What events will look like in 2023 with OpenExchange

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The Financial Revolutionist: How has the past year gone for OpenExchange?

Mark Loehr, CEO: I think the big story is how so many business leaders got the end of the pandemic wrong—we thought it was going to continue longer and that some of those trends wouldn't fall off a cliff as quickly as they did. Whether it’s Amazon with billions of dollars of extra capacity or Peloton, every CEO that benefited from the pandemic was caught off guard by how dramatically things shifted back to 2019. 

If I had a tagline, it would be that revenge travel has its limits. This pent up desire to go see people and be there has really played out. We saw that change happening October, November, and December of some normalcy back to virtual picking back up. People could go to weddings and meetings, but the costs are very high, so people won’t do as much travel as they did in 2022. 

And so we're seeing people wanting to go back to virtual or hybrid, and people wanting to take the OpenExchange idea from a solution that saved them in 2021 to a strategy for 2023 and beyond. One version that I call the “10x factor” has a virtual audience ten times larger than the in-person one, almost like a concert that you’re streaming out, and that’s where hybrid starts working.

It sounds like you think that the trend line is returning towards a more thoughtful hybrid model due to both cost and convenience.

And engagement levels, and return on investment, and return on time for all the participants. 

With those variables in mind, what defines a successful virtual meeting? Does it involve engagement by in-person and virtual participants, as well as the accessible delivery of information?

All of us in our decision making are trying to connect dots. We’re looking for information that lets our confidence level go from 60% to 80%. So it can be specific information, specific details about a quarter, but it also can be an idea that's tangential that helps you kind of see how things kind of fit together. Across those types, it has to be good content delivered in a great way.

With asynchronous content, people might not be able to watch it now, but they might watch it in the next 24 to 72 hours. You don’t want to get bogged down with a 45-minute livestream, but you can revisit the top ten things that happened. Almost like World Cup highlights. I still believe there’s a 24 to 72 hour shelf life for finance-related content to still be valuable.

Are there partnerships from 2022 you want to redouble your investment in for next year?

I have to treat my Citi relationship not as a client but as a partnership. We handle their earnings calls, and we handle their investor days, and together we're trying to understand how virtual can extend all the content they have around the globe. I tell Citi and my other clients that they’re content companies. 

How do they react to that kind of framing?

They go deeper inside the organization. They're trying to consolidate the thought leadership around virtual, expand into areas that we hadn't talked to previously—whether it's HR, or learning and development. They want a unified way of communicating virtually internally and externally.

What are the main variables leaders should solve for to ensure their event strategies are successful in the coming year?

Content in, content out. Content in means, How do I get the best presenters and content in that I possibly can, and show them in the best light? Content out means, How do I take the content from that event and give it a shelf life? Content should be available outside an event and have a recurring life throughout the year—if you get it right, it becomes a virtuous circle, because if you get 10,000 viewers, it becomes easier to get more content in for the next one.