Vok Dams' Colja Dams on the changing events landscape

Following on from our agency inSIGHTS special edition last month, we share further insights from our interview with Vok Dams CEO and Owner Colja Dams on the evolution of agencies and wider event trends.

Colja has headed up Vok Dams, which is ranked the number one event agency in Germany, since taking it over from his father back in 2007. With 19 offices and a 300+ team worldwide, Vok Dams is renowned for delivering award-winning live events and experiences for major brands such as BMW, Bayer and Lamborghini, and more recently for its impressive digital work.

Summing up the last 12-18 months…

When Covid first hit China, I honestly thought it would be like SARS 17 years ago and it would affect our China business and nothing else. Then came this shock phase where everyone was cancelling events all over the world. But then we went into an experimental phase, where most of our clients approached us for digital solutions purely to replace their live events.

Next came the waiting phase as vaccines were experimented with and everyone became hopeful and wanted to wait and see what would happen and when live events would be possible. And finally we entered another phase, a strategic phase, which is still going on. Clients have started to think a bit more strategically and not just digitalise one event at a time but digitalise all kinds of events.

Digital is breaking down barriers…

We used to talk about markets in geographic terms, for example the UK market or German market or the US. But now because it is all digital, it’s all one market.

Based on best practice learned from the 400+ digital events we delivered in 2020, we believe these are the six key factors to successful digital event…

1. Participation, interaction and co-creation – people want to work together to create something new. They don’t want to just sit back and be passive.

2. Multi-sensory and haptic moments – if you send out something that people can touch it makes a huge impact on the digital experience.

3. Autonomy and freedom of choice – creating that corporate content festival feeling online. As with live business festivals like SXSW, people want to pick and choose the content that interests them like.

4. Timing & pace – embracing short attention spans with valued and up-to-date content interspersed with breaks.

5. Networking & interpersonal dialogue – I have just learnt the word serendipity and its great – this idea of meeting someone and having a great conversation. This is what live events are all about, but digital events work closer to television as you may have watched something interesting, but you don’t often get the chance to get into dialogue. However, that is changing now and there are lots of new tools such as chat roulette and Clubhouse.

6. Content – it’s all about high quality targeted content.

I believe there are three immersion maturity levels of digital events…

The first one is just streaming so simple webinars, the second one is translating of live moments into the digital world so online press conferences, sales kick-offs, product launches etc, and the third is creating digital first event experiences so for example we are creating a digital showroom for an automotive client in China.

The best of both worlds…

We delivered our first hybrid event in 1996. Because I am a techy type, we have always been interested in mixing live and digital. But we still went from being almost totally live to almost totally digital in 2020, and we believe the future is going to be hybrid.

The future will be about merging the best of both worlds. It’s not only us who thinks this, Gartner predicted that 60% of all marketing communications, so not just events, will be hybrid by 2023.

Hybrid events will be the future but what is the future of hybrid events?

In the beginning, we had the technological phase, and now we are in the strategic phase. So in the tech phase it was more about seeing what the technology has to offer and how we can use it. Now, we are discussing what makes sense from the event perspective, and then we will find the technology that helps us to achieve it. And that is an extremely important shift.

A lot of our clients have hit the rest button and are rethinking all their event communications and how to really make the best of these touch points and bring everything together.

One huge opportunity is creating new marketing experience hubs, which become the home of all communications – it brings in every channel on the customer side and creates an overall eco-system.

How client relationships have changed…

There has definitely been a shift in what clients are asking from us since the beginning of Covid and I believe it will change even more. Now, clients don’t only come with what they want to communicate, they come with the problem or question, for example “how do I get my people to do this?”

At the end of the day, it all comes back to ROI. While ROI has always been important, it was never really calculated. Now, especially if clients are making the decision to take something digital back to live, which is going to cost more, they will question why they should invest more, and they will expect the outcome to be higher. So there will be a lot more focus on what the outcome is. I believe that the discussion around ROI has only really just started and will become increasingly more important in the future.

The huge advantage we have right now is the blending together of live and digital. When, live and digital were separate, we did not have a smooth customer journey, because there were digital touchpoints and live touchpoints, and we were not connecting the data. Now with hybrid events, there are all these data nuggets we can use for post-event communications and marketing automation, which will be huge in the future.

What comes post Covid-19?

We talk about campfire DNA and the fact there is a campfire gene in all of us. We might enjoy digital and hybrid events, but people love live events.

The second it is possible for us to get back to live, we will all be drawn back to the campfire again, just as we have since the beginning of mankind, to spend time together meeting with friends and colleagues.