How Video Agencies Can Help you Win with Webinars

Hello everyone and welcome back to Webinar Days TwentyTwentyThree, the annual event for everyone doing webinars. My name is Amelia Holmsen and in my daily job I work here in the marketing team at TwentyThree. But for the next two days I will be your host, coming together with all of you to help take your webinar game to the next level. Webinar Days is hosted and organized by TwentyThree. Our video tool is used by marketers, growth companies, and enterprise companies all over the world to do video and webinars. We bring all you need to get real with video into an integrated platform ready to scale for hundreds of marketers or hundreds of marketing teams in your organization. With Webinar Days we want to move the market of webinars forward and digital events. We want to inspire everyone to participate in and organize webinars as well as to do better, create engagement, and build relationships with our customers. For the session today I am so lucky as to be joined by some amazing speakers. We will have a talk about how some video agencies can help you win with webinars. Today I have with me some amazing speakers including Lev Kerb and Lisa Halskor and Fiya Hayset. Without any further ado, we are going to be digging into a panel discussion about how agencies have become this category on the rise. They are currently helping and advising companies all over the world on how they can do better with webinars. Now that you guys are all brought on stage as I say, say hi to our audience members. Please give them a warm digital applause and welcome them on stage. I would love you guys to introduce yourselves, what your role is, and maybe give a little bit of input into what it is you do on the day to day as well as introduce your agency or company. And Fiya, can we start with you perhaps? Yes, of course we can. Hi guys, nice to meet you all and thank you for inviting me on this very interesting debate. I am a partner in the company CPH Live where we define ourselves as a content and event production house. That means that we have a diverse range of services including video production, live streaming, animation, a little bit of podcast and then augmented reality and virtual reality. For us, it is very interesting the whole fusion of all services that comes into mind when we are working especially with webinars which is one of the products that we do a lot. And then we also execute very big 100% online events going down to creating mood videos at physical events and we do commercial videos. We are a company that does a lot of things within visual content. Yes, and it is such a digital world we live in so I can imagine that the requests range from A to Z on this one. Lisa, I know that you work also as a freelancer so your position is a little bit different to the other agencies here. Can you please tell a little bit about what you do as a freelancer and how you consult agencies on webinars? Absolutely, I am a digital consultant in my own company and I work a lot with my clients on strategy and in that capacity I have also concentrated a lot on how to create visibility for brands and in that sense it almost always comes down to either video or webinars. I have hosted over 300 webinars myself during the last 10 to 15 years and I have helped a dozen of, well more than a dozen of clients do the exact same. So I help them with finding out what to have the webinar be about and also to have the confidence and the right content so that you can actually either sell or educate or both whatever you want to do with the webinar. So it's a lot about the strategy for it, so less about producing it but more about what is it going to be about, what is the content and so forth. Amazing, I have to say that running over 300 webinars and if you've done it as a one woman show I'm greatly impressed because I have with me my entire team today and I could not imagine running this production set up on my own. Well I haven't done it in one day or two days so it's over a long period of time but I love the format. Exactly, it's a creative format to do lots of fun with. So Lev that means that you're up next and you're tuning in from no other place than your own studio I can see. Can you please introduce yourself to the audience? Yes of course and thank you for having me on this great event, great to be part of this panel. My name is Lev Kribb, I'm the managing director and owner of Webinarexperts.com and we are an agency consultancy for really anything that touches digital live communications. So it's not necessarily just webinars, it goes to one end over towards hybrid events, digital events, live streaming but then also podcasting, video production whether that's on site, off site, in the studio and so on as well. And it really touches what we do, touches all aspects of that. So it's from the strategy, process development, program design and with that I mean the kind of how the program runs and how it best works all the way over to the actual production obviously itself but also the planning, the scheduling, advice on best practices around content, formats, so really anything that is related to live digital communications. And we typically work with organizations that are large organizations, often multinationals across various sectors whether that's IT technology, software, pharmaceuticals, life sciences, those kind of things. So yeah that's us. Great, thank you. It's exciting to hear that there are so many different industries that are working with the type of digital content whether it be video, webinars. I also heard some of you mention digital events which I think is an interesting aspect because I had a conversation with Fia and when we were talking about webinar days and what was going to go down over these two next days, I was asked a very interesting question because I asked Fia if she wanted to join this panel discussion to talk about how agencies can help you win with webinars and then she said yes I would love to but first I would like to know how you define a webinar which got me to think that it has to be something that is a little unclear in the market and that is talked about in different ways and just listening to your introductions now I can hear that there's a differentiation between what is video content, what is a webinar, potentially there's also a difference between a webinar and a digital event. So let's just get down to basics here and start with the fundamentals. I would like for you guys to clarify from your own perspective, it doesn't have to be aligned here at all, what is a webinar and how do we define a webinar and I can imagine the customers and clients come to you guys asking about webinars and it might mean various different things to different people. So Fia since you were the one who gave me the idea I would like to get your perspective on this. How do you define a webinar? Yeah that's a great question. Thank you to myself for asking that right. No and so the reason why I ask the question is because when we come up to our clients there are like very different definitions of what a webinar is and for me it's all about content, it's all about what it is that they're actually going to say if we're going to place that into a webinar, into a hybrid meeting or whatever, that's not the most important thing. The most important thing is to understand what is it actually that they want to communicate and I can also hear that from Lisa and Lev that that is the priority you also have once you go in but I think how I define it, what I define as a webinar is a one person communicating a message and then of course there are participants that can ask questions and engage but this is around a specific topic where there is one main presenter communicating a key message if I should do it shortly. Yeah short and sweet and we are always appreciating a short and sweet message it's always easier to remember than the long end. Thank you for your input. Lisa can I ask you how do you define a webinar? Well I think maybe it differs a little bit I think from my from my point of view a webinar what truly is a real webinar is that it's live that's what it differs from from doing video and if it's a good webinar because that's not what you asked me about but being a good webinar it would be a webinar with a lot of interaction and that because that's what you can do because it's live but if it's one or more people I think it can definitely be two people presenting if it's more than two people I would probably call it something else than a webinar it's more a panel a discussion or something but or events type thing but it it kind of you know the the categories flow into each other in that sense but in my mind the most important thing is that it's actually live to be a true webinar. Yes that means that for at least two out of two I think we're hitting some topics I mean at least we have the content we have the live factor here Lev I don't know if I can get a three out of three here but no pressure please let the audience know how do you define a webinar for you? It's an interesting one because webinar I mean the term has been around since the 90s right and probably since the 90s there's probably 30 new countries that have formed since then we've reached mars a lot of things have changed since the webinar term was first coined and I think accordingly we see so many people use it in different ways and it's probably fallen out fashion a little bit as a term I think covid helped probably a little bit bring that back a little bit again but you know I prefer to look at it as live digital communications like I said earlier because there's so many different ways of interpreting it thinking about it in terms of what it means to different people but at the at the core of it I would agree it's a one too many live digital communication can be on demand but typically it's live and it's interactive and you know that is different to the pre-recorded element perhaps of podcasts or you know perhaps a non-interactive live stream but all of those are sort of forming a category whether that's called webinars or whether it's called live digital communications whatever it is they can all be used interchangeably but they each have their own strengths so yeah that's how we look at it so I think I agree with the other panelists in terms of the core of it and I don't know if that was intentional or not but I think you gave me my three out of three if you then choose to go with interactive or you know engaging then I do see Pedro, David, Erin, and Balder in the chat here with some reactions so thank you so much for engaging with us we appreciate that it's required to make it a true webinar however I think when when we're looking at webinars you know there's uh I really appreciate Lev mentioning that it's a term that's been around since the 90s because I think for a lot of people this was a new term that kind of came through during COVID and in the aftermath of COVID we kept talking about webinars as a as a replacement for events perhaps but now that we're living in a post-COVID world everyone has heard the word webinars it's no longer strange to us I would like to bring it back to you Lev and ask you a little bit about your clients and what it is they're actually asking for when they come to you like what are the type of problems issues business goals that they have that they want to reach or problems they have that they would like to solve and they're coming to you you know thinking that webinars is probably the solution to their issue but is that necessarily the case you know what is it that the clients are asking for when when coming to a webinar agency yeah they it varies because because of we were just spoken about the the range of what a webinar is what live digital communications is is so different in everybody's mind and every company is different as well so the requirements are different naturally and we you know take a very custom approach to what the customer needs is not just a you know one size fits all often what we see is that the organizations that we work with either don't have the time knowledge or the inclination to do it themselves and they but they they do have an understanding that they need to use this form of communication to reach new audiences engage your audiences and do that in a very cost-effective way you know increase the reach whether it's for lead generation whether it's for internal communications so the what they inadvertently get with that is something different to what they come to us with as a challenge they they they get insights they get more insights than they perhaps get in a in a in person event not saying that in person event isn't valuable together they're really really strong so they complement each other but they have increased reach you know slightly different type of engagement but arguably better measurable engagement so there are different challenges but they typically come from a sort of marketing comms background and typically they don't really either know what they want or kind of how to do it and how to achieve it themselves yes exactly and i think the whole knowing what you want is is the first part of the problem what are you trying to solve what is the right solution you know it varies i agree with you i think when it comes to webinars videos the right answer is always that it depends right depends on the industry depends on your organization depends on your audience which can make it quite challenging for all of us but fia i would like to ask you so when leva is talking about you know first thing is to what is it that they want and then the second thing is kind of how can you help you know what what is it that needs to be done after that can you give some insights into what you as an agency can bring to a company that they have trouble doing themselves what is it value that you guys bring for them where companies just think that okay this is why we need an agency this is barriers this is stuff we could never do ourselves i think first of all it's it's about feeling safe and we're working in a very digital world but at the same time we're also very much aware that everything can go wrong in just a split second and when we're looking at organizations they have with the organizations that we work with they have so many hats on they're working on so many different tasks and looking into a webinar that is very important for us we're working within primarily b2b it's very important communication with their clients they they want to feel safe with having some professionals being there holding their hand making sure that they look nice but most importantly that the live signal is on and that it will stay on throughout the whole webinar and and that's that's one thing and then the other thing is that i agree with lev a lot of it is is creating this awareness or connecting with the with the audiences that you have but i think what we experience that our clients forget is to combine technology with the company so most often they define we would like to do a webinar we would like to communicate it out we have so many other people doing it we want to do it as well and we have this person he's going to present this and then we can do some interactions and some engagement but they forget to set to take a step back and say so what is it actually what type of audience is this is actually that we have and how can we design the aesthetics around it so that it creates a full experience so it's not only the content but that you also have a visual experience that supports the content that you that that they have to communicate yeah i can very much see that being a valid point just taking myself as an example i think i would feel a lot less confident here today if i didn't have my team with me who i know is taking care of the technical aspects and the production setup just a little bit of ease of mind to have that like you said confidence lisa when you work with some of your clients i know that you're consulting them in and also giving them tips on how to improve their webinar content also how to how to be in front of the camera even yeah what type of teams within an organization is it that you usually interact with when when you're hired on as a consultant it depends a little bit i have everything from the very small like one person company to you know mid-size and and bigger companies where it it mostly comes down to maybe we have been running webinars before but they don't seem to really work like we want to sell something or promote something maybe get additional calls from from or clients booking calls with us sales calls or that type of thing and it's in that case it's it's a lot about for me going in and helping them adjust the way they run the webinar so it's basically sometimes reorganizing the content it's about often pulling out a lot of slides and putting in a lot of other slides because usually it's the the interaction part that's missing which makes it boring automatic just not fun to be a part of and and if you want people to buy from you you need them to engage with what you're presenting so so it's a lot it's not about being funny or entertaining but it's basically about being a human in the other end because it gets to be a little too stale and automatic sometimes i feel like for some of my clients they get very it's like almost like they put on the the adult clothes and they sit up straight and they get all like you know stone faced because now it's serious i need to present so it's a lot about loosening up the format a little bit from my point of view so it could be a bunch of different people i work with on that because that's the same issue for big companies and for small companies it's the same issue basically i see exactly and what type of teams is it that usually owns the webinar project is it driven by marketing or is it driven by a yeah it's usually marketing because but then when you get sales hooked in understanding that marketing actually can drive sales calls for them it's much more fun to have a bunch of people who sign up to please call me up from the sales department that's a lot more fun than you know them having to do call calling so if you get that to work together you can suddenly get a lot more topics from from the sales guys the product guys or whatever you have in the company so but you often need to sort of prove the concept for them to understand the the possibilities in it yeah if i can just quickly interrupt Amelia it was just at least when you when you were talking i was thinking when you mentioned powerpoints i was like yeah powerpoints are the biggest gift and at the same time the biggest barrier when talking about webinars and then i just saw paul commenting as well that he's just he's saying slides are just as bad in a webinar death by powerpoint is still oh yes it's a thing a huge barrier we're working within financial and medical industry and there is no culture around powerpoints right oh yeah there's also this confusion about what is the purpose of the powerpoint is it my notes or is it actually something that i want to to use as an element for my webinar communicating to my audience and that in its powerpoints in itself for me is a whole a whole discussion point it turns into a crutch if you don't watch out and something you hide behind which is not good for a webinar definitely i agree actually powerpoint is this is going to be a powerpoint passion question it's a it's a massive restricting factor for so many different things it's it's the form we just did a podcast episode on we start on this question you know what is the is the standard format of a webinar dead where you have powerpoint you know if you're in technology or software you have a demo and then you have a q a because it's it's everywhere this format and it is it is so overdone and it's so limiting because first of all people have a talk track typically behind a powerpoint like you said um you've got the your notes and you sound scripted and you don't sound authentic and you aren't your yourself like you said Lisa earlier and and that is purely down to powerpoint the other limiting factor is actually from that means you can't then advance onto other webinar formats and there's a requirement for the webinar formats because there are people who have different content requirements you know you have somebody who is just finding out about the industry or the product or the company they they might benefit from some slides with some thought leadership type content but then there are those who want to find out about the product and those who want to see demos that's fine and then they want to hear from customers and then as they progress with their knowledge and their experience of what it is that the company is or the industry is talking about they have questions now you can't have questions in powerpoint at the same time it's going to be one or the other you have to serve these different audiences with different different formats powerpoint is really really going to struggle to allow you to do that you take powerpoint out of the equation and all of a sudden it's just like we are here having a conversation it's not scripted we're natural we're kind of laughing with each other much more engaging than somebody who sits there presenting to camera or perhaps actually not camera because it's different on the screen where the notes are and they're reading and they're talking to a script that they've written before nobody's really interested in it but they're really not changing their tone blimey that's so disengaging and at the crux of it is powerpoint and so you really have to think when does it make sense when can you get rid of it and when i'm actually thinking about what the audience wants because talking about who benefits in the organization let's think about who it benefits outside the organization first if it benefits somebody outside the organization we're focusing on value if it benefits somebody inside the organization we're focusing on message two don't always connect so as to go with audience first get rid of the powerpoint when it makes sense and think about okay how we're talking and engaging the audience definitely yeah sorry emilia i was just going to mention that i'm so happy that we decided to not run slides during the session otherwise i would have been in hot water i love that paul calls it power pointless it has a place sometimes but but i agree completely uh with you at the lab that that it it needs to have a place and also you need to be careful about how you use it because of course it's a support and also if you're new at it it can be a great support but not if you like fill it up with just stuff that you read um ribatom on the screen it's just boring and annoying basically yeah and i think what what i'm trying to do with our clients is to use a simple tool and maybe that's also something i'll work for you guys out there but that is what i experienced is that most often our clients start with the discussion around the powerpoint and then we talk about how we're going to perform afterwards and then if you switch that around and you talk about what is the content and what what audience is it and how are we going to engage with them and then we end up at the end with the slide saying so how can how can slides support us in communicating that what do i as a percent what do i as a percent need as a support so i can like really shine through the camera exactly and and when we were defining you know what even is a webinar in the beginning we were saying that you have to it's about the content you have to have great content it has to be live and some type of engagement and interaction with the audience and another thing that lev pointed out in your reflections that i think is super interesting is this a webinar usually starts from an inside out perspective with some marketer saying that i have these five bullet points that i would like to communicate to my audience can we do it via a webinar but what you're actually saying is that it is not the webinar purpose is not for the marketer to you know convey their message to to the world it's actually taking the starting point within the audience and finding out what is it they're interested to learn more about like how can we share some knowledge with them create some content that the audience wants to see first of all not what the marketer wants to push out into the world that should be second of all yeah we have some questions that have come up in the chat i would love for you guys to answer the first one is from daniella who is asking what barriers do you see that stop companies from starting with webinars and i think it's a really valid question because i think potentially the first step could be the most difficult step to take it's a little bit this leap into the unknown and i think for a lot of companies they've just you know they've heard the term webinars everyone's talking about webinars but we've lived our lives fully without webinars so we we don't need to do that and what are some of the barriers that you guys see stopping companies for getting started and fia maybe you can start with this one yeah so i actually think it should be lev and these starting on this one because i'm working with mpb2b and here webinars are the thing so i'm it's not the the i'm not really experiencing the barriers and what's stop is stopping them from starting on it because they are interesting so it's more a question on how can we how can we create even more great experiences within the webinar so i would leave it to lisa on this one yes no i'll hand over to lev then but it's very interesting to hear that the b2b industry is already so mature within doing webinars that it's something that has kind of become a non-issue very similar to us as well b2b is is is where we are as well we do so if we if we look at the question and we do see the occasional company who says haven't done webinars before for some reason always kind of you know tried not to or whatever the reason was and now we want to start those companies typically don't simply don't know where to start and they don't know you know which platform to select how to even get it off the ground how to put the process in place work how to just where just what to do really um but it's if we transfer it onto the kind of b2b area where a lot of companies are running webinars and perhaps rephrase the question of don't know how to change or improve or be better than the competition or you know something else where it's just the next step up that's where we see the restriction simply as I said earlier it's either don't have the time don't have the knowledge or don't really want to do it ourselves and you know with especially the last couple of years probably the last 12 months in particular we see the reduction of team sizes especially across software and technology you know the the sectors being quite affected by that there's fewer people on the teams there is perhaps the same level of budget perhaps a little bit less but the requirement to do more with that and that is that is you know where sort of panic moment sets in so right okay what we've been doing so far isn't enough we need to do more how do we do that and you can either experiment for six months and at the risk perhaps of your own job to say well let's let's try and do this but actually it doesn't work and and that's a career-ending move or you'd get it right and it's all fine but bringing in companies like ourselves for example where the expertise is there we've done it many times over we can we can you know help kickstart that straight away that's the barrier of not knowing and that can be quite disconcerting for people because it leads to almost this inertia of i don't know where to start so i don't start and that's that can be really dangerous so reaching out to say please help we need help now you know have a chat and and then define where to go that's where is the biggest barrier that we see lisa do you ever experience any pushback when working doing your consultancy work within companies or have they already accepted that you know webinars is happening and not always sometimes yeah but when i do meet i would say the common denominator for what stops them from doing the webinars is basically courage and it's sometimes disguised as well what if not a lot of people are showing up what if i say something wrong what if i mess up what if this and what what if that where first of all you can prepare so you are less vulnerable but i think it is about people being afraid of putting themselves out there and being very visible they come to me and lack visibility for the company but then when well the solution is you need to get out there you need to get in front of the camera you need to interact with your audience it's suddenly a little bit scary because it's it's very it is vulnerable and it is in a sense until you find out you can just be yourself that's basically the best the best advice so i think courage is is a big common factor when when i have to persuade my audience to to say this is actually a really good idea you should try it and you should try more than once because i'm always a little tired when people say i did run one webinar once it didn't work so i'll never do that again right it's a process it's like everything else would you launch a you know digital campaign and then look at your return on investment and say oh that i didn't hit my target so i'm not going to do that again you know then it's like okay what what was good what was bad do some ab testing how can we improve and optimize and i think webinars because it's such a creative medium i mean there's so much room to do different things and absolutely yes push the barrier a little bit yeah i want to bring up a question from ari dust because he's asking how do you help companies become more self-sufficient when making webinars and i think that's interesting because do you um can you come in and you know help them out on a project basis and then leave them to kind of fend for themselves will they be able to run webinars after that or is it you know a process that requires a little like depending on how you set up you know do you have returning clients that you work with like on a yearly basis come by tweak it and then like step away a little bit or how does this work with enabling the organizations or companies to to do with themselves uh i don't even know where to start with but uh i can start so we've been doing that um for some years where we set up a studio it was i think it's six years ago is where we helped our clients set up a studio so they could run webinars themselves but some of the obstacles that we experienced was that they didn't either we put up really nice gear and they invested so much in making everything look perfect um but they didn't really use it um and then we came in and we tried and understand so why is it is it something about is the is it too complicated to uh to go live is there something about the technical aspects and and we've really been focusing on the user friendly side so it wasn't that difficult so i think it connects a little a little bit to what you were talking about these which is the courage to actually use the the the studio that is available there and um what what we experienced is that the first where you need to start before you become a company that is self-sufficient in making webinars is making sure that you have some maybe three colleagues that are passionate about webinars that really thinks that this is something that i really want to investigate i want to become great at and that i that i want to help my other colleagues become great at because once you have those three colleagues then you can create a culture around webinars and then you can develop on it together but if you if you have a leader that is thinking webinars are really cool and we could get a studio and then we can save a lot of money because using a production agency every time that's going to be quite expensive and then we can make a lot more webinars when we have it in in-house but if you don't have any activators on it then it's not going to happen and then so so i think i think that's that's the most important thing is to make sure that there's a an interest and a culture around creating webinars within the um within the company yes i love that i love having that hero person that can drive a project because if if you don't believe it in in it yourself it is 10 times harder to try to sell the concept to someone else and it's and it's not only one person there needs to be more than one person because or else they're gonna either feel very lonely in it or they can get sick one or two days and then the company is is not so sufficient in doing webinars so it has to be a team of people that's has to be a team of people i like that you mentioned a studio uh love does everyone have to have a studio in their company any thoughts no if anything it creates a barrier but when you get to a point where you feel it would add you know production value it would help just to represent the brand in a way then it is not difficult to set up you know i mean if you if you look behind the scenes where we are right now it is is effectively a corner of a an office space that happens to be reasonably quiet and we've got some lights and some backgrounds and that's it you know it doesn't cost much or take much um but it's not required um but a decent you know i think since covid we're so used to having you know showing people at homes as long as we don't have you know unmade beds and and you know rude art on the on the on the background then then it's totally fine uh make it tidy and and but you can go a bit further if you want to but it's not a requirement definitely not no i think we've also come to a point where uh webinars haven't matured so much that depending again on what format and for what purpose you're creating a webinar so does the setup follow so perhaps if you're doing your brand video that is top funnel this is only thought leadership you're positioning yourself in the market maybe you want to do that in a hollywood studio with the best production and the high res camera and maybe even want to hire a you know production team for that webinar uh specifically but then on the other hand if you're doing customer onboarding and you only have five participants in your webinar room but they are the most important participants for your company to like build that trust and relationship maybe it's okay to only have a ring light so they can see you clearer and then just sit on your computer by your desk because in that situation in that format it's not the studio that brings the value it's the content and then vice versa sometimes lisa do you have any good tips on how you help make companies more self-sufficient after you leave how is it do they respond to your interaction do they feel more confident what are usually some of the feedbacks that you get to the end towards the end of a project well it's a lot of times it's it's about getting over the barrier doing the first webinar the first webinar is the hardest one because that's where you have all the the anxiety about all kinds of things not that you can't get nervous further down the line but but what i do is i help them understand the the quality of the and the composition of their presentation in whatever format it is but but telling them sort of um and teaching them what why what is important about the the order of the things that you're presenting if you want to sell something for example how you know important it is to build up a relationship with the people who are watching what you're doing giving enough value doing the right things and saying the right things and when that is is when they learn that it's easier to to to do again on another webinar and i basically tell my clients don't don't use because it's again it's it's about courage it's an excuse if you think you can only have a webinar if you have a huge studio i mean my setup as you see is is my background at my desk where i always sit i've set it up basically so i'm ready to go always it's my web camera of a good quality and a microphone and that's it um that's actually the perfect example i was gonna say have a look at us i mean lev you're sitting in a super fancy high resolution studio you have your mic and this futuristic backdrop which makes it seem to me like you're tuning in from the future at least that you're sitting in your in your home office and yeah fia looks like you're almost behind my curtain here can i ask are you in your studio or what no i'm just we just have the same same same backdrop yes because i did um i presented a little bit of our studio in the first session where i showed some behind the scenes and one of the tricks that we've done in our studio is exactly to set up these curtains so that you can get a different type of field so i'll i'll show you guys here for a second but if we remove the curtain we have this uh brick wall that seems a little bit more industrial and a little bit more uh rough and then when we hoist the curtain it's all of the sudden this you know very fancy a professional studio very pretty design to look at but um it's a lot of different ways you can play with your setup again depending on what message you want to convey what tone of voice like what's your brand personality all this stuff uh there's one more question that i would like um to get all your answers to because uh i'm actually very curious to know this myself vilma is asking what is the most memorable event that you have run and she's saying event so i think we can also expand our our definition of what a webinar is here and i'll give you guys a minute or two to think about if there's any like crazy story that sticks out to you any uh studio setup that was either or memorable for some reason either good or bad and uh maybe this time i will start with love and ask you if there's any project you've worked on of course without uh mentioning names or getting too much in detail that has stood out for you yeah um yes there is um actually just on that previous question in terms of the self-sufficiency um just just wanted to mention quickly we we we we've written the what we call the webinar excellence manifesto um which is available on our website it's 82 principles of how to reach webinar excellence across all aspects of a webinar and and we find that's really important we kind of base our own work on it but it's also there to kind of read in your own time and it's it's actually available as a book as well so if you want to connect with me on linkedin i'm more than happy to send you a free copy of that as well you can read over a glass of wine or whatever um but that's just that's something i love to share the knowledge i would love i don't know if andy is with you in the studio today again uh potentially he can share a link with us so we can drop it in the chat uh for everyone to get access to yeah great tip we we we want we're passionate about webinars otherwise we wouldn't be doing what we do um and we do want to share that knowledge and there is still plenty for us to do beyond that um as i said people often don't have the time to do it themselves but they want to understand it that's a great starting point so more than happy to connect with me on linkedin ask me about the book i'll send you a copy um memorable events um there's one that comes to mind covid was a challenge for i think a lot of things what one thing it was amazing for was innovation in in our sector and in our industry um and you know companies had to adjust really quickly and and do new things really quickly without really understanding what they were doing and kind of leaning on those who've done it before covid um we did one event that really sticks in our mind where we had two days of a virtual event um there were seven parallel tracks content tracks like a conference you know you have track one track two and so on seven parallel ones um two full days and there was about 200 speakers from around the world who the vast majority this was a sort of um an industry body uh who were very used to meeting in person um many of these speakers had never really spoken on a webinar live stream before um and that had to be brought together reasonably quickly um because covid hit and actually they were only about three four months away from from the actual physical event which had to be cancelled um and within that you know throughout virtual broadcast studios and so on we had three thousand different scenes you know the scene that you see now with kind of us four um three thousand different ones across the sort of two days which had to be really be pulled together and there was a sort of fairly herculean effort to get it done with a client who hadn't done it before and with 200 speakers who often hadn't spoken on this before but it i think what it did show is and right sticks in our mind is just to see how adaptable people are and coming back to your point in terms of that bravery that courage kind of speak on the webinar for the first time was there was let's say not maybe not 200 but 180 people who had never done that before and people are very resilient and very willing to do that with the right support and with the right encouragement which is why that stuck in my mind and i think when you face that in your own organization where you feel i can't get the speakers you know they won't just want to commit they don't want to be on camera or whatever there is an approach that you can work out or need to need to work out to bring them in make them feel secure um and and there are ways of of doing that um and in fact our experience there was the other event i was thinking of was where we um had somebody who we sort of pulled in kicking and screaming they didn't really want to present on the webinar um and they came off afterwards and it was a sort of ask the expert format where there's no slide where thankfully all questions loads of questions and it was they were the expert on and they were answering these questions and they came off this webinar and they exhaled it's all done brilliant and then they turned around given that we really tried to for a long time to get them on this webinar turn around said so when's the next one yes it was such a good good moment because they really enjoyed it and actually they felt safe and you know i was moderating with them so actually they turned around and to me and said lev i'm just going to answer the questions i'm just going to answer them to you i was like brilliant perfect you know and but the audience benefited from that as well that made them feel safe um and and and you know that way you can bring more and more people on even if they're not really comfortable so those those two stick in my mind anyway i love those stories thank you for sharing that lisa what is some of the things you've worked on that have been the most memorable whether it's events digital events webinars you know what i i love all the webinars i've held and i have a great a lot of great stories from clients but i actually would like to share something it was definitely memorable but not in the good sense because i think it's a it well it is a part of the learning experience that that um and it was all the way back to when i started doing webinars they were called google hangouts and you needed a bunch of different tools to make it work and it was sketchy to get it to work and you know the internet connection wasn't as good as it is today and so forth and i had a webinar where i was on myself and you know with hundreds of people everything was great and then suddenly in the middle of it uh the whole thing crashed uh crashed like completely crashed so i had to reboot my computer not sweating being all panicked thinking i was going to die basically and and just the panic you can almost feel it like right you know how how horrible it was and i log on again and basically the people who were on the webinar i was apparently they had had such a great time that they actually kept hanging around i think only about maybe 10 20 had logged off the rest were basically chatting in in the comments waiting for me to get back on so when i was back on i was like whoo-ha and then i could just continue on and i think it just reinforced for me okay i didn't die uh i did it of course it was it sucked uh but it wasn't a disaster in the sense that things happen like that it it's it's not that bad you you you get on with it and then it gave me an opportunity to hold that to have the webinar once again with new people coming in because we'll redo it because we had a hiccup it wasn't that bad and i think it's important to learn that you you you you survive even when it's kind of not going the way you wanted it to and i think there's uh actually a very positive silver lining to that story because it is just a whole human aspect right you know we are humans we make mistakes yeah technology will always have technical difficulties and i think it's really um motivating that your audience stuck with you i knew it i was so excited yeah that is so supportive we um uh in the first session that we ran i actually asked the audience you know what is your biggest fear when doing webinars or hosting a webinar or producing it and the number one answer was a technical difficulty and it's just really hard to get away from the irony of a technical company having technical difficulties it's yeah so fia do you have any stories that you would like to share that stick out from your uh webinar slash digital event experiences i have so many stories so if you can give me an hour then we've been doing live streaming for the past 10 years and and that's live streaming and events and 10 years ago multi-camera live production was mainly for the tv stations here in denmark and we started out by doing a lot of extreme sports and with that we have so many memorable experiences which was mainly about just trying things out and having some some clients that were ready to try things out so that was live streaming from skydiving to from a skydiving event to live streaming from a pancake house in minus 10 degrees in france and skiing competition and and so many and live streaming from the west coast and denmark with stand-up paddle boarding and the boats coming in and removing all the cables and the wind that hits your face very hard and it was very tough and very very very much fun for us to do all the extreme sports and for the past years we've moved over more over to the to to the events that we know the the more corporate events and when covid hit as you say live there was so many people who had to be innovative and transition from a physical world into a digital world and we were contacted by a film instructor who's passionate about nature who had been contacted up north in denmark by the nature meeting or meeting for nature which is a big event here in denmark where both politicians and organizations are discussing how can we take care of the danish nature and we have 30 days to transition from a physical event to a virtual event and working with a film instructor we were very much focusing on the aesthetic nice pictures and i was very much focusing on formats and and trying to bring the nature into the digital format and removing the stage because now we actually had the opportunity or that's at least what i believe in when you go 100 digital a new format opens a new world opens for for defining it or for designing meetings so we had a team camera team that was live remotely in the northern part of jutland with a cameraman a sound engineer and a light a light engineer who's following a a tv host for six hours the one day and six hours the other day and i'm just saying live streaming from the north of jutland i'm from there so i can say it is very interesting because you need to find the right the right spots where you get the right internet so we had to create all these different maps on the different spots that you had to place while discussing with a film instructor and how we can create the most aesthetic moves and then two days before we got called up that it would be nice to live stream from the nature as well so we had to send a camera down south to find a wild animal and and live stream it so we had to find the wild animal and then follow the wild animal so that we could live stream it at the specific time in the event and then the day before we got called up that we wanted to include our state minister our prime minister is called that and yeah from a live who's opening the whole event and just just that in itself could be a task for four days and we had to solve it in one day and then lastly we had to do test with 50 webinar participants for debates during the two days that is something that i'm still i'm still waking up at night thinking how did we survive how did that happen i can imagine you must have inspired the entire audience all three of you with your stories because i know that myself i'm a little bit shook to the ground whether it's having over 300 scenes and 200 speakers or technical difficulties which is everyone's worst nightmares to being out and like the freezing nature for that uh that excellent footage i can't i can't wait to see what my backdrop will be next year i have a feeling it's not going to be this uh red velvet curtain as you see here now but uh i want to take this opportunity to thank you everyone in the audience who've been asking questions and engaging with this panel i of course want to thank our amazing panelists for joining us via lisa and lev thank you so much for being part of this i think we were able to create a really colorful discussion today covering topics from studio setups to building confidence and talking about what even is a webinar uh in this modern world that we live in so thank you so much for taking part of the discussion thank you and to all the participants in the room who are interested in following along for the next session we have a session on 20 use cases to up your what webinar games where we're going to introduce you to a bunch of different webinar formats define them characterize them and maybe even give you a little bit of inspiration on how you can run more webinar formats so if you want to follow along you can either wait in the webinar room and be redirected to the next session otherwise you can click the button above the chat to enter into the next webinar room and i will meet you guys there very shortly and until then i'll see you soon