Well, it’s one year for me since I stopped doing the commute from the boonies into midtown Manhattan. Blame the Pandemic. Sometime around early November last year, I started going down to Florida. On the Product Tanker presentation, of the Capital Link Shipping Conference (15th in an illustrious series), held on March 2nd and 3rd, several of the speakers referred to a likely demand increase for gasoline, diesel and jetfuel, on the horizon, due to increased driving and increased airline traffic. I can personally attest that the traffic around the Miami area has picked up, the airports have become more crowded (with even The Palm at JFK Terminal 4 making a return appearance), and the airfares have also been increasing. This is all good news- though I may have to start looking for bargains at odd hours.
While in my mind, the March 2- 3 confab is the annual North American shipping event, one impact of the Pandemic is that with virtual panels, there is much more flexibility on time. Gone are the days when shipping heavyweights would fly around in a pack from conference to conference, so there was always a concern about scheduling (physical) conferences on adjacent days when the rest of the squad was likely to be in town. My computer setup is now smarting from new forms of tech-incompatibilities; for example if a Zoom conference or webinar call tries to inject a video shot previously and is archived to Youtube- the sound systems are not always in synch. Such “problems” were not apparent a year ago. At the beginning, all the online everything was really cool, after all in the grim days of March and April 2020, when I was pretty much home-bound, webinars were great. But then, my schedule got clogged up with informercials that were not adding lots of value for me, and the conference schedules began to severely overlap. I get it- 3pm in the UK is 10am in New York, so some times are better than others. That’s why I’ve urged organizers of webinars or other online events to always have a “replay on demand” capability- it’s always very helpful to be able view events at a later date. Missing out on the Q and A component, a feature of live events (if the questions are not pre-scripted), is a small price to pay.
My sound issues notwithstanding (it’s complicated, I try to play the audio on a different sound system or hook into a recorder that creates MP3s), the presentation part of conferences is just fine, in fact far-far better than pre-Covid. Not too many years ago, I do recall attending certain events and begging the audio-visual guys (often sequestered behind a curtain so some “outreach” was required) to let me take a copy of a presentation on my thumb drive, so I could write about it (for Capital Link or others). And then there was the certain arrogance of certain speakers who did not want copies of their presentations re-distributed. National secrets compromised? Unlikely.
But the model for events, going forward, is likely to be hybrid. The social interactions in the virtual medium do not come close to that of spontaneous up close personal (yes, sometimes “in your face”- this is pre-Covid, of course) nature of real gatherings. Once there is some real immunity, maybe after this summer, real in person events will come back. However, I am thinking that the presentation parts and the social parts will be very separate- as “bring your own device” may well apply for viewers of one person presentations, and maybe even for panels. In other words, they need not be in the same room, or within the same conference venue. Select gatherings (maybe pay-to-play) might be on the horizon to establish real interest in a topic. Conference organizers are selling access to highly select and pre-qualified viewers; they may organize physical gatherings as well, but as investor 1-1 meetings have also gone virtual, geography may expand the focus. Sounds like a very good business model to me.
