When discussing taking over IMI Europe with Mike Willis, one of the things he explained to me was, that as an events company, the downside was that we were reliant on two budgets in the companies who send people to our events: the sales and marketing budget for sponsorships and people attending conferences, and the training budget for people attending our courses. And which are the two budgets most likely to get cut during a downturn or recession? Yes you guessed it…
What Mike didn’t explain (and who would ever have guessed!) is that a far more existential threat would come from a pandemic. For a company that in some ways is a hospitality company (we certainly have always prided ourselves on that aspect of our events), and an organiser of events that have mixing people together at their very heart, a pandemic that forced people to stay away from each other, and for a period to stay in their own homes, was a significant challenge to say the least!
When the pandemic hit, we had just completed one of our events (the Inkjet Winter Workshop in Bilbao) in Jan 2020, where covid was a topic of conversation at the breaks. When it became clear that it was serious, and lockdowns were announced across the world, one of the things that needed to be decided was what to do with our business. The next event coming up was our Inkjet Ink Characterisation Practical course in April 2020, and clearly that needed to be postponed (optimistically at the time to later the same year).
Next was the Inkjet Summer School due in June 2020 – what to do about that? After looking at options we decided to try running it online, hoping that people would be able to teach, and learn, effectively over Zoom. We found that it worked quite well – we had good attendance and generally good feedback from everyone, which was a major relief! What didn’t work very well at all was the interaction between the people at the courses – over the whole pandemic period we never found an adequate replacement for the ‘put food and drink out and let people get on with it’ approach to networking. Not vital for the courses, although much missed, but fundamental to our conference, and so with no end to the pandemic in sight at the time we postponed our autumn Digital Printing Conference in 2020 and hoped we would be back as soon as possible.
We also hoped that we would be able to hold the InnoLAE (Innovations in Large Area Electronics) conference at the planned venue in Feb 2021 but it quickly became clear that this wasn’t going to be possible, and we decided that we would try and run this online. What a time to take on a new conference! We spent considerable time researching potential online conference platforms, which was a rapidly evolving market at the time, and found one that we thought would work, which indeed it did (with some last-minute panics). Running a double track conference with 200 ‘attendees’ from our homes is not something I thought we would ever do, but we made it! Delivery of the content went almost perfectly, but again the interaction was lacking, no matter how much we encouraged, and even bribed, this behaviour!
The online model saw us through the rest of 2020 and most of 2021, and in autumn of 2021 it looked like things were getting back to normal, as I was able to run our course at the (also much postponed) Decorative Surfaces Conference in Munich and attend the conference as well. But this proved to be yet another false dawn, with the Omicron variant meaning postponing our own conference yet again, and running the Inkjet Winter Workshop and InnoLAE conference online for the second year in a row.
With everything crossed, and Omicron turning out not be as bad as feared, we intend to be back to face-to-face events from now on, with our Digital Print Europe event in Barcelona in May, Inkjet Summer School in July and some more plans which we hope to announce soon!
Tim Phillips