Will we do conferences again?

Can we look at this without cringing ever again?

Do people think that we'll actually go "back" to having business conferences again? How long will that take?

It’s interesting to wonder whether the conference business is irreparably harmed by this or whether it comes roaring back once there’s some kind of all-clear. Here’s how I’m thinking about it:

Okay, it's September, and business is back "open." But there's still no vaccine, surely. Are you traveling to a hotel/convention center on a plane to shake a hundred hands a day? No. You're not. You’re tentatively having in-person meetings again. You’re still wary of the people in the room with you. Even if widespread testing has magically appeared by then, you’re not sure you trust negative tests, given that you could contract it directly following the test and not show symptoms for 10 days or so.

You’re still giving everyone a wide berth. That makes a show floor and any kind of lecture hall a non-starter. (This is also why I think “people in stadiums by August” for sports is a total pipe dream, but happy to be wrong about that. I miss sports. Would love to be attending a Sea Dogs game tonight, in fact.) There’s just no way to talk to a sales guy from six feet away at a booth. There’s no real way to do education with everyone two chairs apart. (This is also why I think “school” isn’t happening again anytime soon, but maybe the fact that very few young people suffer badly from the disease changes things slightly. Maybe.)

So, let’s think about a reasonable timeline. Just about everyone has predicted a year to 18 months for a vaccine (despite the fact that there’s no vaccine for a coronavirus yet in existence, to my knowledge, and that would seem really fast to me). Let’s be generous and say it’s January 2021 when they’ve got something that can be tested in widespread fashion, and July 2021 when everyone can get it. That would be just about 18 months without conferences. A full cycle and then some. Multiple large events will have been through two years without an event at all.

“Yes, sir, come one, come all, to a giant convention hall where you can mingle with 30,000 random people! And, you, vendors, can pay for the privilege of meeting these 30,000 people by dropping just a measly $500 per square foot, plus all the cost of labor, shipping, travel, meals, and lots of other stuff!”

How many can ramp back up after that? Let’s assume that those run by the likes of Reed Exhibitions and other large conference organizers with the ability to borrow hefty sums and great relationships with vendors (or relationships with lots of leverage) can return to operations. Yes, sir, come one, come all, to a giant convention hall where you can mingle with 30,000 random people! And, you, vendors, can pay for the privilege of meeting these 30,000 people by dropping just a measly $500 per square foot, plus all the cost of labor, shipping, travel, meals, and lots of other stuff!

Of course, only the largest conferences will return, and they will gobble up all available hotel and convention space in “good” locations (Las Vegas, Orlando, Anaheim, Chicago, Boston, Dallas, San Fran, etc. — New York is the true wild card, at the moment, but maybe all the big cities eventually look like that. Who knows?), leaving any smallish events waiting to get back in the mix and having to deal with weekend dates in January or something. Considering the contraction of the market that’s happened by then, with whole industries like sports, live entertainment of any kind, restaurants, brick-and-mortar retail, etc., being utterly crushed, it’s possible some hotel and convention inventory will be freed up, of course.

Regardless: How excited are you to sign up for that, anyway, whether attendee or vendor? The best case scenario any conference organizer could possibly be painting would be 50% down. No way a show floor is charging anything, and even the conferences with the strongest educational programs would have to slash prices to entice attendees to make the vendors happy.

And how well has business and sales gone for you in the interim? Did you muddle through? Did you find that people could order products and set up new product lines virtually, without the need for conferences? Do you, at that point, find yourself saying, “you know, I never really liked going to Las Vegas, anyway”? Did you get all of your continuing education credits just fine? Did you not miss airports (and guzzling miserable glasses of miserable wine at miserable airport bars) at all? Have you considered by that time that conferences were already weird, inefficient relics of the pre-internet era? Those seem like strong possibilities.

Now imagine that world with a vaccine that never appears or which takes three years to roll out. Is that, for sure, the end of conferences? The end of mass gatherings? Or do we have herd immunity by then, regardless, and life has returned to some kind of normalcy once 75% of people have had the virus (and we’re assuming that another flu/coronavirus/etc. hasn’t popped up)? Even then, the coming together would really need to be justified.

“Maybe all of the things that people love about conferences — the parties, and drinking, and casual hook-ups, and, oh yeah, the education and new business relationships (!) — have that much more value for a certain set of people who struggled through the time of social isolation the most. ”

Or maybe there’s a large enough population of recovered people by then who are immune and desperate for human interaction. Maybe all of the things that people love about conferences — the parties, and drinking, and casual hook-ups, and, oh yeah, the education and new business relationships (!) — have that much more value for a certain set of people who struggled through the time of social isolation the most. Those same sorts of people who felt like one last spring break was a good idea? They probably think the return of CEA is the greatest thing they’ve ever heard! And those salespeople who live for conferences and came up in the era of the handshake won’t be all dead by then. They’ll be desperate to return to their natural habitat, right?

Dare I say that male-dominated industries like security, fishing, engineering, software, etc., that revel more strongly in the “networking event culture” may well have the best chance of seeing conferences continue? That IEEE will power through?

We’ll see, obviously. But if I were running an organization with significant revenue derived from in-person gatherings, I’d be pivoting really, really hard right now.