Why events still matter

I have always found events as a test of the community function of a brand. If you can’t convene people, you do not have a community. (Events also do an important job for publishers in that they should be done at high margins.) The knock on events, other than they’re too frequent and too many, is they don’t scale. But why does everything need to scale?

Events are a key part of primary engagement media. At the FIPP World Congress this week, I gave a talk about a more human future for publishing. I think some of the most successful, and sustainable, new publishing brands will be more hand-crafted products that feel more personal than the bland content that’s typically churned out in low-engagement publishing. Events, both in-person and virtual, are an ideal third component of a primary-engagement model along with newsletters and podcasts.

For a couple years, events were relegated to sad Zoom affairs. I knew from the start this would simply not do, because events are first and foremost about networking, not about content. Zoom or Hopin or whatever is just fine for livestreaming yet another panel, but you cannot recreate the connectivity of events over video, and I do not see any metaverse appearing that will do so.