Our Digital Transformation Continues

It has been a little over four months since writing this article in Fast Company.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90499636/8-ways-to-rethink-virtual-events-for-the-age-of-social-distancing?partner=feedburner

As I sit here typing away on my laptop computer, socially distanced and masked, in what feels like a version of mission control it is hard not to feel like we have become, in a remarkably short period of time, a full fledged interactive television network. We are less than 24 hours away from the beginning of our first virtual/digital version of Microsoft Ignite. (Arguably the flagship of our flagship events here at Microsoft)

That article four months ago was published just two weeks before Microsoft Build. Build for us, was the first acid test of the programming and production approach we developed as a result of a 14 show crash course in digital transformation. At that time, we didn’t know whether any of this was going to work. Now, four months later, we believe that this kind of approach to events and experiences can work, and is rapidly becoming the center of gravity for our event strategy both in the short and longer term.

This Tuesday the 22nd of September, we will premiere our first digital iteration of Microsoft Ignite. We are building on the 48 hour, “follow the sun” model we piloted at Build, but we have learned so much since then. Since rehearsal days like this can be a little slow, it made sense to try and capture a few thoughts about what we continue to learn as we continue to evolve and grow in our digital transformation of events and where we think things are going as we all continue to think about the “what’s next” in the world of events and experiential marketing.

 Virtual Events are Crazy Effective!

Listen, The Theater is my root creative DNA and there is nothing like the serendipity of connection and networking that can occur at a live/ in-person event, but make no mistake about it, digital/virtual events are incredibly effective. At the highest level it’s about the scale. We are experiencing orders of magnitude growth in the number of people who are participating with us at our events. (2019 Microsoft Build, for example, we hosted 6200 attendees. 2020 Microsoft Build… 197,000) The next remarkable element is that digital events are so much more inclusive. The mix of our audience has completely shifted. Historically, our events would breakdown to 80% US and 20% global; today that mix is 70/30 Global! And, in terms of inclusivity, this is a favorite stat…. In 2019, only 24 developers from the African continent we’re able to join us for Microsoft Build. This year, we had 6,014 developers from across Africa join us. Remarkable. Finally, there is a data driven reason to believe that we are starting to deliver a virtual experience that, while nothing like a live event, is creating an effective, interactive, and unique experience that creates energy, education and a sense of place and shared experience.

The best part of this learning is that we have some pretty significant data to help support the hypothesis now. Below is a table of some the results of Microsoft Build 2020, honestly there is a workshop worth of insight in virtually all of these numbers.

Digital Events are efficient:

The bottom line is this, virtual events, (even highly produced ones) are significantly less expensive than live events and experiences. By fully utilizing a digital approach to our events strategy, we have been able to reduce our production cost dramatically. This, combined with the point we were all just talking about above around efficacy, is where the whole adventure that we’re all in the middle of really becomes kind of a mic drop. It’s the moment that you begin to see that not only are you witnessing the emergence of, what it doesn’t feel like an overstatement to call, a “new medium” and you realize that in addition to being incredibly effective, is also cheaper than the thing it is filling in for. From my perspective, that’s when things start to get exciting and the idea of being at the beginning of what could be an incredible period for creativity and communication starts to seem not only plausible but even likely.

Now, it must be said that at Microsoft, we have a great set-up in terms of having an existing production facility from which to work, but this cost savings can be realized whether you are in a set up like ours or you are running OBS on your laptop and running two cameras in a bedroom office.

Digital events can create and build community and networking:

There is absolutely no question that this is the area where kinda everybody in the events industry gets a little bit righteously indignant and says, “you’ll never be able to replicate the connections and the networking that can be done at a live event” or, “I’ll never get the kind of leads I get on the show floor” These are fair perspectives and for us it has meant going in a different direction. From a design perspective we have tried to do exactly the opposite. (e.g. Not try and emulate the places and spaces of the live world and instead create a compelling experience in the tools and experiences that are distinctly of the digital/virtual world we’re in now.) In addition to not reminding the attendee at every moment that they are not at a live event, it also unbinds us from a format that is, in all candor, limited. We'll get another significant body of data after Ignite, but as you've seen in the results so far, there is reason to be encouraged. The below is from Microsoft Inspire in July. The below statistics reflect our partner attendees opinion of the work we are doing in the “community and connection space” Something that historically was the most important thing to our partners.

Sure, there is plenty of room for improvement, but when you look at these numbers as an expression of our first attempt! That is encouraging.

Digital Events are not, “Digital Events”

Yes, absolutely, those of you who have been around in the media business, the notion of true interactive television has been fooled around with for a pretty long time. That said, all that experimentation and hard work toward making that vision a reality always had fundamentals standing in the way. Today for the first time, all of those fundamentals are in place.

·      Technology: We are finally at a place where there is a critical mass of distributed hardware, combined with network connectivity and software, that enables the kind of bandwidth, connectivity and transfer speed that can create seamless and real time relationships with our audience.

·      Audience Sophistication: We are living in a world where the vast majority of people working have grown up interacting with their media, (Through gaming and social media) their entire lives. Not only is there a willingness to interact and participate, there are a set of known and learned behaviors that can be called upon to engage audiences and get them to bring the best of themselves to the experience.

·      An effective lever to drive change: Look, we all know more about this one. Change is hard. Even in the extremity of the situation we face as events and experiential marketing professionals, it is remarkable to me how hard it is to drive effective change management. Even in the face of success, it has been challenging and exhausting for everyone on the extended team. That said, the world we are living in right now has been an exceptionally effective lever to help us get as far as we have gotten in terms of driving change.

This combination of factors, in my opinion, has created the conditions for the immergence of a functioning, at scale, interactive media platform that has an incredible number of applications in organizations of any size whether communicating with employees, partners or customers and communities. The opportunity here is to truly embrace the unique qualities and capabilities and our ability to leverage Microsoft technologies to do just that has been an incredible bonus in terms of enabling us to bring our vision to life. Currently, the entire Microsoft Digital Events Platform is running on the Microsoft Stack. Azure, Azure Media Player, Teams, Teams Live Meeting and two third party partners running on Azure create our “Digital Venue”. It has been an incredible journey working closely with our engineering teams as we continue to evolve and articulate our approach.

Digital Events Requires an evolved organizational approach:

Back in April, right after we made the decision to focus only on the making of digital experiences and not do any location based events until at least the end of our FY21, (June 2021), we said to our team that we were in an “all hands on deck” situation as we worked to define the work we wanted to do and delivered several of our most important flagship events. Once we got through our partner and employee event, (Microsoft Inspire and Microsoft Ready) in July, we would spend August taking stock and seeing what alternations or tunings we might need to make. The result was nothing short of a complete restructuring of our organization.

What you see above will look familiar to many, but what it represents is a hybrid of broadcast, studio, and agency models , with a little bit of the interdependence and creative collaboration of musical theater as an underlying cultural note. In other words, an interactive media network.

Digital events are the new center of gravity:

As we continue to live, work and create in this new environment, we hear a lot of people say that they are really beginning to see the value of digital in the context of events. Increasingly you will hear event professionals talk about how this period has given them the opportunity to learn a lot more about the value of the digital world and how it will be a much more important element in addition to the live experience when events come back. From our perspective, we believe that this period has shown us that the digital elements ARE the center point of the event or experience and this will remain the case even as live events return around the world.

When you think about it, the likelihood of returning to large scale, destination based events, over the next 18-24 months is low. What is much more likely is the proliferation of events that take place locally and regionally in much more intimate settings, (50,100,250,500 people) Our view is that we will be able to create extremely compelling experiences that work in harmony with the digital elements seamlessly weaving the highly produced central messaging, executive engagement and production value from the center and localizing and personalizing the experience at the field level where it matters most. (The last mile of service and attention)

Digital Events are an exceptional opportunity:

Its effective, it is cost efficient and we are seeing encouraging signs that even at the human connection level, this so much more than a stop gap measure until live events get back to normal. The stage is set for all of us to continue to raise the bar, the define the medium and then strive to master it!

Ever onward,