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NEWSLETTER 121
 
VIRTUAL EVENTS GROUP
 


Gartner predicts
that by 2025 30% of outbound marketing messages from large organizations will be synthetically generated, up from less than 2% in 2022.

 
 
 
 
 
 
March 23 | 3PM EST | Zoom
 
Meet the Creators
 
Register for our March 23rd session. We’ll talk to Jim Louderback, Lior Cole, Dylan Huey, and Jon Rettinger about how they turned their passions into profits and what you can learn from the creator economy. It’s free, but don’t forget to register.
 
RSVP NOW
 
 
Exploplatform’s Crystal Ball
 
 
 

What’s up with events in 2023? ExpoPlatform’s forecast has a story to tell in the mixture of digital and in-person events. Digital revenue has become an increasingly important component of an organizer’s business model.


Half of event profs now expect between 10 and 29% of their annual revenue to come from these channels in 2023. That’s an increase of more than 10% compared with their previous research in July. Meanwhile, 9% believe it will be 70% or more while 9% said it would be between 50 and 69%. That said, 50% of respondents believe that monetizing digital assets is important to them this year. 

 
 
 
 
 
Silicon Valley Bank Stars in “Not Such a Wonderful Life”
 

“You’re thinking of the place all wrong. As if I have the money back in a safe. The money’s not here,” George Bailey shares with his customers in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” “Your money’s in Joe’s house… and a hundred others. You’re lending them the money to build and then they’re going to pay it back to you the best they can.”

 
 
 
Image credit: It's a Wonderful Life directed by Frank Capra
 
 

This time the money was not in Joe’s house but in Fred’s startup, or Jill’s tech company. And it was mainly deposited by VCs who are particularly financially savvy and also tend to act in herds.


Headlining news this past week is not the Bailey Savings and Loan but the Silicon Valley Bank. Like the Bailey Savings and Loan, it catered to its own community, in this case, a tight-knit crowd of genius startups, hard-driving entrepreneurs, and aggressive/competitive VCs. They were one happy family when things were going well, and a finger-pointing family when things took a wrong turn. 


The  Mr. Potter in the SVB story could be lots of different actors. Some say SVB collapsed quickly because VCs such as Peter Theil and other prominent voices publically told the community to get the hell out of the bank. CEO Glen Becker, even while he was urging clients to remain calm,  reportedly sold $3.6 billion in SVB stock. One colleague even suggested Eilzabeth Warren and her colleagues were the real villains for having a sense of outrage and a desire for tighter regulation. 


Some have told me SVB’s failure proves crypto-investors point, that centralized banking is doomed to fail. (The price of Bitcoin these last few days is rising.)  Others tell me that SVB should have been a federally regulated bank, such as Citibank or Bank of America, from the get-go. Still, others say it was the perfect storm of interest rates, long-term bonds, and a lack of loan activity. 


No matter who’s right or wrong, the irony is not lost that the Feds and the FDIC, who many in the SVB investment community view with distaste over their zeal to regulate and oversee, ultimately solved what could have been an economy-shattering problem.


Andrew Ross Sorkin, the NY Times financial correspondent, commented on Twitter: 

It is a bailout. Not like 2008. But it is a bailout of the venture capital community + their portfolio companies (their investments). That’s the depositor base of SVB. It is the right thing to do in the moment, but there will be ramifications + new regs. VCs should say thank you.

VCs are not known for saying thank you. And you have to believe that a modicum of calm and a little less knee-jerk by the bank’s chummy clientele might have averted the entire fiasco. But that’s second-day quarterbacking. We’ll be watching to see how this episode impacts the entire tech sector. But from where I sit, this is yet another arrow in the back of Silicon Valley’s pioneers. 


Interesting sidenote? At CES this past January we featured Vartika Ambwani, VP and Director of Fintech at Silicon Valley Bank. She spoke hopefully about myriad alternatives to traditional banking. Will this bank failure derail those alternatives, or will they come to pass anyway?

 
 
SXSW’s Great Engagement
 
 
 

Thousands of miles from Silicon Valley, in Austin, Texas, SXSW is in full swing. At its heart, SXSW prides itself as a festival of connections. You’ll want to listen to Greg Brockman of OpenAI. He was one of the opening speakers as Generative AI becomes the harbinger of hope for a wee-bit sluggish tech industry. Sustainability, privacy and security, and inclusivity are just a few of the topics that great speakers will be tackling all week long, but Generative AI is the battle cry. Don’t miss Kevin Kelly, one of Wired’s legendary founders, who reminds us that we’ve talked about AI for a hundred years or more, so it shouldn’t be an "aha! moment" that it’s arrived. Another great moment came at the Future of Immersive Entertainment with Val Vacante (Dentsu) and Ted Shilowitz (Paramount). Ted urged the crowd to stop thinking about the mobile phone as a technology, but rather as biology. It is our appendage and very much a part of our cultural DNA. Humans and tech will only become more enmeshed with each other as we continue our co- journey.

To keep the engagements mantra alive, our panel – The End of Events, The Dawn of Engagement with Michael Casey, Sherry Huss, and Sophie Ahmed, with cameos from Phillip Nelson, Gavin Gillas and Gigi Johnson – focused on how to make a panel sessions more  memorable, foster enduring relationships and create experiences worth remembering.

 
 
Photo Caption:  Bizbash is covering the buzz about SXSW.
 
 
The Power of Twos: Informa Acquires Tarsus, Cvent Gets A Buyer
 
 
 

Informa, the world's largest trade show organizer, is acquiring Tarsus Group, a well-known trade show company. In doing so, they add 160 events and media properties to Informa's portfolio.

 

Along with the deal comes BizBash, one of our favorite places to keep up with the events industry. The combined power of this duo makes them a formidable player in the world of international events. 


Cvent
, a meetings and events management software company, will revert to being a private company, after yo-yoing between private and public status. The $4.6 billion dollar deal with Blackstone tells me that Cvent has more event lives than most other event cats. 

 
 
The Gig Economy
 
 
 

Thanks for the good news. Rich Parker, CEO of Plannernet, a company that helps freelancers and the businesses who hire them ensure compliance, updated us on LA’s new ordinance. Los Angeles (City of Gigs) is taking a stand against companies that don’t pay independent contractors in a timely manner. The City Council has adopted an ordinance that requires any contract of $600 or more between employers and freelance workers to be in writing, with a date by which the freelancer must be paid. If the contract doesn’t include a date or if there is no written contract, employers must pay freelancers within 30 days after the work is completed. Freelance workers can sue employers for alleged violations of the ordinance.

 
 
Scuttlebutt
 

Multiverse Goes Oscar 
Everything Everywhere All at Once, this year’s runaway Oscar winner, is a story for our times. It features chaos, the multiverse, and the trauma of everyday things that force escapism. And with its Asian cast, the movie is in a parallel universe with the first-mover adoption of the Asian marketplace as experimenters with metaverses, multiverses and synthetic humans,


ChatGPT Marketing Copy
Shelly Palmer created a simple (well, sorta simple) yet thorough look on how to use ChatGPT to write marketing copy


ChatGPT At Your Fingertips
Wired looks at 5 browser extensions that make accessing ChatGPT a lot easier. For example, Merlin allows you to open a ChatGPT session right from your browser. 


Let Your Avatar Date in Your Place
Why subject yourself to the indignities and awkwardness of first dates when you can have your avatar do it for you? Snack, the GenZ dating app, uses TikTok-like videos to help you (well, your avatar) meet its perfect match. You train your avatar about your personal likes and dislikes and send it out to engage with prospective hookups.


Call Me Anything but NFT
NFTs were a bad name for a useful item.  Now brands are trying out a different language, stressing more of the utility and less of the technology. Call them tickets or collectibles, give them superpowers… call them anything but NFTs. Reddit calls them Collectible Avatars and they sold, gave away, and traded millions of them. Coachella gave all ticket holders Blooming Flowers that morphed during the event. Candy Digital refers to its NBA NFTs as digital collectibles. And just so the youngest kids can begin to grok the idea of minting something personable and collectible, meet Dog-E, a robot dog from WowWee that gets “minted” into its unique personality as part of the ownership experience.

 
 
 
Image credit: WowWee
 
 
UPCOMING
 
VEG Events
 
 
NAB Show Meets the Creator Economy
April 15-17 | Las Vegas
 

NAB explores the world of Web3 with a series of podcasts by VEG member Lori Schwartz. VEG will also be producing a slice of the NAB Show devoted to the Creator Economy. Let us know if you’ll be attending and want to be involved. 

Contact Gigi@virtualeventsgroup.org.
 
 
 
Earth Day Roundtable: Did the Pandemic Move Us Closer or Further from Sustainable Events
April 20 | 3PM EDT | ZOOM
 

The pandemic shut down live events for two years. Now that travel and live events are back are we on track to act green? Can virtual events help the planet? And what can you do to make your event and event travel as green as ever? Join us for Earth Day 2023.

REGISTER NOW!
 
 
 
 
 
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Robin Raskin | Founder
917.215.3160 | robin@virtualeventsgroup.org

Gigi Raskin | Sales/Marketing

917.608.7542 | gigi@virtualeventsgroup.org