Ichi Telethon | Bundling Event Tech (Accelevents) with Jonathan Kazarian

Embark with us on an odyssey through the ever-evolving world of virtual events and witness my own transformation from navigating simple Zoom calls to orchestrating sophisticated webinar-style broadcasts— a testament to the industry's vibrant growth. Today's live news desk at Club Eichi brims with excitement as we raise a toast to the technical maestros like Jonathan Cazarian and the Excel events team, whose wizardry weaves together the fabric of these digital gatherings. We'll unravel the complexities of technology bundling and shine a spotlight on creating user-friendly software that makes event organizing a breeze. The talk steers towards the integration of diverse tech to ensure that error margins are minimized, and attention remains riveted on what truly matters—the attendees' captivating journey.

As we tread further, Jonathan and I confront the tech stack intricacies and the intricacies of email delivery in an era where seconds count, discussing the paramount importance of responsive partners in the high-stakes event industry. We delve into the challenges laid forth by Google's new email regulations and share golden nuggets on fostering a robust email list that distinguishes between transactional and promotional content. Our narrative takes a turn, exploring the intersection of AI and the indomitable spirit of human creativity within the event space. Culminating with words from Donovan, a special guest who echoes the sentiment of community and connection, we close with a celebration of the warmth and authenticity that only real-life interactions can bring, leaving you with a sense of harmony and a community to belong to this holiday season.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

what's going on and your perspective on virtual events. And you know, back in the old days where we just did everything on Zoom and you could see all the people. And then to Jonathan's point, switching over to this webinar style where you're just kind of talking and you don't know who's there and it's like a live TV broadcast, like we're doing right here. I'm making all my journalism dreams come true today. That's what Club Eichi is all about. It is making your dreams come true. And today I am the host of a news desk.

Speaker 1: 0:23

But I did not expect all of the tensile garland that would be in the cool Ashibodu addition to my life, and life is always better with tensile, apparently. So we really appreciate the age of conversation team and thank you for just doing an entire commercial on how great it is to hang out with really fun people, so thank you for that. Our next segment is going to be with the CEO of Excel events, jonathan Cazarian. So we're just working a little backstage magic here to make sure that we can find him. Sounds like maybe we found Jonathan. Can we pull him up here? He's there.

Speaker 2: 1:00

Hello. How are you Prove you're real? We're the fingers.

Speaker 1: 1:05

Look how many. First of all, jonathan, I cannot thank you enough for bringing Excel events into our life. This would not obviously be possible without you, because we are live right now. On Excel events, we were able to put together this one single live feed for 12 hours going on, and then we built out the agenda with every single segment, so recordings of each one are going to be able to go in there. I mean, virtual events really has changed. It's an incredible feat that you've accomplished here.

Speaker 2: 1:35

Well, we're thrilled to be partnering with you for this. I'd love to hear a little bit more about what you're doing on the backside to make all of this happen. I mean, the production is incredible.

Speaker 1: 1:43

It's pretty magical back there, and the production team is. I'm not sure if they're excited for the challenge or if they're the Godavoodoo doll back there of me Amazing time. So, ok, now you and I have had some conversation around technology bundling, because this is not just one thing. So talking about bottom of the scenes and what's happening.

Speaker 1: 2:05

Not only do we have Excel events on the front end for everyone to experience, but on the back end, like we're using Zoom and VMIX and all these magical technologies to pipe people in, but when we talk about actual tech bundling I know that's kind of a passion of yours right now what are you talking about when we say that packages aren't just for Christmas anymore? So what's going on?

Speaker 2: 2:25

Yeah, exactly, and I mean, that's what we've seen over the past couple of years. In 2020, there were what 250, 300 different event technology providers out there. We've obviously seen a big consolidation, but what we're seeing is all of these coming under one roof because of a couple of reasons. We all have shrinking budgets right now. That's continued. We all only have so much time and capacity to learn different tools, and that means that those things have to come together. Technology, event technology in particular has to be there to make life easier for organizers, and when you are forced to glue all of these different systems together, it just creates too much opportunity for something to go wrong.

Speaker 1: 3:05

Yeah, until the robots take over, and then there will not be any challenge whatsoever.

Speaker 2: 3:09

But for the moment, we do have a bunch to push yeah.

Speaker 1: 3:16

But automation versus API, versus bundling, like break it down for me.

Speaker 2: 3:22

Yeah, I mean, look, all of the major event technology providers have APIs and webhooks that you can use to integrate with the rest of your stack, to tie the different tools together. But you as an organizer shouldn't be focused on that technical aspect. You should be there to really ensure that the production, the experience, what the attendees are going through in the attendee journey that needs to be the focus for organizers and, as technologists, our job is to try to make sure that's the only thing you're thinking about, so that you're not worrying about the technology.

Speaker 1: 3:51

Yeah, I think you're right.

Speaker 2: 3:53

Yeah, right, because what happens is you end up with multiple databases and multiple sources of truth for all of that event-related information, and there's just no seamless way to make the experience cohesive, if that's going to be the case.

Speaker 1: 4:07

So does it exist today or are you pointing out a problem?

Speaker 2: 4:10

I'm pointing out the the way things were and we are moving towards the solution. That's our focus every day. Somebody the other day commented on a post. I asked what was the most common pain point you have with event technology and somebody commented saying it's just not intuitive enough. And that's ultimately my definition of what good software is. So we're out there every day trying to make sure that everything is as intuitive as it possibly can be and again that means connecting all of those pieces.

Speaker 1: 4:46

So I think that a lot of our event tech is a little bit like the Winnebago that's pulling the motorcycle, that's pulling the jet ski and we've just tagged a bunch of things on. I know that our tech stack looks like that. We've got a website on Wix and some membership community opportunities on Wix, and then we've got virtual event platform, but then sometimes we're using Wix for event registration. Sometimes we have Excel events for registration. We've got data coming in. I don't even know how we send emails anymore. It's just a mess.

Speaker 2: 5:13

Right well, the other problem is at a larger organization where you might have to go through like a web dev team to make any changes to your website, or the marketing team or marketing ops team to send an email. It just it disempowers the event organizer. And a lot of these other organizations don't understand the sense of urgency that event professionals have to face because events have hard deadlines. I was emailing with you last night when you were at the studio at 11 o'clock at night, and when you re-empower the organizers to be able to do things on their own, they're just able to move faster. Without those roadblocks, they can get done what they need to do.

Speaker 2: 5:49

I mean you know these are the people that go from 20 feet in the air on a ladder, changing on light bulb three hours before the doors open, designing a poster. They want and need control in their hands.

Speaker 1: 6:00

Absolutely, but they also want and need support, and that is the one thing that I really appreciated with your team, which is I don't have time to go through all the documentation and figure this out. I just need someone to help me, and making sure that you have a partner that's there for you on that is just such a life saver.

Speaker 2: 6:14

Oh, likewise, from a sense of urgency perspective, you can't wait to get a response.

Speaker 1: 6:20

Right, right, okay, so I know that we didn't plan to talk about this, but I've been dying to get someone to answer this question, which is the big challenge around email deliverability right now.

Speaker 1: 6:30

So there's a whole bunch of challenges going on out there and in this omnichannel world. There's messaging coming in through eight to a million different inputs on brains that were made to be able to just pick berries, and it's coming in from everywhere, but email it's filtering everything out. It all goes to promo or junk or spam. How do we get event communications through? Is this something that your company is working on?

Speaker 2: 6:51

Well, it's about to get a lot worse.

Speaker 1: 6:53

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 6:54

So come February? Google has announced that if you send an email and you get more than three spam responses per 1000 emails, you're basically gonna get blacklisted.

Speaker 1: 7:02

Oh.

Speaker 2: 7:03

Yes, so it's gonna make things quite a bit harder. There's a lot of things that you can do to ensure that your email deliverability is ending up in the inbox and not in one of those promo folders. A lot of it goes down to who you're sending it, to the frequency at which you're sending. I mean the basics, but you have to be more conscious of it. The other thing, and probably the biggest factor, is making sure that you're only sending emails to people that have actually opted into that communication. In the past, I think we've been more willing to take those risks, but you can't do it anymore because you're gonna end up penalizing yourself with the audience that you need to be in communication with.

Speaker 1: 7:36

That's interesting. So who can evaluate that for us? You know you have a list. You have no idea if they were opted in. You got a new job. You were just handed this marketing database and told to go market to it. How do you even validate that stuff?

Speaker 2: 7:48

Yeah, I mean, the first thing that you can do is run it through a tool like Bright Verify that's gonna check that those are still valid domains, but that just tells you that you know, and because the more bounces it goes to then the higher you get flagged right.

Speaker 2: 8:01

Well, yes, and that's gonna hurt you with the IPs. So in the case of Gmail, what they're saying is, the real concern is people who market as spam. So worse than just a bounce. So when it comes to figuring out who actually cares, I mean, look at the past history of interaction with them. When did they opt in? When was the last time they interacted? Somebody hasn't engaged with you in six months. It's probably safer just to remove them from that list.

Speaker 1: 8:26

Yeah, okay, that's good advice. Okay, maybe that'll help us get our communications through. So then we have, when we think about all of the event, communications. You have obviously pre-event marketing and then you have actual attendee communications. Does this affect those transactional emails too, or is it just promo emails?

Speaker 2: 8:41

Yeah, so it doesn't differentiate between transactional emails and promo emails. That said, transaction emails tend not to get flagged by as spam because people interacted and there was a timely email that occurred right after they took an action. So it actually helps your ratio because the more transactional emails you're sounding don't get marked as spam. Maybe you're up to 10,000 emails now. Of those, three get marked as spam, you're fine.

Speaker 1: 9:07

Yeah, yeah, okay, well, okay. So that is definitely above my pay grade, but something that we're gonna have to figure out. Hopefully the AIs can fix that for us and we won't have to worry about it anymore. How about you guys? Are you integrating AI into the platform?

Speaker 2: 9:21

Yeah, I mean we certainly use AI in our did-to-bate business for a variety of different things, but in terms of finding ways to use it in the platform, we're excited about it, but it doesn't replace people yet.

Speaker 1: 9:34

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 9:35

There's a level of just you know creativity and personalization that we have found doesn't match what our organizers are putting forward.

Speaker 1: 9:45

We do think there's a lot of opportunities areas.

Speaker 2: 9:47

Like you know, you had a lot of sessions today and a lot of session descriptions to write. Streamlining all that, making sure the language is consistent, are all things that we can make easier for organizers within the platform, but by and large, this is gonna be a really hard industry to replace with AI.

Speaker 1: 10:04

So do you use generative AI, like, did you use chatGBT inside and allow people to help? Because, I'll be perfectly honest, if you go to this Clubitia website, on the Excel events page, that whole first paragraph, it's got cute little abodis and everythings. Chatgbt wrote that for us, so we just went in there, grabbed it, dropped it in, made a few tweaks to it. Is it already embedded or is it something that is coming?

Speaker 2: 10:25

It is embedded in our drag and drop page builder so you can use prompts to initiate writing paragraphs or other language within that area. Where it's going to be coming more heavily is related to that session management.

Speaker 1: 10:39

Okay, is it gonna be able to help people actually manage the sessions, or is it more content?

Speaker 2: 10:45

More on the content side of things.

Speaker 1: 10:46

Okay, okay, and anywhere else, like networking, matchmaking. Do you have things in the tool that you're thinking about? Putting that to?

Speaker 2: 10:53

We already do a lot on that side of things, but we're actually using more machine learning than AI in the GPT sense when it comes to figuring out who the best people are to meet with each other, because there's just so much more data in a more quantitative sense that actually the machine learning models are better for matching than the GPT models that are great for writing copy.

Speaker 1: 11:14

Yeah, okay. So tell me the sweet spot with Excel events. Are we talking virtual events? Are we talking reg platform? What should we be looking at you for?

Speaker 2: 11:22

Yeah, so our sweet spot is actually organizations that are doing all of the above and they want to be able to do that all under one roof. We started on the in-person side when we launched back in 2015. Obviously, we moved to virtual heavily in 2020. But today it's a pretty mixed bag. I'd say we're about 60% focused, or 60% of the events that take place in the platform take place on the in-person side, with the remainder being virtual, certainly a mix of hybrid in between. I know in the last session they were saying a lot of the associations are finding the cost of doing hybrid high. We're hearing something similar, but on the corporate side, hybrid is alive and kicking.

Speaker 1: 12:05

That's great to hear, and what's the version of hybrid look like these days, because it kind of has gone all over the map on what a definition is. Is there an actual online event happening at the same time, or is it just broadcasting content from the in-person?

Speaker 2: 12:21

It's primarily the broadcasting of content from the in-person event. One thing that I think we knew from the beginning was that there wasn't gonna be a scenario where you've got an in-person audience networking with a virtual audience, and I'm glad that we've, as an organization, as an industry, moved away from that idea.

Speaker 1: 12:38

That was dumb.

Speaker 2: 12:39

But really finding ways to make the event more accessible and make that content more accessible to a broader audience is very appealing to organizations and if they're gonna have an AV team on site recording the content anyway, the incremental cost to stream it is not much higher.

Speaker 1: 12:55

Yeah, that's true, that's very true. But the difference between needing a platform for that versus just streaming it to YouTube or something like that, is it engagement? Is it metrics? Why would you make that choice? Because you know the cheap version is we'll just livestream it on Facebook or stick it on YouTube or something versus actually investing in a platform.

Speaker 2: 13:13

Yeah, in the corporate space, you don't get any information when you're doing that, right, and so much of these events are understanding why somebody's engaging with the content, who's engaging, what specific areas they care about, their ability to participate in chat, polling, q&a, and that's what a platform enables. Now, when you pick a platform that can do your registration, your check-in, your badge printing, but also do your mobile app and your virtual component, you can do it in a way where you're not adding crazy cost, or any cost for that matter, in order to be able to do both the virtual experience and the in-person experience.

Speaker 1: 13:47

Okay, so you touched on mobile app, which we didn't even touch or know, or do you have a mobile app? Is it just native in the tool and is it the basics of agenda and stuff, or does it do more things?

Speaker 2: 13:58

Does agenda. You can access the sessions from there, participate in chat, polling, q&a, set meetings with other attendees, get push notifications all the good stuff that you need to be able to do. Access the venue map from within the app, and then the way that app experience gets built out is seamless with the rest of the event experience you've built out, so you're not having to do duplicate work.

Speaker 1: 14:18

Right. What about trends? What are you seeing for 2024? What direction is the world going?

Speaker 2: 14:24

Yeah, I mean, look, there is never a time I've been more excited about the opportunity for events because of what's going on in the marketing world right now Third-party cookies, just trashing the traditional paid media that we've seen over the past decade, the work from home environment, just creating more incentive for people to get together in person. There's so much incentive for people to be at events, for brands to be building interaction with their audience, and that's what we're hearing from our customers and it's what we're seeing in terms of event volume.

Speaker 1: 14:55

That's great to hear and obviously, with all the conversations around AI, where the events are the authentic one right, this is how we can actually get people together and really know that we all have 10 fingers. Exactly that's amazing, donovan. Anything else that we need to know or that you'd like to share with the Club EG community?

Speaker 2: 15:16

No, I just want to congratulate you on what you put together today. This is awesome. I wish everybody happy holidays.

Speaker 1: 15:22

Thank you so much, Really appreciate your support in this and I appreciate you coming on and chatting.