We recently interviewed Scott Hope, an experienced marketing and events professional and the Commercial Director of AR Experiential. You can connect with Scott on LinkedIn or Twitter, and hear him speaking on innovation and commercialisation strategies for events at the NOEA annual convention, taking place November 24th.

Q1: Scott, can you tell us about your background, and what you’re working on at the moment?

My background is quite diverse, spanning across the events ecosystem.

I’ve worked in events since 2004, where I started out in public event catering. I was straight in at the deep end, managing all aspects of the business through tendering for concessions, driving the lorries and emptying the bins!

In subsequent years I acquired the catering concession rights to Boardmasters Unleashed (Ripcurl Boardmasters at the time) and delivered the Quorn Kitchen project on behalf of Premier Foods / Blue Chip Marketing.

Quorn Kitchen was an important juncture in the world of public event catering as it adopted a new revenue model, operating as a concession but to subsidise a brand marketing / campaign budget.

Moving on from event catering, I stuck to ‘stuff on wheels’, with Pan-European operation of motion simulator attractions and exhibition / roadshow trailers. I’ve been fortunate enough to work across many corporate sectors through a diversity of business unit responsibility, learning all the way.

Through the years I’ve become ever more versed in the relationship between events, brand marketing and the various business models, which continue to shift and merge.

Take for example multi-seat, motion simulator attractions, which are a great example of hybridity, which is the opportunity to operate either as an attraction / leisure concession, often linked to a brand licensing deal, or in support of a brand’s experiential marketing campaign.

In the last couple of years, I’ve been working in the field of augmented reality and virtual reality, developing a platform to manage both the operational and data analytics needs of brand experience marketers, for exhibitions and roadshows. As this ecosystem develops, I see this technology becoming important in the world of leisure concessions / visitor attractions too.

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Q2: There’s a perception that concessions, a revenue stream that goes directly to the organisers, and the main content of the event, which visitors also pay the organisers to see, are often at odds with one another. In other words, visitors feel they’re paying good money to see too many vendors; while vendors are paying to get in front of visitors who aren’t that engaged or just want to see the main attractions. How can innovation help resolve this conflict and allow organisers to commercialise their events in a smarter way?

For sure, there is a lot we can do to innovate event commercialisation, and in my opinion it is the outdoor, public events that need the most work.

All too often it is the case where visitors pay a hefty admission charge for a limited content experience, wedged in amongst a plethora of sales & marketing focused trade stands and poor quality, overpriced catering.

Unfortunately, our industry has some antiquated approaches to business models and budgets where revenue generation conflicts with content and services cost.

All stakeholders are somewhat to blame, with businesses built on this culture continuing its perpetuation.

In recent years, sponsorship and experiential marketing have become ever more prolific at outdoor events, but all too often organisers have just capitalised on this trend (i.e. taken their money) without considering the overall visitor experience.

Simply substituting traditional ‘trade space’ for brand experience activity, with the lure of increased ground rent, isn’t a sustainable approach in its own right. We need more strategic foresight from organisers – the experience economy notion comes into play here, there is great opportunity for the savvy event organiser.

To use a phrase coined by two of my acquaintances, that I truly believe in, ‘the experience is the marketing’ or at least it should be! All the commercial aspects of the show need considering collectively.

With brand experience marketing benefiting from continued growth, are we well positioned to have the brands deliver the core content? It all comes down to authenticity.

If the organiser knows their audience, they’ll know the brands relevant to them, that they can work with to deliver authentic content that isn’t sales focused. It’s a win win win scenario.
From an event technology perspective, various innovations in audio / visual and multi-sensory engagement support the improvement of experience delivery, but most important in bringing it all together is social media.

All event organisers and stakeholders must embrace the social conversation and its shift online.

Most important is a well-managed infrastructure (think poor Wi-Fi & cell capacity issues), followed by opportunities for visitors to share their experiences and their conversation at every turn.

Once again, ‘the experience is the marketing’ rings true. A collective approach to social strategy is required, correlating the social media marketing activity of the show with that of its vendors / partners.

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Q3: Whose responsibility is it for concessions to be engaging to visitors? Should organisers do a better job of educating (or even regulating) the quality of vendors and what they offer at events? Or is it really down to the vendors themselves? 

The underlying responsibility falls to the show organiser. As an organiser, you are the curator of your show and if you take commercial innovation seriously, you should surely take an active role in this.

Organisers should always be regulating their vendors in some capacity with a view to quality and professionalism, but we need to take this beyond the basics with a more proactive approach.

The world of public outdoor events has traditionally operated within its own commercial ecosystem, quite literally enclaved from the rest of the commercial world familiar to the visitor / consumer, often disadvantaging the visitor.

The industry has been slow to innovate, but with visitors demanding more and events now centre ground in the eyes of brand marketers, the pressure is on, and it’s down to event organisers to come up with the right commercial model.

Vendors must embrace this change too, wherever they sit in the ecosystem, whether it be innovating their own operations or agreeing new brand partnerships, to embrace the experience economy.

The question is not so much about improving the quality of vendor operations, but more so about the event organiser setting the right strategy for commercial innovation and ensuring the right vendors are sourced to deliver it in a commercially effective way.

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Q4: How can Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality help brands up their game when it comes to creating more compelling experiences for visitors?

Both these technologies will become strategically important for all events, but it’s important to understand the differences as to how they support event objectives.

In terms of maximising adoption, Virtual Reality headsets are arguably more about bringing the outside-in, rather than the inside-out when it comes to events – think live streaming for example.

When you’re in actual attendance at an event, you have to question why you should be virtually somewhere else? Surely an event is about real, tangible experiences that would otherwise be unobtainable?

That said, brand experience marketers have jumped on VR in the last couple of years, largely through deployment of hardware intended only for development use. That didn’t stop the brands though, with the wow factor of new tech being the draw, not necessarily its relevancy to the brand or the quality of the content, nor the authenticity of the storytelling.

Brands have been on dangerous ground here with many experiences dismissed as gimmicky, although there have been some great examples that have been effective and won industry awards for their agency producers.

Virtual Reality is a great tool in the experiential marketing arsenal for brands, and when applied correctly, with great content, it has the potential for great impact. It lends its self well to multi-sensory engagement and for social sharing of experiences.

Innovation with VR will see new commercial opportunities too, in the same way as brought by multi-seat, simulator attractions. We’ll soon have hybrid systems deployable as visitor attractions or for brand experience activity – both important markets for outdoor events.

Augmented Reality has seen less action in the world of events, largely due to delays and disruption within the overarching ecosystem. Most use cases to date have centred on trade shows where the technology has been used to ‘augment’ exhibiting display products, using tablet devices.

Some vendors are innovating the ‘event app’ concept to add AR features around show navigation and proximity based solutions. Augmented Reality Smartglasses represent the next wave of AR for events, freeing the hands of the visitor to allow augmented digital content to be placed directly in their field of view.

As this technology develops, exhibitors and roadshow organisers will be able to create digitised storytelling experiences that embrace the physical aspects of the event space, whilst combining other multi-sensory technologies, and that all-important social sharing capability.

The key to all of this is emphasising the experience, not the technology used to deliver it!

You need great content and a great story! Industry protagonists, myself included, believe that Smartglasses will ultimately replace the Smartphone, becoming our everyday personal communication device of choice. The opportunity for the events industry is on that trajectory.

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Q5: What other advice, based on your experience, can you share with event organisers for ensuring they commercialise their event in a way that benefits all the key stakeholders?

My perspectives are those of someone who’s worked across different events, in different roles at different levels; I don’t profess to be an expert on event commercialisation, but I know what happens on the ground and the trends we’re all facing.

Let’s be honest though, what we’re talking about here isn’t an easy ask of event organisers, to fundamentally change the business models that, largely, have been commercially successful for them.

What we’re concerned with now though is continued financial sustainability as the experience economy develops, that as you say benefits all stakeholders. I’d encourage event organisers to take a mid-term view with all of this but to be brave in the short term and lead the way for the industry.

I think by far the best advice is to start with your objectives and how they sit against the customer experience, because your visitors should always come first.

Consider all your stakeholders as partners, set out your vision to them and replace outdated processes. The practice of reverse tendering for concessions needs an overhaul as it can lead to cartel-style operations amongst vendors.

Innovate your relationship with stakeholders across the whole transactional & planning process, support them, engage them in the discussion and welcome new relationships. After all, the events industry is very commercially competitive.

For those stakeholders that don’t support your strategy, there’ll always be plenty of others that do who’d be just as, if not more, capable. This is the behaviour than influences change in an ecosystem.

The goal? Satisfied customers, maximised revenue streams and minimal costs! If it was that easy, we’d all be doing it!