“We needed to create an iPlayer for the occasions business,” recollects Hugh Edwards, chief govt of ReAttendance, of his imaginative and prescient for the enterprise 5 years in the past. Lengthy earlier than the Covid-19 pandemic, Edwards and ReAttendance’s co-founder Peter Dickson, might see the business was rife for disruption. They thought a service just like the BBC’s on-line viewing platform, providing content material in several types and on demand, might be the innovation required.
Each males had been well-placed to make that decision. Edwards has racked up nearly twenty years within the occasions and leisure business, alongside a profession as an award-winning voice and casting director – he additionally serves as a British Academy of Movie and Tv Arts (Bafta) awards decide. Dickson, in the meantime, has a voice that’s acquainted to hundreds of thousands, with 40 years of labor on hundreds of TV and radio broadcasts, together with stints on The X Issue and Britain’s Bought Expertise.
Collectively, they launched ReAttendance in 2016 as an occasions platform for a altering business. The purpose was to supply a service that may assist organisers develop and handle their occasions in no matter format they needed – from conventional in-person affairs to completely on-line endeavours, or hybrid occasions combining each bodily and digital options.
By 2018, Edwards and Dickson had been starting to benefit from the fruits of their labour, delivering a string of profitable occasions in a number of industries – from conventional conferences and company occasions to exhibitions and awards ceremonies. “We began to make the platform extra broadly obtainable, and in 2019 we started engaged on the ultimate piece of the jigsaw, growing a product for shoppers who needed to run digital occasions reside and in actual time,” Edwards says. “We had a single developer engaged on that and we weren’t in a selected rush.”
Then, after all, the world modified. “We launched our reside service on the finish of March 2020, simply because the world went darkish,” Edwards recollects. It was good timing – with the UK, and far of the remainder of the world, imposing strict lockdown restrictions to fight Covid-19, organisers needed to cancel all bodily occasions. Demand for ReAttendance’s reside occasions platform accelerated exponentially.
It was the appropriate product on the proper time, after all, however in a short time ReAttendance started to note one thing. The swap to digital occasions was born out of necessity, but additionally generated some large positives. Most clearly, with organisers now not dealing with the price of hiring area for occasions, or incurring journey payments, revenue margins had been considerably larger.
The query was whether or not digital occasions would endure in a post-pandemic world. “In October 2020, we began to consider what the arrival of a Covid vaccine would possibly imply,” says Dickson. “We had an actual crimson letter day and made the toughest enterprise determination of our lives – to start out another time with the platform.”
ReAttendance’s view was that when the pandemic subsided, organisers would wish to preserve lots of the digital options that they had found through the disaster, however that they’d additionally wish to return to bodily occasions. “Our platform wasn’t designed to ship that type of hybrid service – at the very least not within the true sense of the phrase,” Dickson says. Work on a reimagination of the platform started directly.
Nearly a yr on, Edwards claims ReAttendance’s platform in the present day is “distinctive”. He explains: “It’s the solely platform designed holistically to assist a hybrid occasions mannequin.”
The purpose is to supply organisers with a whole service as they develop their occasions, with a spread of choices on how they run. Some organisers will select to host utterly on-line occasions; others will run bodily meet-ups, however promote further tickets to a web based viewers, maybe at a decrease price. And through ReAttendance, everybody will get entry to the identical alternatives – from attending key periods and break-out occasions to arranging meet-ups.
Digital performance can assist bodily wants. For instance, delegates would possibly get a QR code which supplies them entry to the occasion venue. And the bodily occasion can assist digital materials too – offering alternatives for on-line attendees to participate in periods, give their views and, after all, to stream content material reside.
ReAttendance CEO Hugh Edwards
Sheils Burnett
Edwards believes the character of the awards business is altering essentially – even leaving apart the affect of Covid-19. “The Netflix technology has very completely different calls for,” he says. “Occasions organisers are going to must grow to be content material creators, delivering a spread of supplies quite than a one-day hit.” ReAttendance is within the good place to assist, he argues, supporting content material earlier than and after the occasion in addition to throughout it; additionally it is producing vital quantities of information to assist organisers perceive what works effectively and what wants altering.
Furthermore, whereas the pandemic is – hopefully – now starting to go, Dickson factors to a different disaster that gives an crucial for his business to alter. “Massive conferences and occasions have an enormous carbon footprint,” he factors out. “Individuals are more and more unwilling to fly to those occasions as a result of they don’t wish to contribute to local weather change.”
On this world, some occasions attendees – these dwelling extra domestically, say – will select to go to the bodily occasion. Extra far-flung delegates received’t miss out as a result of they’ll attend just about.
The important thing, because the world emerges from lockdown, is to maintain evolving. “Had we not taken that tough determination final October, we’d be caught with a web based platform quite then one thing that’s really hybrid,” Edwards says. “The expertise we now have obtainable isn’t what we’d have envisaged at first of 2020, however having been by the disaster, we will now see easy methods to deploy it.”
That offers the British firm a vital head begin in a market the place the expansion prospects are phenomenal. Grand View Analysis thinks the worldwide digital occasions market will likely be price as a lot as $505bn by 2028 – the equal of 24% annual progress between at times. ReAttendance seems, as soon as once more, to be in the appropriate place on the proper time.