Creating Attention and Engagement in Digital Events

Hello everyone and welcome to Webinar Days 2021. New connections is the topic of this year because webinars connect us in new ways and ways that are more authentic and human. Big surprise, webinars are here to stay. Webinar is this interesting sort of a box. We've been seeing marketers that have shifted 40 million euro event marketing budgets down to zero and then starting from scratch building up a webinar organization, webinar studios. We started let's say in July last year and after around about two months we had the first webinar registration already online. What we found out is that our audience, our customers, were actually very keen on hearing from us. And trying to be better at using our product and solution. Yeah, I think first off thanks Andreas and Bertrand for sharing your stories. I think you're very inspiring in many ways. I think also I mean sort of paradoxically obviously us building tools, we didn't talk that much about tools. And the people actually doing great marketing didn't talk a lot about the tools, right? But I think that was definitely a key takeaway that I think tools are such a key part of the business. It's a key part of enabling your organization and creating this kind of webinar driven organization, right? And we quickly realized that there was a huge commercial potential in collecting data from signups. But then after the event you spend a bit of time and you look at what has actually been created because it's a piece of long form content that can be used. First the topic being discussed. They're looking for something that they haven't heard before. This was the number one self-reported reason as to why someone actually chooses to register for a webinar. Or a virtual event. Making sure that you plan everything out. And not only that, making sure that you have one central location for everyone to look at all the events that you're actually doing. As I say, think very carefully about where YouTube sits in the strategy. There's absolutely no data there. So potentially a real gap there for the marketeers. Great. That's a good start. That's a good start. Let's start this session off today. How do I sign up? I can answer myself. I mean I cannot really connect to anyone else if I'm not connected to myself. The idea is to get a little bit more of vocal dynamics involved. And why that? Because when we start to use our voice a little bit more, we also transmit more energy. Present to you how I feel right now. Now you heard Hook say something about presence being there. But also showing something that's really you can make that extra camera love. Or extra connection to whoever's in front of you. My job is to make them look good on camera. I mean many of them were very good already. But my job was to make them look fantastic on camera. Make them come across really well on camera. And what I want to do today is bring some of that experience to you and give you some practical tips. How do you build a good narrative for your presentations? And how is this done when drawing? It really helps you tell the story and everything around those small visuals. But what are your takes on gestures on cameras? I believe you should of course know where you are cut. How large a frame you are in. Because if there's only hands popping up like this, it can be really disturbing. We will be back tomorrow at 10 o'clock Central European Time. Thank you very much. Take care. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And then we are live. Hello everybody and welcome to Webinar Days 2021. This is the second session on day two. If you have participated in any of the other sessions either yesterday or today, welcome back. And if this is the first session, you are participating in Webinar Days, well, welcome. We are also very happy to see you here. Webinar Days 2021 is a three-day webinar session where we have thousands of engaging pioneers within webinar marketeers that want to level up their games within web in-house. And we have over 30 speakers. So this is quite interesting. And we have already learned a lot. And yesterday we had the sessions camera love. We talked about the marketeer's guide to great webinars. And we also talked about the webinar driven organization. Today in the first session, we talked about the future of the webinar manager. If you didn't see some of the sessions, you can find them all on demand here in the system. So you don't waste anything good keynote to take away. The next one and a half hour, we will focus on creating attention and engagement in digital events. We will cover topics such as how to engage a global audience of 3.5 billion. Humor makes webinars better. And it can even make yours better, believe it or not. And the best events subverb, the norm. So that is what we will talk about for the next one and a half hour. Now, of course, we want this to be an engaging conversation. We are in a virtual room with people all around the world. So please use the features we have in this platform to engage. There is, first of all, the question tab. You'll find it over the chat. During the presentations, type in your questions in the question tab. And then we will gather them all when we have all speakers at the end of the session for the panel debate. So use the question tab for that. Then we have the chat. I think most of you know how that works. So talk to each other, chat, comment, and see if there's some new connections maybe for you with your peers as well. And then, of course, we have the reactions. Now, we can just test if the reactions are working. So you can clap, send a heart, or maybe a little light bulb if you are ready to get this session started. So try and click on the reaction so we can see that it works. And also, actually, now I can see it works. So that's great to see. It could also be great just to know who are actually watching right now. So in the chat, it could be great if you would write where are you actually placed around the world. In which country or city are you placed right now? You can type it in the chat. So we have a good idea. A good idea about this virtual event room we are actually in. So in the chat, country, city, where are you placed right now? And also, I think it could be great if you could type in as well. We have some good speakers on today's topic. But do you actually have a good success story already or a good tip about how to create engagement in webinars? Then type that in as well. So if you have a good tip already, then put it in the chat as well. And I can see there's already buzzing in with good comments. So I can see we have Susan from Toronto. We are in Richmond, Virginia. We are also in Copenhagen, Sweden as well. We are in Sweden again. Denmark. Great. Keep it coming on the chat and let it buzz during all of the speaker sessions. And now I think we should get started. I think we should get started on this session. Our first speaker, he is an award-winning Olympic sound designer. He has worked in film and television for more than 30 years. And he is actually, his name is in more than 900 international movie database across 100 separate production titles. So he's there a lot in that database. He just returned from the Olympics in Tokyo. Which actually placed him in COVID isolation in a hotel in Brisbane, Australia, where we hope we have connection to him right now. He will talk about the importance of sound in live events. So please send some clapping reactions for Dr. Neil Hillman. Hello, everyone. And thank you for allowing me the privilege of the time to talk with you today. The fact that you are here on this webinar taking part in these workshops. Marks you out as some of the most progressive thinkers in your industry. And it's good to be part of that movement and to be in your company. Thank you, Christian, for asking me along. And thanks to the technical team at 23 who have worked with me to facilitate this presentation from my hotel room in Brisbane here in Australia. Where I'm currently serving my 14-day quarantine sentence after reentering the country following what has been on balance a wonderful 60 days in Japan. Working on delivering sound for the illimited audience. And the Paralympics. I was passionate that the Olympics and Paralympics should go ahead. And even though some people said it wouldn't go ahead. Another said it couldn't go ahead. And then another group suggested that it shouldn't go ahead. I personally think that the world is a better place for us having had the opportunity to celebrate the dedication and the discipline that these athletes have shown us. I find it rather inspirational, especially during these metaphorical dark days of the consequences of COVID-19. It's also literally dark where I am by the way now as the time here is just after 11 p.m. at night. So you've probably seen enough of me already. If we could perhaps have the first slide, please. On to the next one, actually. In this very short session. That's the one. Thank you. So this is me. The face of the disembodied voice. And we've worked surprisingly hard to ensure a stable connection. Australia is renowned for its poor online connectivity. Surprisingly enough. And that's due in some part to its geographical challenges and the distances involved. But our biggest challenge has proven to be getting a clean signal from a hotel in the center of one of the biggest cities in Australia to you all today. So let's keep our fingers crossed that the line holds up. Having successfully reached 3.5 billion viewers during the Olympics. It was 3.6 billion for the figure in Rio in 2016. So maybe more for Tokyo. It would be mightily embarrassing to lose the signal today. So by way of a quick introduction and overview. I'm a practitioner and an academic. Sometimes that's called a pracademic. Which means that I continue to work in my chosen area rather than adopt a purely academic approach to my field of study. And it's this academic link that informs my practice. Which at its heart involves the evoking of emotions in others through the use of sound. Now it's important to understand that this is in the forefront of the digital age. And it's not just about the simple and I think rather lazy sometimes fallback of adding music to pictures to make them work. Where music is a major key is intended to make us feel happy or something in a minor key is to suggest sadness. And you often find fast music used to suggest industry while slow music is the cliche to suggest calmness and slow motion sequences, of course. But I think that the music is very much centered around the human voice in conjunction with atmospheres and sound effects. Now music has its place, of course, and it's a powerful ally for the sound designer. But you'll all have seen corporate videos that contain complex images where the editor has given no more thought to the soundtrack than choosing some royalty free music that plays from the first to the last frame. And if we're lucky, we might get a tempo change somewhere in the middle. Well, the point is, it's not just lazy. It's also wasting the most powerful opportunity you have as filmmakers, as communicators to reach out from the screen and speak to your audience. The use of music in this way is left over from the silent movie era, which in turn came from earlier musical theater. And there the music was there to tell us what to feel. Instead, a more powerful use of sound to evoke emotion in a listening viewer is to ask them these two questions. How do you feel and what do you feel? Marry that carefully to your message and your address in the audience in a much more personal way. Just one of the important psychological phenomena of sound for moving pictures is that it can draw the viewer's attention to a particular point on the screen. Now, we can do this manipulation consciously and subconsciously with sound. And that's where my practitioner and academic worlds converge. Because it's not only relevant. It's relevant to the feature films I do, but also for the consulting work that I undertake for my corporate clients. And not only in creating emotional engagement with their audience, but also working with an organization to establish the sound of the company or the sound of its voice. I know it's strange when you first hear about it, but I'm hoping that by the end of this short presentation, you will have a light bulb moment. Maybe heard something that relates to your company's unique identity. And this idea of using sound and emotion together will present itself as a new opportunity to communicate internally or externally in a much more effective way. The main relevance to your business is knowing that what I'm going to quickly cover can work for anyone. It's not a sector related thing. A powerful emotional experience for your viewers or your delegates. Something that evokes strong emotions. Will certainly make your presentation powerful. And it will definitely give it impact and make it memorable. I'll give you an example of this shortly and also offer some takeaways from this session that you can start implementing immediately. And my notes will be available for you to download from 23 after the session. May we have the next slide, please? Thank you. So these are the areas that I work in for feature films, television drama and corporate communications. And it's an alpha to omega approach that can involve recording sound on location, known as production sound. And then completing the editing and mixing of the soundtrack in a studio in a process known as audio post-production. I own and operate an audio post-production facility in the UK called the Audio Suite. And I'm here in Australia to expand our studios and to expand into 24 hour productivity for our clients by utilizing the working time difference of the working day between the UK and Australia. I also work on outside broadcasts delivering live television programming from behind an audio mixing console. Often sport but not exclusively. And I also enjoy the broadcast engineering side of things, delivering commentary feeds and broadcast communication circuits to and from remote sites. My first degree was in electronics. So this kind of work helps keep me up to date with developing technology such as audio over IP. And then I also do a lot of other things. And I've been very lucky enough to be involved with some great sporting events like Champions League Cup finals, Athletics World Cups, Commonwealth Games and, of course, the Olympics. This picture was taken at the Olympic Velodrome in Izu, Japan. A beautiful two-way track. It's a 250-meter indoor wooden bank track set in mountain forests with views of Mount Fuji. And I don't know if any of you watched the track cycling from the Olympics this year. But I'd never been inside a velodrome before. And I found it to be an incredible sport to watch. The banking goes up to 45 degrees at the two ends of the track. And in this picture, I'm sitting at the bottom of the banking because I couldn't get any higher up without sliding back down again. Next slide, please. At the Olympics, I work for the Olympic Broadcasting Services, known as OBS. And you might not know that any footage that you see of Olympic events comes exclusively and only from OBS. You might think it's your home broadcaster's pictures because it has their station ident on screen. But the reality is they pay extra to take the OBS logo off and have us insert their ID instead. And they're not allowed to film any of the events. So I always find it slightly irritating when someone like the BBC wins awards for its Olympic groundbreaking and innovative coverage of the games when actually all they've done is had a commentary team out of vision at various events, built a presentation studio maybe, and designed some opening titles. This year, OBS delivered over 9,000 hours of content from 42 remote sites to that global audience of around 3.5 billion people. So as you might imagine, this means that there's quite some pressure on us as engineers, technicians and operators to deliver a seamless service. And my job this year was to help deliver commentary and communication circuits from the mountain biking course and the velodrome in Izu for the Olympics. And then for the Paralympics, I was stationed at the Olympic Stadium at Shinjuku in Tokyo, one of my favourite cities in the world. Next slide, please. This is the velodrome. And I took this shot before the Olympics actually started on a training day when we were still rigging our equipment. And this is the French women's team hard at work. And the next slide, please. This shows the commentary positions in the velodrome and as well as the broadcast equipment of microphones and headsets that commentators use. We're also responsible for providing the picture feeds on the monitors you can see on the desks. So that the commentators can see exactly what pictures have been transmitted live to the viewers in their home country. You can also see that we were allowed a crowd in Izu, being outside of the Tokyo prefectures. We were about two and a half hours southwest of Tokyo. And we had permission for a 50% capacity audience inside the velodrome. So that was about 1,500 people, unlike the Olympic Stadium and other Tokyo-based events that weren't allowed any spectators at all. Next slide, please. So this is a shot I took of the Olympic Stadium at dawn. It was actually on the last day of the Paralympics. We had a 4.30 a.m. start that day to prepare for the marathon, which started at 6.30. And that was to help the athletes miss the heat of the day. It really is a beautiful building to work in and also to spectate in. There are no obscured views anywhere in the stadium. And it's such a tragedy that people were denied the opportunity to watch the athletics there. It was built on the site of the old Olympic Stadium, the one used in 1964. And Tokyo is the first city to have held the Olympics and the Paralympics twice. Let's move on. Here again, you can see commentary positions complete with COVID screens inside the stadium. The checkerboard or camouflage effect on the seating helps to make the stadium feel less empty. And it actually works remarkably well. But as I say, it was so sad that there weren't crowds there cheering the athletes on. I remember at the London 2012 Paralympics, where I was actually working as an audio mixer, going into the stadium at trackside level to watch the final of the wheelchair 800 meters when Team GB's David Weir was racing for a fourth gold medal. The sound pressure level from the 100,000 capacity crowd as he entered the last lap was unbelievable. The pressure on my chest was so great that the breath in my lungs was squeezed back in and it was difficult to breathe. It was truly incredible. And like nothing else I'd ever experienced at any other stadium. And that includes a Champions League final at Wembley and a Real Madrid versus Paris Saint-Germain European fixture at the Bernabeu, which was, by the way, the most exquisite game of football I've ever seen. Thankfully for that game, I was working as the technical producer. So once the game got underway, I could semi-relax and just watch, something you can't do if you're actually mixing the match at an audio mixing desk. So the reality of a strict COVID code of conduct for us, in fact, the condition of us being there at all, meant that we had to be health monitored every day with PCR tests every four days. We were only allowed to mix with work colleagues. And although a clear test at 14 days meant we could shop for food in convenience stores, it was all to take away and evening meals had to be eaten on our own in our hotel rooms. But in any case, the restaurants in Tokyo weren't closed. They weren't allowed to sell alcohol and they closed at 8pm. So we didn't really feel like we were missing out compared to the other people in Tokyo. Everyone was missing out. And in passing, I do think it's worth saying that at both of my Olympics and Paralympics venues, we had no incidents of COVID. And that was not only in my immediate team, but also for the OBS presence at my venues as a whole. So the system obviously worked and kept us safe. Next slide, please. So the OBS was to initially help build the infrastructure of the commentary control room, known as the CCR, from a kit of parts delivered to the venue and to install the systems that run the commentary and communication circuits, and then to administer the day to day operation of the CCR and supervise our operators. This is a picture of an operator screen. And from here, the commentators' feeds can be controlled. Not only what they're saying for the benefit of their home television or radio station listeners, but importantly, we can control what we put into their headphones, such as the sound effects of the event taking place and the talkback from the studio director at home to the commentator and vice versa, without that conversation being heard on air by the viewers. We're also responsible for routing the talkback circuits for the flash and mix zone interviews. Now, those are the ones that take place with a reporter and an athlete trackside immediately after the event. Next slide, please. This is what the commentators use to do their job. Imaginatively, it's called a commentary box, and it has a headset for listening with a built in microphone for speaking and push to talk buttons so the commentators can talk to their home studio, to each other or to us in CCR without any of that being heard on air. And we also feed into the headphones, as I said, the sound of the event taking place, which is traditionally called international sound as it has no speech in it. And that sound of the event is provided by our colleagues in an outside broadcast truck who place microphones on the field of play and match the sound to the pictures. We also arrange to send the commentators a feed of the stadium announcer, a feed of the OBS television director so that they can hear when a replay or a slow motion sequence is about to be shown. And of course, the production talkback from their own studio overseas. Up to three commentators can work through one of these units, and all of those feeds can be adjusted in volume by the individual commentators on the box itself. By design, we can see our control screens on our control screens exactly what each commentators personal settings are. And because almost every panic call to a CCR operator involves the commentator not being able to hear something, that's almost always because they've managed to turn it off. Next slide, please. Ultimately, this is what my responsibility distills down to. Getting the right sound to the right place at the right time. And with one very important quality. The voice must have effortless intelligibility. A phrase that I've coined in my work with clients to emphasise the crucial nature of viewers being able to hear what is being spoken. If the audience pauses to ask, what was that they said? You've broken the spell. And you've lost the buy-in from the audience. For emotional engagement with a televised sporting event, or a television drama, or a feature film, this is the single most important component of the soundtrack. Next slide, please. So let's talk about emotional engagement. My PhD research focused on human emotions and which of them could be evoked through the deliberate or thoughtful use of sound. And it turns out, given the right context, all of our emotions can be affected. And we have about 20 unique and identifiable emotional states to work with. So the result of my research was a thesis that considered, amongst other things, the what, when and why we should use sound for evoking audience emotions. One of the leading lights of... Could I have the next slide, please? I'm sorry. Thank you. One of the leading lights of emotional research in the 20th century was a guy called Paul Ekman. And he proposed that those 20 subtle and not so subtle emotional states actually arise out of six universal base states. Happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. Now, think about it. And you could experience all six of those when you're watching your favorite team playing football. Or rugby. Or whatever sport. Or, equally, watching a feature film which, broadly speaking, will major on one of those emotions and then support it with the manipulation of the others. Movies and TV routinely have access to our top level emotions because we pre-qualify ourselves. When I'm watching a comedy, I expect I'll be happy. If I'm watching a tearjerker, I expect to feel sadness. Similarly and so on if I'm watching science fiction. Watching a documentary. Watching a thriller. Or watching a horror film. Next slide, please. Our audience's pre-qualified state for corporate communications is not so open or quite so easy to access. Because we don't have the same unwritten contract with our audience as we do with a feature film. It may be that the message is not what they want to hear. Especially if it involves change in some way. Or it may be that whilst this is an essential topic for the progress or success of the organization I work for, it's not something that excites me or even interests me very much. And I think you'll agree it's not unreasonable for an audience to think, why do I need to consider this new service or this latest product that you're trying to sell to me? I've devised a simple formula that considers the variables that are at work here. First of all, the audience's willingness to change. And that is directly affected by how deeply the need to change is felt by the audience. Notice I use the term felt because the audience needs an emotional trigger. And the bigger that emotional effect is, the more deeply it's felt by the audience. Then that in turn drives the smile on the face of the audience. at which you can move the audience towards your desired outcome. Next slide, thank you. So let's look at a real-world internal communications example that I was involved with and one that was designed to unashamedly manipulate the audience's emotions for a given outcome. The purpose of it was to address a poor customer relations culture that had become problematic for a high street bank, and it had a spectacular intended and also an unintended outcome. So here's the set-up. And the interview was intentionally filmed in a fly-on-the-wall, observational documentary style. The viewers were all employees and they saw familiar uniforms and surroundings in the set-up shots, standard branch interview pods and introductory processes for a routine mortgage arrears interview in a more private office. But what they actually witnessed in emotional terms was the emotional impact of the bank's ultimate recourse to mortgage arrears being applied. Despite her pleading and her obvious distress, this separated mother with two small children was made homeless. Now, this interview was fictitious. The roles were played by superb actors, but it was shot in a way that made it look totally real. Importantly, the sound was Christophic. The sound was crystal clear, so no nuance in either of the actors' voices was lost by recording the sound of an echoey room on a distant microphone. Remember, stimulate and trigger the emotions of the audience and a reaction is more than likely to take place. Having watched the film, and with no explanation or context other than this was a mortgage arrears interview that was just one part of a video training module, what the audience experienced was what emotion researcher Professor Norman O'Connor, and Holland describes as a particularly cinematic experience. Holland says of this, we bring to bear on what we see some feelings or experience from our own past. And by bringing our own past to bear on the here and now of this tragedy, it makes us feel it all the more strongly. So what we were allowing the audience to feel is what they would feel if that happened to them. And we allowed the audience to remember, how they felt when this or something similar happened to them. So I describe this as the feel, felt, found moment. I know how that onscreen person feels. I felt like that when this happened to me. And what I found was dot, dot, dot, insert the consequence of the emotional reaction there. Next slide, please. In this entirely fictitious scenario, the manager, a male actor, through verbal language and body language, had no sympathy or empathy with the woman in front of him. It was simply his job to follow the procedures to the letter, irrespective of any mitigating circumstances. Meanwhile, the woman's verbal and body language revealed her complete vulnerability. When the film finished, the audience, in this case the bank employees being trained, had seen for themselves at first hand that she and her child were going to be made homeless following this meeting. The outcome from this training exercise was unprecedented in the history of the bank having a training department. The HR department were initially overrun with cases of staff questioning the humanity of the organisation that they were working for, to the extent that there was a need for counselling for employees who thought it was a real scenario, even after they'd learned that it was fictitious. And here's the important point. The emotion that those individual members of staff had felt during the film had remained with them long after the film had finished. Overall, the response of the staff was entirely as intended. It evoked compassion, an emotional term that's not usually heard in a financial environment, but it worked because now they had that towards the customers they subsequently faced. For the internal communications team, it also meant recognition as the film went on to win numerous internal communications awards. So here's the thing about emotions and what makes them powerful tools to use in communicating an overarching message. Even though we identify that it's the circumstances of the on-screen activity or the character on screen that has aroused strong feelings within us, we still feel them just as strongly. And that is such an important phenomenon of human emotional behaviour. And we could spend so much more time on workshop in just this aspect alone, but time prevents us from doing that today. But, next slide, please. What we can confidently say is that stimulate and trigger the emotions of the audience and a reaction is more than likely to take place. We identify that it's the circumstances on screen that has aroused these feelings within us. So we're in no doubt about that, but we still feel it strongly. And remember that Norman Holland thing that we bring to bear and what we now see some feeling from our own past. And that makes us feel it all the more strongly. So let's move to that summary statement, if we may, please. So here are three things for you to take away from this session and to consider implementing as an approach to your video communication activities. And this you'll be pleased to know. puts you in exactly the same position as a broadcaster televising a global sporting event or a production company making a blockbuster movie. You're using the audience's emotions to create measurably effective corporate communications. Thanks for your time today. Well, thank you very much, Dr. Neal. And I think if any of you had a light bulb moment during this presentation, send some light bulb reactions and we will get Dr. Neal back when we have the panel debate at the end. So if you have any comments or of course also questions, send them in in the question tab that you have just over your chat. So thank you very much, Dr. Neal, for now. Next up in this session, we have a speaker who himself hosts a high-profile event. It can be like TEDx Amsterdam, Brand Minds Live and also the next web conference, etc. He actually also made President Obama laugh when he hosted the Nordic Business Forum. So that's something for his LinkedIn profile, I think. So everybody, please welcome Pep Rosenfeld, who will inspire us on how humor and improvisation makes webinars better. Over to you, Pep. Thank you very much. Thanks for the introduction. And thank you all very much. And thanks to you guys for having me here today. And of course, for the folks that are signed up and watching, thank you so much for participating in Webinar Days. Well, my name is Pep Rosenfeld. And what I want to talk to you about today is webinars. I mean, obviously, that's what we're talking about, webinars and how to make them better. Now, we just saw a great one. So, Neal, nothing I'm saying applies to you. But let me say this. It's not polite to say this right in the middle of Webinar Days. But I think if we're honest, we would acknowledge that many webinars suck, right? Many of them are just not interesting. You know, like most of us, you see the invite for a webinar in your inbox and you're like, OK, that's bad news, good news. The bad news is I have been invited to another crappy webinar. The good news is I can delete the invitation unread, just like I do with every webinar invitation and continue with my life. Before I continue, I want you to know that I'm one of the founders of Webinar Days. I'm one of the founders of a comedy theater here in Amsterdam, Boom Chicago. And, you know, what we do is we make up comedy on stage. And it's one of those places in life where you must be engaging. If you're not, you lose the audience. They go to a different comedy show and you go out of business and President Obama has to laugh at someone else. So a lot of what we do on stage is the sort of stuff that we've sort of honed and focused and things I'd like to share with you today so that your webinar does not become one of the invitations that disqualifies you. One of the invitations that disappears into the trash bin. Now, the truth is webinars are hard. I mean, look, you know, look at us. We're all, look at us. If you see us, we're all, we got a cup of coffee and I got my fuzzy slippers on. You can guess for yourself if I'm wearing pants. But the answer rhymes with schmo. We're all super comfortable here in our homes. And in one way, it feels more relaxed. The thing is, all your listeners are in the same boat. They're also relaxed. They're also at home. They've also got their fuzzy slippers on and their cup of coffee. And worse, they've got all kinds of windows open on their screen so they can do other stuff as soon as their interest in what you're saying fades a little bit. Now, you can't control what they do. You can control the way you give a webinar, the way you give your presentation. And the fact is, even though you feel more relaxed, you have to work extra hard in these virtual digital webinars. The fact is, though, that even in this world where you have to work extra hard, most webinars are a drag. So just look, before we start, I just want to ask you in the chat, throw in there, Emily, I love that you've got your slippers on, Alistair. I mean, maybe I'm wearing schmorts. Maybe I'm wearing a skortz, you know, the skirt shorts combination. You never know. But in the chat, on the count of three, everybody just write down one or two words about why webinars are a drag. So one, just write down. Don't send it yet. Don't send it yet. Why are webinars a drag? Write it down. And on the count of three, we'll all send it. One, two, three, send. The sheer sameness of the event. Yeah, many of them just seem the same. That's absolutely true, Alistair. And that's the only bit of engagement we've got from the chat. So that's unfortunate. But what are you going to do? What are you going to do? It's my fault. You're alone in a room. Bad presenters. Oh, gosh, we'll get on that in a minute. Boring. You know, Eli, as you'll see in a moment, I agree. Tone of voice, not succinct. They go on too long. Latency is slowing down the chat, Emily explains to me. Thank you, Emily. I feel my feelings were hurt for a while, but now I feel much better. Thank you, Emily. This is all true. These are all true. And here's my two biggest reasons. Sessions don't get to the topic quick enough. Ah, is that a note? Because I'll take it. I think there's two big reasons why webinars are a drag. I think the first reason is a lot of speakers don't use the medium. This is different. You know, this is different. And, for example, this is why I'm not going to use a PowerPoint today. I feel like if you're on stage and here's a screen with a PowerPoint, that's kind of cool. And I think if you're in a big jumbotron place where you're on the jumbotron and your slides are on the jumbotron, that's cool. But I personally don't like it when the screen is my slides and I'm just a little head over here in the middle. I don't like that. More on the medium in a moment. But I think the biggest one was hit on by many of you, and that is that webinars are bam. They're boring. Webinars are boring. You're bored right now, some of you. You don't have to lie to me. If you're bored, that's fair. But speakers have to work extra hard to be unboring. It is our job, our duty, our responsibility to you to be engaging. Because here's something. A lot of folks have a fear of speaking. And they say that evolution taught us to have a fear of speaking because in the old days when we were just caveman apes, if we saw that many eyes staring at us, it meant most likely we were about to be dinner. So that's why people are so afraid to speak. But I think there's another bit of evolution no one thinks of. It's from the other point of view. Because when you're in the audience, whether digital or in person, when you're looking at the speaker, you're primitively speaking. You're primitive brain is thinking one of two things. Is that my prey? Is that an antelope that I can devour and not respect? Or is that a lion? Confident, proud, and perhaps even dangerous. The job of the speaker is to be the lion. So, so, so, okay, so let me back up a minute. What do I mean by use the medium? What do I mean by use the medium? In the chat, tell me how this medium is different from physical. What are the goods and what are the bads about the medium itself? And I will be aware of the latency. So no one, two, three. You just write it in the chat. What is unique about this digital environment? What makes, what's a potential strength? And what is a potential weakness? Now some of the weaknesses we've already said and why we're boring. But you knock yourself out. Try and think outside. Let's see, harder to see micro expressions. That's true. That is true, Emily. I would even say, though, that sometimes if you've got people on your screen for a smaller presentation, it's easier to see the micro expressions because they're right in front of you. It's even weirdly intimate. You can divert your attention without others knowing. Yeah, couldn't agree more, Don. Folks can sort of tune out and don't even, all you got to do is know how to nod and you're pretending that you're engaged. Can't smell the other person, says Emily. What I do is I have a little perfume, which is just smelly people, and I spray it around the room. No, no, that's actually a good point. It reaches across location. Yeah, that's true. Double M, or do you say triple M? You can bring many more people together. That's a real advantage of the medium. But you're missing the audience. Audience could be half listening and multitasking. We're seeing more negatives than positives. So I want to say, I want to try and focus on positives. I want to look at stuff that you can make better because of the medium. The first one is, well, there's two tricks that I learned from a fellow whose name is bam, Neil Patricia. And I'm putting this up here. a screenshot because this is a good dude. He does a great talk on happiness, but he taught me two tricks. I'm going to use them today. One of them is the one I just did, cards. You don't have to have a screen. You don't have to have a PowerPoint. You can have index cards. Now, maybe you got a lot of important charts and stuff, and that's important to you. You could print them out. You could hold them up. There's a million things you can do to mix it up and make things more engaging. The other thing that I think webinars have over in person is the chat. It is my belief that the chat is actually better than in person, and here's why. First of all, you get a ton of information in no time, and that information has a name associated with it. In person, I couldn't just go, Jenny, you are right. The audience can hide from you, although for my money, you sit in the back row of a big event, and you are hiding successfully from the speaker. Alistair, index card bonus. can expense the manicures. Super true. Also, the Band-Aids for the paper cuts. It's a good point, Alistair. See, I made a joke, and I watched Alistair laugh at it. It was actually more intimate than it might have been if he was in the back of a theater. Another thing about the chat is that you can really encourage engagement in a fast way that doesn't derail your presentation. Sometimes a speaker in an in-person event is like, hey, who here can think of two reasons why these in-person events are actually worse than webinars? It takes too much time. No one raises their hand. On the other hand, you get the introverts chiming in immediately. You don't have to wait for the big screen word cloud. It happens right away. The chat can create engagement immediately. You can also force engagement. You can ask questions you don't even care about the answers to just to get people listening and typing. The third thing, and I can't demonstrate it today because of the platform we're on, is you can have some fun with your backgrounds. If it's Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, you've got those virtual backgrounds. Don't overdo it, but you can hit people with some prizes. They weren't expecting you to do a punchline of your Donald Trump joke with a big picture of Donald Trump. Someone was telling me that on Teams now, you can actually put your slides as the background, and then you sort of get over onto one side of the screen, and your slides are over here. I think that'd be a pretty cool way to give your talk. But the real bottom line is use the medium, think about it, and remember that the medium, in this case, is the message, or at least the message, and what happens with the message itself is that you equity to it, and you have a point. Something else you have a lot of control of besides the medium is, of course, you. It is your job. Alistair, Troy McClure. I'm Troy McClure. You might remember me from Sus Messages as the medium is the message. I'm no Troy McClure. Anyway, you can do stuff to be more engaging, and there's great stuff you can do to make your talk the most engaging. First of all, every speaker should be willing to show off their BAM, their emotion, their emotion. A lot of people think that, oh, you know, I've got the data and the data speaks for itself. The data does not speak for itself ever. Not even graphs speak for themselves. If they did, what the hell are you doing giving a webinar? No, no. You speak for the data and you speak for the graph and you speak for the charts. You speak for everything. You are telling the story. And if the audience doesn't feel that you care about it, then they're not going to care about you. And they're right. If you're not emotionally engaged with what you're talking about, how can you possibly expect your audience to be emotionally engaged in what you're talking about? I want you to always feel free to show emotion. And I think I've got time for a little demonstration of this. Look, I want us all to try something. Wherever you are, look in your camera right now. Now, most of you I won't hear or see, but the other speakers I will. So, you know, I can see you guys. So here's what we're going to do. All of us, all of us, we're all going to count to 21, but every three, I'm going to ask you to change your emotion and you're just going to practice letting your emotion out. It's kind of fun. Oh, Dr. Hillman has joined us because you're going to play along too. First of all, we're just going to be neutral. Okay. As we count one, two, three, you're going to be neutral. So here we go. And one, two, three. Emily, you didn't count to three. I mean, you wanted two people. I'm like, I'm going to count to three. I'm going to count to screen. So if you don't count, I'm on top of it. I know that. Okay. We're going to try it again. And Alistair, I don't know what's happening with the Alice in Wonderland, but I love it. We're going to count to three and, oh, no, no, but I don't want your emoji emotion. I want your emotion. One, two, three, neutral. One, two, three. That was neutral. That was like most webinars, right? Okay. Four, five, six. It's going to be happy. I want you to be over the top happy. Now, only I, I think only I can see Neil, Emily, and Alistair. But we're going to be happy. Okay. For four, five, and six. Here we go. And four, five, six. See what I mean? You don't have to be so over the top. I mean, like some of you are thinking I need a drug test right now. And it's not crazy that you think so. But that's what happy is like. And you want to show your emotion, your face, your voice, your upper body. Obviously off camera, doesn't matter. You can amputate. That stuff doesn't matter. But on camera, show your emotion. Okay. Seven, eight, nine. We're going to be angry. Here we go. And seven, eight, nine. Now check it out. I even got close to the camera. You can do that on a webinar and when you can't on stage, you can really get in there close. I mean, it's not a rap video. So don't get in there too much. But I'm seeing some good stuff. I wish you guys could see Alistair, Emily, Neil, and Anders right now because it's great. 10, 11, 12, we're going to be scared. 10, 11, 12, it's going to be scared. Maybe of the angry people from before. Now, nobody likes fear. That fear is what the audience will connect with. You're talking about the climate. You're scared of it. You got to let them know. 10, 11, 12, we're scared. And 10, 11, 12, that's pretty, that's good stuff. That's scared. And Alistair, you keep, you're using faces that aren't yours. That's not the idea. I want you to use your own emotion. 13, 14, 15 is going to be, you've got a secret and you can't tell the secret, but you want to tell the secret. Like you won the lottery, but if you tell, you don't get the money. So that's what's happening now. So that's 13, 14, 15. And here we go. And 13, 14, 15, you lean in, you cover your mouth, you want to talk, but you can't talk. I'm going to stop it on 16, 17, 18. 16, 17, 18 is in love. Okay. Now for in love, I'm just going to look off camera. So it's not creepy in love eye contact, but 16, 17, 18, we will end on... So here we go. And 16, 17, 18. Ah, in love feels good. In love, love is like, love is like a happy, you know, times 10. And if you're in love is like angry times 10, you need some therapy. But look, I just want to, I'm doing this. I'm asking you to do this to point out, we all know what emotion looks like and feels like, but sometimes, especially in a business environment, we hold it answer the question, I'm just asking first-come questions and Google- mungkin they do, And so part of the question there is do we move that's a little bit more over omission here. I'm forcing engagement. Write down in the chat why you think word stress is important. I'm waiting. I'm waiting. Thank you, Skip. I do use that as a warm-up exercise. I'm not going to lie to you. I'm not going to lie. Emphasis, sure. Absolutely. Emphasis is a biggie. Varies the pace and keeps things lively. Emily knows where this is going. What else? What else? Because humans need to be reminded to pay attention. Those are honestly the three biggies for me. We've just nailed them. Stressing words tells the audience what's important to you, what you want them to remember. There's something else is that stressing words can change the meaning of words, change the meaning of sentences. For example, take this sentence. I didn't steal your money. I didn't steal your money. It seems like it makes perfect sense. We all know what it means. But what if I stress the word steal? I didn't steal. Your money. I didn't steal your money. Okay. What the hell did I do with your money then? All right. How about if I stress money? I didn't steal your money. Ah, I didn't steal your money. But where's your car? Right? How about your? I didn't steal your money. No, no. I didn't steal your money. But Alistair's money? I got it. So look, you can show people what you mean by stressing words. You can let them know what to remember by stressing words. And you can even change the meaning of the sentence by stressing different words. The biggest one, though, is what Emily, no surprise, said is that, and what Alistair said as well, is that when you stress words, you're changing up your energy and it just gets people's brains to tune in. You know, more evolution. The brain was taught at a young brain age that if something is constant, it's unimportant. But if something is changing, it's important. Because when you're staring at a forest and nothing's moving, you're safe or you're not going to eat. But if you see a little motion in the forest, hey, that's a wake-up call. Because either you're going to get to eat something or something else is going to get to eat you. Your brain was trained to look for little differences in stimulus. So when you shift up the way you talk, it just gets people tuning in. As Alistair would note, it reminds humans. Emily, I'm so sorry about that. And yet, and then I'm totally not because you'll have to improvise. I like that. The other thing I want to talk about, and I hope I'm demonstrating it as well, is something you can do to be engaging is make eye contact. You can make eye contact. And I think the thing we've all learned over the last 18 months is your audience is not the screen down here. It's this camera. This camera is your friend. And down here, when I'm looking, oh, what's Emily thinking about me? I don't know. But everyone else is thinking, where's that weird dude looking? Because he's sure not looking. got to look at the camera. Okay. How do you look at the camera in real life? What do you got? What if you have performer's notes? I'd say two things about your notes. One, open up a Word document and put it right under the camera. That's what I do. I'm not going to lie to you. I got an open document right now under the camera. So look, sometimes I'm looking down a little bit, but my notes are right at camera level. But you might have less notes. Maybe you just have bullet points. Put them on an index card or a Post -it note and post it near the camera. Look at this. I got my notes. My notes could be posted right there. Look, emotion, word stress. There's the, I didn't steal your money. And then eye contact. You can do it all. You can put it right next to the camera. Give yourself the same advantage that newscasters and presidents of the United States have been using for decades and put your words where you are looking. The other thing that I got to say is when you are making eye contact with a camera, you're missing people. In a recorded webinar, it doesn't matter. But in live, Reviewing is important. Manage is important. Stop it. Yeah? Please know that when I was holding up the sign that said boring during Neil's talk, I was practicing my cards and not commenting on Neil's talk. Now, so I'm here to talk about humor in my last three minutes. I want to make sure I mention humor because I believe that humor is the secret sauce to almost every business communication. Humor makes business better. That's our motto at Boom Chicago. Now, obviously, my background is comedy. I mean, if I was a plumber, maybe I'd be here saying, well, if you really want to connect with your webinar audience, clean pipes. That's what you need to clean pipes. I don't know. I'm not a plumber. I'm in comedy and I believe humor makes business better. But there's a couple of good reasons. And and and let me tell you a few of them right now. First of all, humor surprises the mind. Right. Nobody's expecting a joke. When a joke comes, the same reason that makes a joke funny. You weren't expecting it. Also does that that that word stress effect, which just grabs the focus and brings people back in. To your talk. I think a real valuable thing about humor that people don't tend to realize is the way humor can help communicate. It can help communicate ideas that might be difficult to communicate. And once again, the secret is is hidden in evolution. The secret has to do with the fight or flight response, because I think we all know that back in caveman times, you know, if a caveman was attacked by another caveman, you know, they had two options, fight or run away. And, you know, sometimes he fought and won or sometimes he ran away and got away. And that's how his genes were continued in evolution. You know, and sometimes he fought and was eaten or he ran and was caught and then eaten. And then that he didn't reproduce. And that's how evolution works. I have often wondered as a slow runner and terrible non fighter, how could I have possibly evolved? How am I here? And I realized maybe there was a third way. Maybe there's a third way, which is make your opponent laugh. See, I think that when primitive Pep was attacked by a primitive predator, the predator might have said, you know, I will eat you. And primitive Pep said, wait, wait, wait. Two cavemen walk into bar and one caveman say nothing. He was Cro-Magnon and Cro-Magnon has not yet developed power of speech. And I'd like to think the predator was like, oh, oh, oh. And his defenses were down. The mood was lightened and he didn't eat my ancestor. And maybe, you know, who knows? He maybe he made friends with my ancestor. Maybe he hired him. You know, I'll be here all week. Try the fish. Maybe he mated with my ancestor, which was, you know, the world's first H.R. problem. That's that's a totally different story. But I really do think there's a third way. And humor is it because a lot of times when you're communicating, maybe it's it's an idea that people don't want to hear. Maybe you're arguing with people. There is a lot of. There's a lot of times when you're talking to people whose minds are closed to your message. But if you can get them to laugh, you can get their defenses down. You can get them to go. And that's when the door is open to crack to your idea. So I'd love it if you would put in the chat right now the punch line to your favorite joke, the punch line to your favorite joke, mostly because I'm curious about the punch line, your favorite joke. But I promised 23 minutes and I've just hit 23 minutes. So I just want to say in the end, Tanish is a great punch line, Alistair. So in the end, I want to remind you to use the medium, use the medium that you can use cards. Make sure you use the chat. You can mess around with the background or figure out other ways to use the medium. You're more clever than I am. You can come up with ways. But remember, it's a different medium and that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad. Use the medium to your advantage. Even more important than that is be engaging. And when I say be engaging, I'm talking about connecting to your with what you're saying with emotion. Stress the right words and make eye contact. With the camera. And of course, use humor. Use humor to engage with the people you're talking to. Use humor to communicate ideas, especially difficult ones. And just use humor to be more fun. Who are we kidding? It's more fun to watch someone who's funny than watch someone who's not funny. That is it. I am Pep Rosenfeld from Boom Chicago. You can find me on Twitter. You can find me on Instagram. And I hope to be quitting Facebook very soon. Thank you very much. Well, thank you. Thank you very much, Pep. And send some reactions to Pep here in the chat if you like this talk here. Really great. And again, coming after Pep, I would just like to say good luck to Alistair and Emily there. It's going to be a hard one. So let's jump right to it and keep the energy. The next speakers are two. Not in one, though. It's Emily Ross, who is a strategist and CEO of Inkwine. And it's Alistair Kroll, who is a conference. Organizer and best selling author. And both of them are now going to start with a joke. Here we go. We can start with a joke. All right. Emily, why don't we put Emily on here first and we're going to start with our slides. But Emily, how many tickles does it take an octopus to laugh? I don't know. How many tickles does it take an octopus to laugh? Ten tickles. Oh. Alistair. That was a joke. Pep did say he wanted a joke to get started. We have a lot to cover. So, Emily, why don't you take it away? Go to the room and leave that what you've done. That was absolutely disgraceful. I'm ashamed of you. And actually, because we've been writing the book for so long, I've had four years of bad dad jokes from Alistair Kroll. And you're not going to get away with that tennis joke either, by the way. I'll have to say thanks a million for putting us on after the Olympic quality award winning speaker. Followed by a professional comedian. Yeah, that's a really low bar. Thanks a million. Yeah, it's a delighted to be going on after two such excellent guests. OK, so why are we here today? We're here to talk to you about event subversion and actually Pep. I wouldn't say he stole all of our best material, but there's a lot in here that absolutely validates the advice, the advice and the recommendation that he's giving. So, first of all, I want to tell you a little bit about us and who we are and why we're here. I am Emily Ross. I'm the founder of Inc. Fine. I generally help technology companies to scale internationally. We help them to get it, get attention and convert it into profitable demand. My first business was actually an event management company in the corporate sector. And we helped companies really to create these incredible experiences with high risk additionals. I also happen to have written a master's thesis on authenticity and online content and online behavior. But actually, I learned everything I know about attention and events from my time in the circus. And if you're lucky and if you stick around to the end, I might even tell you what I actually did. And oh, somebody is bringing me tea. And I'm a second. Thanks, darling. You're very good. Bye. So that's me. Alastair, why don't you introduce yourself? Sure. So I founded a company called Co-Radiant after working in the tech industry. It was a web performance company. And then since then, I've chaired a number of the world's biggest technology conferences like Interop and Cloud Connect and Gigom Structure. Today, I run Startup Fest and Ford 50. And I've written a bunch of books on technology and industry. But I think far more importantly than either of those things, Emily and I have been studying subversive go -to-market tactics for the last four years. Learning about big brands, small startups and their tactics for bringing something new to market. And we're writing a forthcoming book and writing some cohorts about how to thrive. And I do a lot of work myself. for real, they'd come across four sexualissez veterans The house... I spent a tremendous amount of time looking at event tools, literally 240 tools and counting, which I documented in the spreadsheet, everything from streaming systems to video capture and switching systems to chat systems. And then we put them as part of the team that I run into a structured spreadsheet with 300 different categories as a sort of requirements checklist. I wrote up a detailed report. Forty five people who run events all contributed to it. So we have this sort of living document, about 100 pages. And then knowing that nobody was actually going to read that document, I decided to run a webinar. And for the webinar, I was still on crutches. I got a liquor delivery because in Canada during COVID, you could get alcohol delivered to your house, literally got up in the middle of my webinar and left it to someone else to run, which seemed kind of strange. But the reality was it was weird and unexpected. But that's what everybody talked about because it was unusual. So, you know, people afterwards are like, I can't believe Alistair got up in the middle of a talk and did this thing. But the new normal, as Pep has shown us, was to be. Much more improvisational. So between our work subversing, subverting marketing and our work running these events and studying last year, you might say we know a lot about what it takes to run an event in an overstimulated market. And look, I think no one's going to we're all going to agree that even before COVID, our event industry was kind of screwed. It was really morphing into this and, you know, real estate play where it was all about selling exhibition stands. And the same speakers over and over again doing the same talks and flogging tickets, trying to get early birds in. And yeah, tools were making it more and more easy for companies to run their own events. Communities were developing and creating their own meetups. But really, many of the competitive moats that event companies were had enjoyed for decades, they'd evaporated. So we were already, you know, kind of on the way out. And then I think there was an interesting survey about. Done about like attendance versus registration. And this was for online events even before COVID. You might only get about 36. Well, this was a particular study, but, you know, a third of those who would register would actually show up. And even the ones that did, they would turn off their cameras. They're, you know, thinking about something else. They're checking their emails or on their phones. And they were just not engaged. And, you know, when COVID came along, it just got worse. And you know what? COVID. OK, there was an acceleration of tools and various different platforms. But really, it just accelerated it. It just sped everything up because channel burnout is a thing, right? Events and webinars are just another channel. And every channel burns out. I'm going to explain to you why. So Andrew Chen was the head of rider growth at Uber. And back in 2012, he coined this expression, well, a rule called the rule of shitty click through rates. And he used this to basically say the more you use something, the more you use a tactic, the faster it is to become less effective. Right. So, for example, if you're using something to to flog tickets or to get people interested, it'll work the first year. It might work a little bit less the second year, but things generally tend to decay. Now, if we think about so he used his law of shitty click through rates and he used data from display advertising and email open rates. So what you're looking at here, right, if you remember all the way back to 1994, this is the first ever display ad. OK, now we're like we're so used to them. But 1994. This was like a whole new idea. And you're seeing here the text says, have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will. I mean, it's cute, right? So Hotwired is Wired.com today. And back then, some reports say they had click through rates of like 70 something percent. It was more like 44 percent, which is still bloody marvelous. Now, you fast forward five years later to Facebook ads. You're going to get 0.05 percent click through rates in like maybe 2011. And then if you fast forward to today. And if you. Buy display campaign space, if you do really good creative and if it's really targeted and if your audience is relevant, you're probably lucky to get 0.02 percent click through, which is pretty much appalling. Well, look right now for us, every day looks the same. We're all in little boxes. And like Pep's so right. You have to dial it up. You have to do something different. You have to be different. Like because. With everything. Looking the same with all the boxes, the same with the webinars, the same like something's got to give. We really need to dial it up. And everything. The things in the tab next to you are going to be more important. You're not just competing with other webinars. You're competing with Netflix. You're competing with everything else on the Web. Now, we actually ran some numbers about the attention economy. And Alastair is going to tell you a little bit more about that in a bit. But and the book that we're writing, it's all about this attention economy. You need to get attention. You need to attract it. And cut through the noise of it, of our attention economy. This is why platforms like TikTok and YouTube and Twitter are valued so highly because they you can pay them to get attention and they capture our attention. Now, we actually did this. Alastair calls it math. I call it maths or sums. But if an average person lives about 72 years in a single day, there's 2500 human lives spent in attention on Facebook in a single day. Like, that's crazy. So, Alastair, will you tell us about an attention economy? Sure. So today, obviously, we're faced with an abundance of bland content. Not here, because Dr. Neil and Pep have definitely shown that it can be engaging. But there is an abundance of blood content, both online and off. Excuse me. And this means really small, disengaged audiences and a collapse of revenues or leads or whatever the reason you have for sharing content is. And this is not something that was unexpected. This pattern of something becoming abundant and the thing it consumes becoming scarce has happened before. Herbert Simon first coined the term the attention economy because he said that information consumes our attention. And so when there's too much information, we don't have enough attention to pay to it. An abundance of information effectively consumes our attention. And that's the thing that becomes precious and scarce. As an event organizer, you're fighting against what is literally the greatest distraction. And if you're having trouble looking at my little face because of this wacky, waving, arm flailing inflatable tube man, you know that's true. And today, there are hundreds of businesses out there that monetize attention from Facebook to YouTube, to Instagram, to Google, to TikTok, all of whom will give you some engagement for money. You can buy ads on them. They're part of a massive attention industrial complex. But if you play by that system's rules, you'll lose because you'll be doing just what it wants, just like everybody else, There's a solution to this problem that Herbert Simon first posed, of course, which is that when there are too many things to pay attention to, we focus on what's interesting. And what's interesting is what's novel and what's unconventional. In a study of over 200 battles, conflicts over the last 200 years between a big country and a small country, the underdog actually looked at what happens when the underdog uses conventional versus unconventional tactics. If you use normal tactics and you're the tiny underdog, you lose three quarters of the time. On the other hand, if you use unconventional tactics and unconventional strategy, your opponent can't respond to, you'll win two thirds of the time, which means that you need to go and break rules in order to win in this attention economy, to get that attention machine you're part of, to behave in a way that gives you an unfair advantage. And it turns out that's what our brain does. So the fact that we spent the last year learning everything about conferences and we're writing a book on how to understand what it is that helps certain brands stand out and win in a competitive attention economy, we figured we'd share some of that with you today. Actually, just to give you a little bit more about the book, we researched various different industries. We talked to innovators, psychologists, hackers. We studied game theory, cybersecurity. to us was the fundamental tenet is this, creating attention that you can turn into profitable demand is possible. And you can do this. And I love the fact that Pep talked about mediums because our book is talking about subverting systems, taking the mediums, the platforms and using them and getting them to behave in unintended ways that help you. And this is a skill you can learn, she said, emphasizing certain words. Thanks, Pep. Thank you. ak and you know, a very big brand, every major event has a skeleton in its cupboard. Tupperware came along, no one ever thought about turning a dinner party into a massive multi-level marketing franchise. You know, it was such a strange thing, but then after it was implemented, it became the norm and now multi-level marketing franchises are everywhere. I want to give you a more modern example, cloud kitchens. So part of subversive thinking is looking at what is now possible that wasn't before. And we delve into this in our frameworks in the book, but cloud kitchens looked at what was now possible. Food delivery was always a massive industry and in COVID it accelerated even further. But most restaurants, bricks and mortar restaurants, either had or now needed a digital platform. And digital presents a whole new array of potential subversion opportunities, a chance for you to be unconventional. And so, you know, take some examples from here. So restaurants now have a virtual storefront, but just because you have a virtual store, it doesn't mean you need to just have one online presence. You can have multiple hats, you can test stuff, you can see what works, you can see what gets attention. With cloud kitchens, what they did was they actually created multiple storefronts with crazy names. Look at these restaurant names. I don't know if I'm allowed to swear, so I'll do a fecking good pizza, pimp my pasta, dirty little vegan, and bitch don't grill my cheese. So these, if you're, looking at a sea of options, the thing that grabs your attention first is the thing that's going to actually succeed. So hacking attention is a really smart thing to do, especially when there's too many choices. Another good example of looking at what's now possible is Dunkin' Donuts. In Seoul and Korea, they experimented with trigger smells and they sprayed coffee scent into buses right at the same time as an ad for Dunkin' Donuts talked about their coffees. And on that route, coffee sales at those ad ran went up 29%. They looked at what was possible, they harnessed new technology, and they cut through the noise to get attention and drive profit. We actually looked at, actually, the slide says 184 case studies. I think we're at 186 case studies. It's probably why the book hasn't come out yet because we keep writing more case studies. But we looked at all of these different studies from multiple different markets to find the patterns, to find the recipe book for the, to find the way to do this subversive marketing in an attention economy. What we realized is this. Making more noise won't help. Churning out more ads, more press releases, more social media posts won't actually work. What you have to do is you have to think subversively so that you can cut through the noise. Making more, pushing out more press releases is dead. Think about hacking markets. There are things you can do to find unfair, asymmetric advantages. So when you think about an advantage, all competitive advantage lives in the gap between what's normal or expected of you and what is possible. That's where literally every unfair advantage comes from. It's almost the definition of an advantage. And succeeding in event content, whether you're online or off, is about upending norms in ways that help you change the behavior of your target audience. You need to do something different, something unexpected, something subversive. You need that unfair advantage if you're going to compete with the attention economy in which we live. And after looking at literally hundreds of businesses, two mindsets and seven sources of asymmetric advantage emerge. Submersive marketers do a lot of clever things. They ignore the folklore of the past, they're willing to do what others aren't, but they also apply a bunch of tactics — psychology, unfair access, reframing, streamlining, and more things to exploit the gap between what is the norm or what's conventional and what is possible. So we're going to run through a few of these in the time we have here. We don't have a lot of time to get into it. Obviously, you're welcome to go to Just Evil Enough and find out more stuff. But the first mindset I really want to focus on is disagreeability. This is a personality trait that simply means you don't care as much what other people think. All of the iconic entrepreneurs that we see, like Steve Jobs, have this attitude. Sometimes it borders on sociopathy because they really don't care about norms. But they were all focused on the outcome they wanted or the behavior they needed to get and were open to new ways of getting it. So I'm going to tell you a quick story about an event that I was invited to, how they completely reversed the normal way events run. So I want you to type into chat now what you think the biggest risk in running an event is. So go ahead and type in chat and hit enter right away. What do you think is the single biggest risk in running an event, whether it's physical or virtual? What's the biggest risk in running an event? And while you type those in, I'm going to tell you about Lean UX. So Lean UX was a conference that ran a few years ago, 2015. This is the version I think I was asked to go in 2012 or 2013. But I got an email that said, would you speak for air travel, hotel, and a bottle of scotch? And I replied, yeah, sure. If the bottle of scotch is good, I'll be there. And then I asked the organizers about their event. And it turns out what they had done was they had first invited... Invited many people to sign up to a mailing list. And they said to themselves, if we can get to 1,000 people on a mailing list, then we will ask those people if they want to come to an event. And we'll do that by getting them to buy a provisional ticket, which is sort of you agree to buy a ticket for 500 bucks, and we'll only bill your credit card if 300 people agree to buy the ticket. They managed to get up to that many people. Those people said, hey, we're going to buy a ticket. So they had some conditional demand. And they said, we're going to do this within 25 miles of downtown New York City on this day. Okay. So then they mailed people like me because their next risky assumption was, hey, can we get a speaker to show up? And when we said yes, they then announced the speaker lineup. They didn't announce the location yet. And they put tickets on sale and sold another 400 tickets. And then they picked the location. And then they said, okay, we're going to go to that location. And here's the location. You have 48 hours to cancel your ticket if you can't make it. So from about 700 people, they got down to about 670, at which point they said 670 attendees coming to a conference. They booked a hotel with space for 800. And then they started reading out to sponsors saying we have 600 desirable UX experts gathering in one place and sold some sponsorship. So the single biggest risk, if you haven't guessed already, is that nobody shows up for your event because all of the economics of sponsorship and so on are related to that event. But the problem is that most people, when they're running a conference, the first thing they do is pick a date, pick a venue, pick a platform, make all those decisions rather than ensuring they have demand first. And so what I loved about Lean UX and why they thought disagreeably is they approached it backwards. They went and de-risked the riskiest part of their business, which was does anyone care? And then from there, worked back to the speakers, the sponsors, and eventually the venue, which is completely disagreeable, but it worked really well. A second critical factor of thinking properly about this new attention economy and subverting things is called fluid intelligence. And this is sort of like forgetting what you know. In 1963, Raymond Cattell proposed that there were two kinds of human intelligence. Fluid intelligence works things out from first principles. It's our ability to solve novel reasoning problems. Babies, for example, are born with a knowledge of physics. They respond quickly to snakes and spiders, although contrary to popular opinion, they're not actually afraid of them. But these are good first principle evolutionary things like problem solving. On the other hand, crystallized intelligence is patterns that we find useful and we develop over time. Those patterns are like the ability to deduce a relational abstraction by figuring out what happened in the past. This is literally prejudice. If you've read Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, you probably know he's a system one and system two. And this kind of crystallized knowledge wisdom is very efficient. It helps us to do things. It helps us to do things that don't take a lot of discussion or thought, but it's very bad when the world is changing quickly. In 2010, a psychology professor named Zach Hambrick performed some tests. He analyzed how naval candidates in the Naval Academy handled fluid task environments. And what he did was he gave them a console with four quadrants in it. There was a fuel gauge, a set of letters, a set of numbers they had to add together, and a red button to push whenever a high-pitched tone sounded. And this stuff happened really fast. It sort of gave them quite a bit of a sense of contributed to a score, which was on the center of the screen. But then they suddenly changed things so that one of these quadrants contributed 75% of the score. So if you were smart enough to notice this and switch to just that one quadrant, you'd do really well. And some sailors spotted this, some didn't. And those sailors tended to test high and fluid intelligence. Other sailors continued to focus on the task at hand, trying to split their time between all four things, and their scores fell. conscientiousness. So the people who tended to score best, in an environment where things are rapidly changing and the value of stuff was being re-evaluated, scored high on openness to new experience, which is actually a terrible predictor of job performance in most jobs today. To borrow the management expert Peter Drucker's formulation, people with a trait of conscientiousness are less focused on doing things—sorry, people who are distractible, and not conscientious, less focused on doing things right and more likely to wonder whether they're doing the right things. And we like conscientious people when we're hiring because they can be trusted. They show up early, they double check their math, they fill up a gap. High in fluid intelligence, low in experience, not conscientious, open to potential distractions, sounds like a horrible employee. And yet it turns out this is the kind of thinking that you actually need to survive in the current economy. Let me give you a slightly different example. Out of 26,000 registrants that attended a conference, how many of those attendees do you think are still online at the end of day one? I want you to type this into the chat. Let's say I'm running a conference. It's a free conference. Anyone in the world can attend. It has some pretty amazing speakers, like well-known speakers. There are 26,000 people who registered. How many people do you think are online at the end of day one? And I want this is audience participation, so you can all go type this stuff into... Are you allowed to tell them who that conference was for? Because it's... It's a very large publication that I can't... It's a six-hour conference. There are about eight speakers. It's a very large publication, very well-known, very famous. They had like Al Gore. So the punchline here is there were 52,000 people on. All of you are dramatically underestimating that. How can that be, you wonder? Well, unlike traditional events, where when the event starts, that's the end of ticket sales. Most people decide to attend your event the night before. They look at the calendar and go, ah, am I double booked? So you have to shed expectation. This conference had such good speakers and so many people tweeting about it that everybody else was like, oh, I can join that now. Click and join. They doubled the number of registrations. This is folklore. This idea that your max registrations happens when the event starts. No, you can actually make it go up. And that's hugely important because it's a very different way of thinking. So Alistair talked about disagreeability. That's a difficult one to hack, especially for women who've been conditioned to want to be nice and want to be liked. But actually, I can reframe the idea of being disagreeable. And thinking about Pep, I'm going to talk about Pep a lot now in the next bit about psychology. But if you're prepared to let go of your need to be liked, if you're prepared to let go of that ego when you're presenting, you're a much better presenter. You can be much more relaxed. You can be much more engaging. So be prepared to be, you know, to make mistakes. Be prepared to mess up. And I promise you, you're going to get a better engagement level. So we're going to talk about psychology as another way for you to get attention and to convert it. And there were so many things that Pep did that are basically just proving and validating what I'm talking about here. If you think about our modes of like three the three c's there's there's uh something you share that's communication there's something you learn that's content and there's something you do that's that's collaboration and if you think of all of those three and use them you'll have much more engaged audiences so let's think about what what pep did uh he and he got you to um he got us to change our faces he got us to move into the camera we were frightened we were you know he did a physical game where we all got moving so we started to think of our physical selves which was really interesting now i know one of uh one of alistair's many many conferences at forward 50 he invited attendees to stream from their sofas and some of them actually tweeted this themselves sitting on their sofa so you talk about getting them relaxed getting them more comfortable getting them engaged um uh and so i think actually there's a there's a picture of one of the screen grabs of somebody actually saying look they're watching forward 50 from the comfort of their sofa there's so many different things you can do like if you go back to the psychology of what drives us i mean there's been tons and tons of research around cognition and behavioral psychology but let's boil it down here to the basics and actually this is the thing that i think is the most sticky from our talk laid made paid afraid the fundamental drivers of human beings we want to be liked we want power we're greedy we want to feel safe when you're writing your session descriptions or crafting your invitations or even soliciting sponsors think about these levers that you can pull to produce a clear outcome and when we're talking about copy and copy is so important this is my space comms right uh how you craft your message is so critically important by tweaking it by improving it by leveraging that psychology you can be so much more effective at cutting through the noise so for example don't just say if you're running a webinar oh we'll teach you how to save money each week say retire a decade before any of your friends you know don't talk about the work talk about the rewards and it's also really really interesting to see that uh look at um oh yeah look at how you can use concrete messages uh don't talk about they talk about you and oh my goodness if you think back to to neil he talked about his heart racing when he was at at a match and he he really brought us into the space we felt like we were there and pep brought pep to the screen he was sensory and visible and and so go don't avoid all the boring language and be scintillating just think about it think about laid made paid afraid oh and bonus points don't ever let your speakers write their own bios or talk descriptions you write them because you're going to make you're going to think about laid made paid afraid and you're going to bring that wisdom to us we also think about um clickbait so neil patel actually uh has a great blog post about uh how to get use clickbait to hack your talk titles i'm going to give you one instruction for something to do later on after you've done giving us your attention the next time you're scrolling through instagram or facebook or twitter whatever your social channel of choice is and the next time you stop randomly scrolling and you stop to look at something be self-aware ask yourself what made me stop what was it the copy was it the was it the image what what captured my attention and start to learn from your own behavior uh because we do it mindlessly be mindful and understand what grabs your attention in an attention economy i also want to talk about scarcity and scarcity is another psychological lever that you can pull human beings value what is scarce in a physical world it happens naturally uh you know you can't sell the same square meters of floor space twice that's a um a talk that starts at 10 you're going to miss it if you're not there digital transforms all of that and actually takes away that kind of scarcity thing um unlike atoms bits are perfect copies and it means that you can record replay rewind and it devalues uh in many cases the content the demand that people will have for that content so you need to bring that scarcity back you need to dial up the value of authenticity and immediacy and you can do that by not like it kills me when i see people clients in particular sending out an invite to webinar saying webinar starts at 10 it's going to be live and you can watch it back later why would you do that why would you actively discourage people from showing up because in the live in the real with all of you talking in chat here and now is so much more immediate and scarce and there's the velvet rope tactic you can see don't you don't um record it like someone was spending half an hour or two coming in and saying well bum hick no because warwick anticipated feeling could wh assembling a failure which means Hobby blind people to just leave theseات deserves's Eagles has eight move their limbs. Pep did all of these. He's a master. You can vary the light and the sounds, your backdrop, and you have to have a good mic. And this is exactly what Neil was talking about. Your audio quality is so important and it's not that expensive to get a decent mic. It breaks my heart when I see people, you know, using headphones that like are scraping against their top or, you know, oh, it's not that hard to fix. And it's the biggest impact altogether. You can use gamification. You can use cards. There's quizzes. There's multiple tools, as long as you know how to use them properly and they're nice and slick and, you know, you figure out the tech. But use games, everything. And actually, when somebody starts to tell a story, you activate different parts of people's brains. You have to be as much of an entertainer as you are an information source. And speaking about entertainment, oh my goodness, I like late night TV because I'm an insomniac. Late night TV shows use a really clever way of saying, because imagine every ad break is a chance to lose your audience. You're given a chance to everyone to walk away and not come back. So what you study, how late night TV shows use ad breaks. Here you can see the late show is saying, coming up, Daniel Radcliffe. They're doing a sneak peek of what's going to be your reward if you come back after the break. Steal everything that late night TV shows do and pay special attention to what happens in the ad break. Okay. I'm not going to get everyone to type into chat because you've done a lot of that already and perhaps demonstrated, but I'm going to tell you the science behind it. I'm conscious of time too. The science behind entering things into chat or doing a poll or taking a quiz is called state change. Now in a survey at a different event, people were asked to say, how long did they think it would take before people got bored in an online event? And the answers were somewhere between eight minutes and 15 minutes. I don't know what you would think, but the true answer is probably closer to four minutes. If there isn't a state change in four minutes, then people get bored and a state change is swapping to another person. Isn't that right, Alistair? Absolutely. Yeah. So state change, or it's switching to a poll or it's playing some music or it's playing a video or it's launching a quiz. State change, state change, state change. This is what's going to keep people's attention. It's really, really important. And we've done it all. All of our speakers today have done this. There's all of these different things that you can hack. Alistair, what's next? All right. So we, and speaking of state change and being respectful of everyone's time, I want to fly through this quickly. That's a lot of stuff about psychology. We have a few other tricks. One is obviously access. You may not recognize Draco Malfoy, but you can get him on Cameo to join your event. A lot of this is about being adaptive or doing things that are unexpected. If another speaker, for example, steals your stuff, then like steal from them and throw it in your slide deck, if you have the ability to do that, because why not? This is about adaptation. Also show up early to borrow people's talks and understand what they're saying. So you don't come across as not responding. You got to be improvisational. You got to ask yourself, what can you include that other people can't? Get creative as long as you're using brand consistent novelty. You got to think about reframing. Reframing is a really important concept in marketing. Everyone has a frame of reference by which they evaluate things, whether it's a car or a coffee shop. When Avis said, we try harder because they were the second place car rental company, they kind of put the leader, Hertz on its heels. Here's an example of this. These are two gold medal Olympic gymnasts. One's a swimmer and one is, sorry, gold medal Olympic winners. One's a swimmer. One's a gymnast. You can probably guess which one's which, because one of these people would be two feet behind the moment they jumped off the starting blocks and another one would smack her head on the ground. So pick a frame that benefits you. What is the thing that you're about, that your event is about, that people should use to think about you? How will they decide if your thing is good? Are you good because you have famous speakers? Are you good because it's a small, intimate audience? Is it bite-sized chunks? What's the angle that reinforces you and then help people to think that that is the thing that makes something valuable? You also should streamline every aspect of the process. That means removing every obstacle from the behavior you're seeking. Events have plenty of hurdles. We once ran an event in Tito that had grip as an event platform. We had a different streaming platform, voting platform, and attendees got lost along the way. So you really need to lubricate every stage of this process. Emily, you're from Ireland. So why don't you teach this one? Well, actually, I'm conscious of time, but Tupperware is a really good example. Bait and switch. Pitch one thing, deliver another. Products do this all the time, but bait and switch is another thing that we cover extensively. You can also use innovation. Innovation is a really great way, and that's back to what Dunkin' Donuts did using new technology, what Cloud Kitchens did. Innovate, tweak formats, take the medium, and make it do something. And now we've got a couple of really good hacks and tips for your own events that we've picked up along the way. So this is something we call popcorn. Popcorn is a very good way to make a spontaneous conversation among people who are in the same webinar. For example, all the speakers here today chat. So this is from an event we did earlier where Navdeep says, hey, I popcorned Joseph. Joseph says something for a couple of minutes. He says, okay, I popcorned Teresa. Teresa says something for a couple of minutes. She popcorns to Amy. And this is a great way because everybody knows that they're going to be choked, so they don't accidentally popcorn back to someone. But it's a good way to get feedback from three or four people. We use another format called chain reaction. This is an event I did last summer outdoors called Startup Fest. But chain reaction is a very good way to avoid the usual agreeing contest that you get into with a panel of people. And so, for example, imagine that Christian from 23 is the moderator of this panel. He invites Malala on, interviews her for five minutes. As the interviewer, he can set the tone, and then Christian leaves, and Malala welcomes Elon Musk, interviews him. And then Elon takes over and Malala leaves. Elon switches to the interviewer role and interviews Greta. Greta Thunberg, that's great. She has some questions. And then finally, she interviews Christian to say, what did you learn from this? So this is called a chain reaction panel. We've written this up. We can paste the link to it in the chat. But it's a much better way of doing panels than having everyone on the screen at the same time. It's not just formats. You can innovate with time. You've got to be aware that before the event, you can solicit questions or conduct polls. During the event, you can have a live Google Doc that people are contributing to and having a sense of creation. Afterwards, you can take the best responses in terms of a podcast. You should think about things like the budget you have and whether you can send people physical artifacts, because in a virtual world, that's much more compelling. Sometimes innovation is as simple as turning your camera 90 degrees from the screen. If I turn my head like this, so my screen is in front of me and Emily does the same, now we look like we're having a conversation. And one of the things that a subversive marketer is always looking to do is repurpose stuff. So for example, one of the events that we ran, we had people change their autoresponder to say, hey, I'm attending this conference. Well, guess what? Everybody who mailed that person while they were at the webinar got a link to the webinar, which further increased it. So we turned autoresponders into promotional tools. So we've only had a bit of time to share this stuff, but here's a checklist to remind you of what we just covered. And if you're going to take a screen grab or take your camera out, this is the one slide I would hack. And it covers off all of the different ways of thinking that are going to allow you to prepare for your events and stand out from the market. And most of these will work for online and in person. And if you like this kind of thinking and you could follow along, I can already see some people have already preordered the book. Thank you so much. You can visit justevilenough.com. You can, if you shout at us on Twitter or put the hashtag just evil enough anywhere, we will find you and thank you so much. Great. very much, Emily and Alistair. Let's send some reactions in their way. Then let's just see all of the speakers back here. We're a little bit over time and we are getting ready for the last session so not that much time for a big talk, but I think if we should have a little popcorn, if you should send a popcorn, Pep, who would you send the popcorn to in this panel? I mean, I'm pretty arrogant. I just keep the popcorn myself. Can we call it Pepcorn? No, please don't. I just think that was a fantastic talk. I want to say nicely done. Nicely done, Emily. I pre-ordered the book. I actually left as my memo when I pre-ordered it. Is it available digitally? I'm a bit of a digital book reader because I always want to have my book everywhere. It's available nowhere right now, but when it comes out, it will be available digitally for sure. Well, actually at the moment, one of the reasons why we've also been a bit delayed is that we've been asked to teach a course of the book and when we actually started doing that, when we started teaching it, we had to come up with all these frameworks and we're teaching a course for maven.com which is from the good folks behind Alt MBA and Udemy. We'll be teaching that course in February, but it kind of slowed us down. I won't lie. Now we've got a book and a workbook and a course so it's just kind of blossoming into something bigger than it was. Can I chip in? This is a soft topic, but Emily, are your books organized by color? Yes. I do this to annoy librarians. Thank you very much. I will actually show, this is Alistair's book that he wrote, kind of world famous, Lean Analytics, and I have it sandwiched on my shelf between the history of the police in Ireland and best women's erotica because I think that's where it belongs. I can see it. Hey, Neil. Neil, you had a question. Well, yeah, just a point really. I found that a fascinating presentation. And the thing that I took away from that was that you were talking about breaking the rules, but ideally to break the rules, you need to understand what the rules are first. So one of the things, for instance, is that you said that, you know, superb copy is paramount. And I think that what that book allows people to do is they will be able to understand the rules, because you've taken the time to actually tell people what the rules are before they go and break them. Because if you're kind of breaking the rules because you don't understand what you're doing in the first place, it's a bit of a scattergun approach. So I like the idea that you've actually formulated that to tell people what the rules are. And then this is how you can break them for most effect. That's what I've taken away from it. Yeah, no, I think, you know, lo-fi house works because you know they could produce it well. Right. And I think the same thing is true. If you're watching a well-produced sound thing, then when someone's calling on a telephone and it sounds sort of mono AM radio style, that only works because the rest of it was flawless. So like Picasso, you've got to be able to paint a nose before you put it on someone's forehead. Great. Well, as mentioned, the time is running. So could I just get all of you speakers as well, all of you looking at home, take your hands up in front of your head. And just up here is all of you. Great. Then we clap. Yeah, that's right. And back again. We're not done. And now the most important thing. Joshy hands. So we make Joshy hands here. Yeah. Thank you very much to our speakers. Great what you can get people to do when you're on camera. Dr. Neil, Pep and Alistair and Emily. Thank you very much for being here and enlightening us with all of your great keynotes. Thank you very much. And for today we are done with this session, but we still have one more session left. And we are quite excited about that as well, because we will have great visit actually here in the studio, because we will have an award Oscar winning. That is what it is. An Oscar winning director, Thomas Vinterberg, who will be in the studio. The theme is authentic storytelling and video and digital events. And it will be, as I said, Thomas Vinterberg, the Oscar winner. And we will also have Medinur Gaston, who has a background from Ørsted and Novo Nordisk. The last session of today will be, at 8 p.m. Central European time. If you are in UK, that is 7 p.m. And if you are in the States, Eastern US, that will be 2 p.m. So we are looking forward to see all of you at the next session. And also a very important notice on that. All the presentations from today and yesterday are on demand. You can find them. But the session with Thomas Vinterberg will only be live. So make sure that you tune in when we get back at the last session today. Until then. Take care and remember to be awesome.