broadband feeds.
- Safety and hygiene to take precedence over experiences.
- Technology will play a huge role while curation of experience.
- Duration of event will increase to accommodate different TG at different allocated times.
- ePass for Events which will have specific time for smaller user groups to attend the event.
- Physically present speakers will interact with their co-speakers through Holograms or more and more cases of cross geography speakers giving a miss to “Red Eyed Flights” to interact with audiences with the aid of technology.
Click here to find out how we curated India’s biggest virtual Pharma Event post the lockdown.
