On-ground Event Spends To See A Dip Of Up To 20-25%
One of the biggest casualties of the ongoing pandemic are physical events. The event industry in India employs around 50 million people and Covid 19 has dealt a devastating blow to the sector. While the industry has been scrambling to find a foothold back, and when it was trying to come to terms with it early this year, in April 2021 the second Covid wave has made the situation challenging than ever.
The limitation posed by covid on physical events has shifted focus to event tech platforms that ensure sustenance of business in these tough times, and their use is becoming more widespread by the day.
In a pandemic-riddled world, several industries including IT, Retail, Healthcare, Automotive, Education, BFSI to name a few, are actively transitioning to virtual events. From internal trainings, press releases, product launches, trade shows, or even a client conference, virtual events are becoming the norm rather than an exception.
With this demand, there has been a mushrooming of event tech platforms. From a perception standpoint, in the last one year, the acceptance of event tech platforms has become mainstream and their relevance is undoubtedly here to stay.
In our interaction with marketers across businesses, the mushrooming of event tech platforms has posed a big challenge. There are so many available now that most marketers don’t know which ones to choose. Also, there is not a definite, credible list of event tech platforms based out of India that marketers can rely on. This gap between marketers and event tech platforms needs to be addressed.
If we look at pre-covid numbers, around 40% of the marketing spends were on on-ground physical events. Now the scenario has changed. According to experts, in this challenging global environment for business, the on-ground event spends will see a decrease of up to 20-25% and will move to virtual events. Businesses believe that events will continue to be critical for business growth, and in fact 80% of marketers believe that business leaders also support the move to virtual platforms and technology adoption is no longer a barrier.
While the beginning of 2020 threw the events industry into a tizzy, the fag end of 2020 proved that virtual events are not only here to stay, but grow and morph into mean and lean delivering machine. Virtual events are seen to be streamlined, focused, targeted, and can be tailored to deliver experiences par excellence.
