Mike Seaman, CEO, Raccoon Events

Ahead of the Future of Business Webinar on July 21st, Mike Seaman of Raccoon Events discusses how COVID-19 has affected the events industry, why he doesn’t believe digital and hybrid events are the future, and his positivity about the recovery of live events.

HOW HAS COVID-19 CHANGED YOUR BUSINESS?

We had to postpone an event that we were due to run  in London in June until next year, which I've never had to do before in my entire event career. That forced us to really think about how we deal with this from both a visitor and exhibitor point of view. What we tried to do was to put ourselves in their shoes and think about the experience they would want.

With exhibitors we allowed them to move to the following year’s show for free, or we refunded those who preferred not to, which felt like the fair and right thing to do. With visitors we realised they wouldn’t want to wait an entire year for the event, so we held a digital show. It changed the product focus immediately. It has also given us some bandwidth to think about some long-term plans that we’ve had on ice for a while.

WILL THE CHANGES TO THE EVENT INDUSTRY BE ADOPTED LONG-TERM?

If we were to have an event running tomorrow it would have to be a very different event, but I think events in six to eight months’ time are probably not going to be drastically different than how they were 12 months ago. In my view, things are going to go back to normal a lot quicker than everybody realises. If you look at the high street, you can see the desire for people to get back to gathering, there is a desire to get out and get back to meetings. If you look at the way the events market is rebounding so quickly in other countries, looking six to eight months down the road, but my personal view is that it won’t be too dissimilar to what it was before.

I’m very cynical about virtual events and hybrid events. The first time virtual events came around, I was at a company where we were all asked to run a couple of virtual events in our portfolio, and they didn’t really work. I think they are a great brand extension and they are great products to have in your toolkit, and they have helped us through this crisis – the digital events that we’ve run have definitely extended the life of our brands when we haven’t been able to do physical meetups. However, for me the benefit of digital is all about speed and on-demand, and that doesn’t necessarily translate well into events, because some of the benefits of an event are ‘blink and you’ll miss it,’ one time opportunities to attend and be involved. I just don't think you can recreate that as easily online, certainly in our markets which are consumer. We ran a digital show with 2,500 people – it was very successful, but that took just as much work to get those 2,500 people mobilised as it did to get 25,000 to the NEC.

It’s very easy for us to be futuristic in our thinking, but actually we have to go for what the audience wants and the audience has up until now always told us that live events are the way to go, and I'm not convinced that this pandemic is going to completely change the mindset of consumers going forward. I can back that up in the stats that we've seen – during COVID, we have launched our National Outdoor Expo marketing campaign and we've had 8,300 people sign up for that in the first three weeks. That’s a consumer event launched in the midst of the pandemic. We’ve had 10,000 registrations for our National Running Show in January. I think the industry seems set on reinventing and hybridising, but certainly in our market which is B2C, there is still an appetite for live experiences.

HOW HAS COVID-19 AFFECTED RELATIONSHIPS WITHIN YOUR MARKET?

I think some people have done well through the pandemic and some less so. The people that have done the best are the people with good products that have been open, honest and who have communicated with their customers. We’re very lucky to have really strong relationships with our market, and we were very open when the pandemic hit – we didn’t claim to know everything, we talked about what might happen if we were forced to cancel and what action we would be taking, and then we honoured what we said we would do. By being on their side and supporting them through it, we've had some really good feedback. They’re just as keen as we are to get the shows back on the road.

HOW HAS IT CHANGED WORKING PRACTICES?

This is an area where we are quite lucky, as we’re quite a young business and we already have a lot of flexible working and working from home. We always say we’re accountability based not hours-based; our employees are judged by the results they get, not by the time they spend at the desk. I do see that as being the future. Also, when we do get back to running live events again, they are obviously going to have to change. There are going to be restrictions in place, we will all have to take responsibility of protecting the future of live events, because if one of us runs a show carelessly and then there's an incident, then that affects all of us. As we've all been doing as a nation by staying home, we have to take that responsibility quite seriously as we open back up again.

 You can register for free for the Future of Business Webinar for Tuesday 21st July at 2.00pm here.