The coronavirus crisis this year has caused many predictions that “the world will never be the same” and that a “new reality” awaits us. But in essence, the crisis only accelerated the changes taking place, compressing the time of several years into a short period of 3-4 months. All trends of modern society and economy will continue, they will just accelerate significantly.
This has some painful consequences. Ineffective businesses fly out of the market, and more viable ones take their place, and this happens forcefully and quickly. Agencies (and people) that didn't save suddenly found themselves unable to make ends meet. But this would have happened anyway, albeit a little later, when accumulated debts and cash gaps would have bankrupted this part of the companies. Agencies that sought to maintain the status quo and did not want to adapt to market changes never began to adapt. And agile companies began to change even faster.
The trend to expand online services existed before, but it was not so obvious. Now it is obvious to everyone. The need to diversify businesses, competencies, and openness to new things has also become clearer. The speed of decision-making and implementation of these decisions, the cost of delays were important before, but have now become critically important.
This also applies to the event business. Those who wanted to stay in the market “changed their shoes in the air”, began to organize online events, reassembled their teams, and were ready to resume offline events. And now they are excitedly competing in new tenders. They appeared and this means that the market, having held its breath for several months of quarantine, exhaled and began to breathe again.
People need events, impressions, live communication. During quarantine, people missed this part of social life and tried to find a replacement: online parties, travel, performances, conferences, bars. Sometimes these substitutions take funny forms.
If people are so hungry for real experiences that they are willing to pay for fake ones, well. It looks like the event market is expecting a quick renaissance and many agencies are preparing for it.
However, the online market has also already formed; it has its own market niche, clear economics, new leaders who have rushed forward and positive prospects. Online will remain with us and will be a noticeable part of the event market. The percentage of the market and budgets that will be redistributed in favor of online is still difficult to adequately estimate, but it will be significant. We could have come to this in a few years, but we arrived in the middle of summer. And it seems that the rate of change remains just as high.
