Blame it on the economy, stupid. The serendipity of a chance meeting at an event is taking a back seat to pre-scheduled meetings where you know you’re going to see a return on your investment. 

Dahlia+Agency (a friend of VEG) issued a press release about a study that found 67% of event organizers plan on using pre-scheduled meetings in the next 12 months, as the economy worsens. “Pre-scheduled meeting events, like hosted buyers, which were popular over a decade ago, are having a renaissance as organizers look to increase revenues during the economic downturn.”

A new generation of meeting software is designed to give serendipity a shove. Download the B2B Relationships report. The lesson? In a down economy, leave nothing to chance. Companies like Clarion Events, RX, and Connections Luxury are part of the report. Grip, an AI-powered event platform, sponsored the study.

Every one of us has our own time-gobbling chore. Here at VEG we spend too much time chopping up long-form videos into nugget-sized pieces of content. We’ve tried most of the tools on the market but didn’t fall in love until we used Opus Pro. It takes that hour-long video, identifies the main topics, transcribes it, and spews out social media-ready snips. 

Veg Member Aug X officially went into widespread beta this week. It uses AI to turn your text into videos. It’s a blast.

Now that live events are back, we’re seeing an after-effect we don’t like. The brightly lit in-person backgrounds behind speakers make them look like reddish/purple lobsters when you repurpose the conference as a video. (People of color also disappear in these backlights.) What’s the cure? Less sexy lighting in the back and more lighting from the front that’s full-range and skin-tone friendly.

Darlings of New Journalism Shutter Doors
BuzzFeed News and Vice, each a hallmark of a new breed of journalism, simply cost too much to produce with too few ad dollars to support them. BuzzFeed News won two Pulitzers for its reporting and did a great job covering politics and technology. They published the Steele dossier, which contained allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. While the news division will be shuttered, BuzzFeed will live on for the moment.

Vice embraced gonzo-style journalism, producing first-person looks at everything from women’s rights to the alt-right, winning a few Peabody Awards. Vice filed for bankruptcy, but it’s looking like they might find a $40 million dollar way out.

We’ll miss them both, and fingers crossed that next-gen journalism will not rely solely on Twitter and generative AI for its news. 

Re-envisioning Event Tech
I wrote about this last week, but Miguel Neves of Skift Meetings gives an excellent second-day analysis of the neurosis besetting event tech companies as they recreate themselves in a post pandemic era.

Patently Curious?
Patent Drop scours 100+ patent filings to provide expert analysis on innovation from top companies and deliver knowledge to your inbox 2x weekly. Stay in the know and and sign up for free. Thanks, Recomendo, for the reco.

Thinking Ahead — Our Calendars, Your Budgets; Looking for Products, Storytellers, and Creators
It’s an absolute given that event tech folks, Web 3 companies, and metaverse makers need to seek out new audiences and new connections. That’s why we’ve teamed up with Ragan Communications to produce a special area of Comms Week  (Nov 6-10 in Austin) devoted to showcasing new technologies to comms professionals. You won’t find an audience more eager to incorporate more ways to meet and communicate than comms professionals. We’re offering special discounts to VEG members. Email Gigi@gvirtualeventsgroup.org for more details.

For CES (January 9-12 in Las Vegas) we’re helping produce conference sessions on retail, lifestyle, and fintech. If you’ve got a story to tell, you might belong on the CES stage. For more info write to Gigi@virtualeventsgroup.org.

We’re also helping with the 2nd annual Silicon Valley Video Summit (Jan 24th, 2024) at the Computer Science Museum in San Jose. Because we know that every company is now in the video business, we’re expanding the landscape to include video-forward corporations that are killing it (Intel Corp, Dreamforce, Cannes, Sundance, and others). If you’ve got a corporate video story to tell, we're all ears; we’ve got your speaker cards ready. For more info write to Gigi@virtualeventsgroup.org.

Read and Watch
Forrester published a report looking at the 14 top event tech platforms, rating each one. And read my column about why we’re going through the equivalent of Kubler-Ross’s stages of grieving over AI.