Taking Events Beyond The auditorium

Communication across audiences is becoming more and more important today. There are multiple reasons for the same. There is a slowdown, and so everybody is looking at value. That's a reason for us to force-multiply and take experiences and various other aspects of the brand from inside the room, to the outside world. It is an important aspect of the marketing communications business to showcase value.

The other is to show that we actually enhance value for people interested in the particular topic on show - be it a brand or a service or a launch or anything else. In order to reach out to everybody, you need to force multiply.
The third is to actually build a very important part called 'trust' -the one thing that is being eroded in the current context. When trust gets lost, the things easiest to eliminate get eliminated. And therefore. as communicators - and trust is essentially a communication platform - it's important that we look at trust extremely carefully. There's need for greater accountability, transparency, and ROIs from the events side of things.

One unique feature of events is that they promote dialogue. They allow you to interact. Any other medium, I dare say, does not allow that.

The events sectors are also communicators and as a communicator, would probably go to the client and says, "I offer integrated communications." Unfortunately, what happens is that the integration between advertising, PR, events, etc., is often not very seamless. In fact, it's not even there. Many in the events sector elaborate on how that could be done in the context of MICE. In the integrated communications space, how should we approach this? Integrated communication and 360 degrees shouldn't become four-letter words. They're unpronounceable any more, and the sad part is that everybody uses them.

Firstly, certain things may be corrected with regards to education. I teach in a couple of institutions. Some of them are 'communications schools', some are 'mass communication institutes', and some of them offer 'Public Relations' courses. Unfortunately, while there is supposed to be a holistic perspective given to students, these courses give the same segmented viewpoint that all of us are used to. We are used to separating aspects of communications, and viewing them individually, because that's supposed to be simpler that way. Because we teach them from our segmented points of view, these very students who come in to the industry come with our mindsets and viewpoints. They are examples of how we think. We are the ones who are creating this system?