Avoiding the Age of Average: AI That Fuels Creativity and Efficiency

Thank you. Wonderful. You're live. Welcome to our InControl webinar. Whether you are joining live or catching this leader inside a community, I'm glad you are here. What we are talking about today is something I think about a lot. And I expect you do too. AI has arrived in the events industry, not as a promise for next year, but as something your clients are already asking about, the competitors are using, and your team is already experimenting with whether you know it or not. and here is the uncomfortable part the more people use the same ai tools in the same way the more everything starts to look alike there is a phrase for it the age of average when the machine becomes the default creative events lose the one thing they cannot afford to lose the feeling that this could only have happened the way it happened with those people in this room The person I have with me today has been rebuilding remarkable live experience over twenty five years for some of the world's most demanding brands. He runs Vogue Dams worldwide, one of the leading event agencies on the planet. He's someone who has been asking exactly this question long before it became fashionable. I admire him a lot. Koja, great to have you here. Welcome. Thank you for having me. You coined the phrase age of average to describe what happens when I becomes the default creative. That's a big, big phrase. But when you look at it at live events today, where do you actually see it? How does average look and feel like in a room? actually if you look at ai and the system behind ai what is ai basically doing especially the large language models they grab something off the web so they're trying to look for an answer already existing somewhere in the internet and therefore everything from a simple prompt comes to average and this average may be used before the event during and after the event and of course this is nothing we as an agency are happy with and this is why we believe you have to be distinctive You have to be different and you have to be disruptive using AI because using AI is a lot more efficient, gets you to create something extra special. And by the end of the day, it's more fun too. yeah well i i on one of the previous webinars with professor stefan lupold i said a sentence ai will not replace event managers but event managers with ai will replace event managers and following what you said llm is not creating something new it's based on statistics on everything that was already created it's just reshaping what was done so there's nothing new in it so if i understand what you said properly it means that the human factor is the deciding factor if you bring nothing special in you get nothing special out of it is that what you said Absolutely. Internally, we developed what we call a hamburger model. A hamburger model in how to approach AI. And basically, the bold idea is the AI is like the meat patty in the middle. But the hamburger buns on top and on bottom, these are event managers really making sure to breathe, to talk. prompt the AI correctly and to take whatever comes out of the AI, revise it and put it back into the system and create something extra special from it. And it sounds very bold, but this approach is absolutely helpful. And like you said, I believe people event managers in our world are making the difference not the ai but these people will be using ai Normally, I had a lot of experience working with creative agencies in my previous life, and I think the biggest benefit is this creative process, the blueprints that are already created over years and where you created also your own style. But with working with AI, you're faced with amazing knowledge, amazing source of information you can easily i would say go in the wrong direction and so it becomes more of a sparring partner rather than a tool and it's a very dominant one because it delivers results very fast so how do you uh work with this creative process is it something that just comes naturally or do you have with this hamburger model a really defined approach to working with ai I believe AI is going to become into every part of our lives. I'm still coming out of a time where I remember we did sessions on how to use the internet in events. A few years back after that, we were not talking about the internet anymore because it became imminent to everything we're doing. And the same is happening to AI right now. Now it's still extra special and everything needs a label AI inside right now. But believe me, I'm very sure that AI becomes a major part of all systems that we will be using in the future and therefore will also be nothing special anymore. Yeah, it just reminded me when you said that I remember like today, two thousand and thirteen, I gave a speech at CDF. They have a future Congress, innovation and stuff that will be coming. So I was speaking about the Internet and OTT and the new ways how to consume content. And I was looking and audience full with TV people broadcaster and somehow I said somehow I felt that they're looking in me and thinking okay, I When this will be over so that we come back to the old ways and we can work what we did for the past twenty five years. What you say is AI is here to stay. AI will not be gone. So what we need to do is we need to start learning how to do the best, how to adapt our creative process with this new powerful tool. That's right. Absolutely. And we've created next to the hamburger model, we created an internal kind of like a show and tell sessions where we are getting together. Everyone can dial in and it's a virtual meeting where like everyone is sharing what their best and most successful usage of the week was, or if they found out about a new tool, a new system. and sharing is actually caring and it really helps people to get involved more and to learn what others are doing and pick up some of it but also see the limitations and maybe go into this specifically yeah but it sounds very easy and are you afraid that your customer will come to you and say What is your benefit? I can get this from AI anyway. What is the added value that I get from work times in this case? I believe the value will be still existing. And by the end of the day, it's just another tool and another tool in the box of all the tools that we're using. And therefore, I believe it's also very important to consciously use it. And I would love to share with you actually our most prominent AI use case right now, which is digital doppelgangers. That sounds like first time scary, but what is it? Digital doppelganger in a way that it's a new way to approach events or I'm curious. Absolutely. Digital doppelgangers, as we created them, is basically a clone of your audience. So we create digital copies of everyone in the audience and have them up and running before the event. And the huge advantage is now while we are planning, while we're going into the strategy, into the design of the event, we already have our audience there ready to test drive our ideas, to simulate and to really see what's working out and what may not work out so great. And therefore we are entering a phase, and that is absolutely new, where we have the data before the event. We call it the pre-data phase. And this is extremely exciting. Because especially in times where more and more budget of the marketing budgets is allocated into live events, this budget now can be used in a risk-free way because before we spend the money, we make sure that we get most out of every single euro spent and creating the utmost return on investment. You touched so many topics, I have like one million questions. I hope so. Yeah, well, this is a budget thing, it's obviously very, very important. We moved from big budgets where people just throwing money out of the window, organizing crazy events to now really target audience. to really thought through processes. But when you say digital doppelganger, let's start with that. So this is any type of the audience or is this certain type of audience? How you design it? What doppelganger is or who is it? Absolutely. You importantly, especially we do corporate events, we do leadership meetings, sales driven events, trade shows, pop up stores, anything you think of, which are usually in a business to business setting. therefore our clients do know their audience they usually have the mailing list ready to reach out to their customers to their journalists influencers or whomever they would like to address with this corporate event so now what we basically do is we take this mailing list and create digital doppelgangers of everyone attending. And therefore, you do need to be specific. You do need to know who is attending. And if you have more than one target group, for example, you have press, influencers and customers and employees attending, you would have to create doppelgangers for each and every one. because they have different needs and different ideas. But then again, one of the huge advantages is, especially if you're addressing multiple target groups in one event, the digital doppelganger helps you figure out what is their common ground. So what is it they all are interested in to address together? But when you model an audience, I know it because I'm very deep into business matchmaking, which is a similar case. However, I try to model a perfect profile for every single person. So it's a very similar process. We use internal and external signals. Internal signals are basically what happens at the event and also what people provided to us. External signals are more or less double checking LinkedIn. So you have your own biography, you have your connections, you post a lot. So we can get this munition out of it and you combine external and internal signals, you get a pretty good profile. about a person and everything is today about human connection so we try to match the proper people with proper people in your case how do you know how press acts how do you know how corporate people act in this case Actually, we built a multi-layer digital doppelganger system. And the first seven layers are actually generic layers that we created from everything available in studies, psychological, behavioral models, and everything that is out there to create like a generic base layer. But then exactly like you said, we have to add two more layers. And these layers are the context layer, because it's a difference if you have, for example, automotive journalists or journalists from financial newspapers worldwide. Then you need, as the icing on the cake, you need the top layer, which is the client layer. And there we do exactly what you described. We are scraping the net. And this is a slightly gray area, but extremely rewarding and fun. GDPR compliant because we're not matching the single person with the part. But we are scraping maybe LinkedIn, Glassdoor, Kununu and everything else that is out there. And if it's internal target groups, a lot of times our clients let us access their internal Slack, Teams, whatever channels they're using to discuss stuff internally. So we can use this data also to help to shape the digital doppelganger. And then the amazing thing is the digital doppelganger is building itself. In the old days, we created personas and we thought about how they should react and build it up. a person that then will react in a certain way. Now we are not telling anyone how to react. We're just supplying the data. And due to this base model of event behavioral systems, we are very, very sure that we create a system that is exactly reacting and taking decisions at an event, at a trade show, as potential guests will be doing. That was a good point. Well, personas is something we will know. We've worked with that for many, many years and there's sometimes good, sometimes bad. Then you get lost in building too many of them. And what happens is over time, you need to rework it because things are changing and times are changing. People are changing. Everything is in constant change. That's the only thing that remains and everything is different. As I said, parallel to business matchmaking, we have very different types of a presence. So we are forced also to analyze if the people are introvert or extrovert. So if you connect to introverts, they'll connect properly. If you send someone who is highly introvert to speak to a very extrovert person, it will not work. And one of my colleagues also said we're building Tinder for businesses in this case. I see the digital doppelganger, but you are really promising to avoid serious mistakes and basically to provide feedback before event happens. So you can not only change things while event is happening, you can change it before it even happens and you push it to the way that it becomes kind of a perfect event, right? Something like that? Absolutely. And we're coming out of a world what we call the post-data world, where data was only available at or after the event. But that data, in most cases, was useless. We created terabytes and terabytes of data, but after the event, most of this data was not put to use. Especially if you do an event, you will never do the exact same event again with the exact same people. And even if you do, there's a year in between it. And this year, if you just listen to the news, the last two weeks the world changed again. So everything that you've collected is only of limited use. And now in this new pre-data world, we are giving secure basis, a data-driven basis for taking care of your event strategy, your event design, and really being able to test drive it with your real audience as digital doppelgangers. And what is extremely surprising, after we dropped our digital doppelgangers just before Christmas last year, we've been contacted by very many startups, universities, and even clients having looked into something like this already. And we've been approached by a university who has a study program already for two years in place for looking into general market research with digital doppelgangers. And they test drive our digital doppelgangers. And we came out if you, because in theory, you could invite your audience and do deep level interviews and talk to all of them before. Of course, that makes no sense whatsoever to invite everyone to a pre-event to discuss the main event and take all the surprise out of it. But in theory, you could do that. And this comparison the university study did was in-depth interviews compared to the digital doppelganger. And they were matching eighty seven to ninety four percent. So we are extremely close to whatever is doing this in classical market research and therefore it has a proven case that the digital doppelganger gives you really the same approach as if you'd be questioning your audience before. And this, of course, offers a huge level and opportunities from a very high level on the strategic level, but also on a very hands on level, because by the end of the day, You probably know the feeling, especially our clients at large corporations have the feeling internally everyone seems like they are an event professional. And while you are the head of events, you are approached by everyone in your organization, giving you nice ideas what to add to your event. And usually that is kind of annoying because people that have no clue about what's happening are just adding more stuff. And now you have the opportunity to test drive these ideas with the digital doppelganger and give instant feedback to whomever of your stakeholders internally saying, thank you for the idea. I appreciate that you're trying to help me with my job. We just discussed this with our audience and this is the outcome and this is why we are using it or why we decided against it. And this is helping on an operational level internally for events so much. We are now in project number eighteen and And we were totally surprised because this was not a use case for us. But this is one of these de-risking moments and getting annoying approaches away that we were totally surprised with. Yeah, well, I'm so happy to hear that because I was preaching for a long time and well, I'm building Event Intelligence Cloud as a data lake, as a curated data that AI is using, because I believe that those creative processes need data driven decisions. you know many people think that being creative means experienced and crazy have so many ideas and you jump well brainstorm and boom the perfect solution is there and what i'm hearing from your side and this is something that we can also give as advice to everyone you need a very good data, you need a very good base and your decision should be proven based on what you collected, what you read up. It's not enough to be just creative to have the idea, but working with the data, creating something will provide better solutions, will provide better decisions and obviously better budget decisions, save money, less mistakes and probably even more creative solutions at the end because This process provides results and results provide more budget. Something like that. Absolutely. You hit the exact two points. Of course, you need to be creative on the one hand, because we are cloning here the audience. We're creating digital doppelgangers of the audience. We are not cloning event creatives or event managers. That would be a whole other project. No, we're creating, recreating the audience doing digital twins of the audience so that we can come up with an idea and test drive the idea. But the idea, we still have to make up. And this is also important that this is adjusted or helped by AI, but the idea will always come from a creative mind. It will not come from AI, I'm very sure. At the same time, to test drive an idea, to make sure... this idea is truly driving return on investment. This is where the digital doppelgangers come in. And then it's not about, I like green better than blue. It is about that I have a clear, what we call event call to action. So a clear goal of the event, the event call to action, the ECTA, and to meet this goal, i can make sure now before i'm spending money on all kinds of different things to make sure that whatever my goal is that i'm spending money wisely on reaching a return on investment to make sure that i reach this goal yeah that's i really it is so such a great feeling hearing a creative person speaking about return on investments less money with a better budget better actual better strategies because this is what is everything all about because creative ideas help but basically our target is to have better events better return on investment happier attendees and in your case you're assuring that attendees will be happy that sponsors and exhibitors will be happy because the outcome of the event is what makes everyone happy First impression is important, but the last impression is even more important. How you start always can be changed, but how you end, it will last. And for the next event, I could assume that this knowledge helps you create better and better events. With every event, your experience is larger, your data storage is larger, so you have almost better decisions based on better data. But it sounds pretty big. Is it something that everyone can do or we all need work times to do it? There have been lots of startups and organizations reaching out to us that are developing something similar in these cases, especially on the broader marketing area. On really event behavior, we've been now working on it for two years. And this is, of course, absolutely rewarding. On the other hand, sometimes we have outcomes that we didn't accept. I'd love to share one use case we just had with a company approaching us, helping us to create their anniversary. So they wanted to create an anniversary event next year, bringing together five thousand salespeople from all over the world to Germany to celebrate their anniversary. The company actually producing machines that somehow check pipelines and they have two large competitors, one in the US and one in Asia, in Korea. Now, this company, the first thing we usually ask when being approached is, so what is your event call to action? So what would you like your attendees do after the event? So the event call to action, very simple. What should they do after the event? And now the customer told us very clear, but all these five thousand are free agents, so they can choose between our product and from our two main competitors. I want that after the event, when they get an RFP coming in from their potential customers, that they will send out our sales collaterals no matter which product is being asked for before they go to the American, Korean product. And now the second question after we've now established what is the event call to action. So what would you like to do the audience afterwards? And then the second question we ask is why aren't they doing it today? So we're asking for the obstacle. What keeps them from doing it today? And then the client said, honestly, we don't know. We created the digital doppelgangers. We are now fast. It only takes us like two weeks to create a digital doppelganger dimension profile set for an event like this. And now we ask them the question, why don't you do it today? And the answer was so simple. Our company, our client had all their sales collaterals in the languages English, Chinese and German. The competitors had all their sales collaterals in the US, twenty seven languages and the Korean in thirty four languages. And our digital doppelganger told us, No, it depends on the language we are being approached. And then we take the material in the language available. And so we had to come back to our client and say, listen, if this is what you would like to achieve with your event, and even though we'd love to do five thousand people anniversary events. Honestly, there's a far cheaper way to do that. Just translate your sales collaterals and you'll drive a business. And I've just been back to the client invited for lunch. He was super happy because this is exactly what we're now doing, a small two hundred people event. But they drove up their sales for two digits just for the interaction with the digital doppelgangers. Yeah, that's invaluable information. Thank you so much for sharing because I think everyone listening can apply such practices because questions you are asking is basically a question that anyone can ask. It's not something that is related to scale. You're speaking right now about the event of two hundred people, which is something that people are doing on a daily basis and it can scale to twenty thousand. thousand people with ai we are capable of really approaching problems that are not related to the company size anymore it's just the decisions you make and experience you create and I'm so happy that we will see you in about two months on June second and Düsseldorf we have an in control summit where the community will come together for the first time really event community event managers who are dealing with AI on daily basis and I know that not everyone just joined this webinar there will be probably a lot of people watching it on demand afterwards but you will be keynoting and sharing not only your ideas and concepts but also experiences and something that people should really get with take with home and think about it and I think the keynote will be a probably the highlight of the show And I look forward to discussing this a bit more in detail, because I believe the creative process has changed, but has changed in a positive sense. So I see how your approach changing the industry and changing how we think about events. And a biggest outcome from my side would be that data driven decisions are now part of the creative process. And we could expect better events in the future. Do you agree with me? Absolutely. And I'm very much looking forward to our keynote session in two months from now. Yeah. So thank you very much for joining. That was really educational. And I think our guests and viewers had a lot to think about, to hear many, many interesting things. Digital doppelganger are a big, big step forward. And I think also what we do with matchmaking, there are so many innovations that we will share on InControl Summit. So I invite everyone who wants is interesting that in the topic to join us and to be there because this is the place to discuss it thank you so much thank you for having me