Once considered a regionally focused series, Bloomberg Invest has managed to combine content from across its portfolio to create a truly Global Summit with a few simple alterations. The agenda starts in Hong Kong, with a breakfast briefing, before moving west to Dubai, London and New York throughout the day. This is an excellent showcase of how virtual forums provide new opportunities for integrated international engagement that spans global regions and timezones, where physical events can't.
Cannes Lions has launched a comprehensive pre-event marketing campaign, promoting the event via digital, email, social, advertising in the newspaper and PR, with podcasts and video interview teasers. Progress Through Creativity is a weekly podcast series, running for 10 weeks ahead of the festival, talking to members of the Cannes global community to explore their inspirational stories of progress. In addition, Cannes Lions have extensive pre-event and pre-session email reminders to prompt registrants to attend.
In its physical form, Eurofinance's International Treasury Management Conference was centred around its exhibition, which has been replicated well virtually through the platform VFairs. Visitors are able to access the exhibitions through either a 3D walkthrough or a traditional exhibition map to access booths where solution demos, resources and live chat rooms can be found.
Attendees and sponsors alike have full live visibility over which attendees are at the booth at any given time, and sponsors have the ability to launch impromptu discussion rooms.
Traditionally a meeting scheduling app used at conferences, Brella has been employed by Informa Connect for its Fund Forum online event. As opposed to a full platform, its tools can be integrated into existing virtual events to facilitate the profiling and matchmaking of attendees through smart algorithms and AI. Tools such as Brella are great means to analyse audience intent and could be leveraged to group the audience into breakout sessions for sponsors.
Brella can also be used for 1-to-1 meeting scheduling and networking and provides an additional means to gather audience data.
Fund Forum's Brella engagement data
To adapt to virtual, The FT structured their Global Boardroom with alternating session lengths and types, ranging from 5-minute video clips to 50-minute panel discussions, with the shorter sessions placed strategically to break up longer presentations in one single stream. All sessions were available to view post-event, to allow attendees to watch any missed content, however, typically there is less engagement with pre-recorded content.
Previously a one-day event, The Economist adapted the programme for their Sustainability Summit to span across five days, with live-streamed content between 1 pm - 3 pm daily. The agenda features a combination of live and pre-recorded panels, presentations and roundtables, with audience Q&A and engagement. Spreading the content across the week increases accessibility, however, it may restrict international reach.
FT Global Boardroom attendance data