TechUnited-Zoom-e4m roundtable: Industry heads discuss brands gaining from hybrid meets

With the pandemic boosting virtual conversations, the world shifted to owning this digital format of communications. In this space, virtual events made a massive mark in organizations as need and demand set frame. As the world has now moved on to in-person events again, organizations are still looking at virtual discussions as an advantageous move. At the TechUnited-Zoom-E4M Roundtable held in Bengaluru, industry leaders pondered on the topic of how they’ve been engaging with their target audience virtually and how hybrid events can maximize ROI for their organizations.

The roundtable was chaired by Anand Bala, Commercial and SMB Sales Leader Zoom and Dheeraj Venkatram, Director, TechUnited. It consisted of Piali Dasgupta Senior Vice President Marketing, Columbia Pacific, Jayati Singh, Chief Marketing Officer, Tally Solutions Pvt Ltd, Ganga Ganapathi Poovaiah, VP Marketing, Epsilon, Barun Mallick, Marketing Head, Keka, Kiran Veigas General Manager & Head - Corporate Marketing & Communications, Happiest Minds Technology, Rahul Karthikeyan, Chief Marketing Officer, Scaler, Mehul Malviya Ecommerce Head Sri Sri Tatva and Vaibhav Mehrotra, Senior Director Marketing, Cashfree Payments.

Anand Bala began the roundtable by talking about how one of the biggest challenges that organizations are facing today besides economic conditions is how to tackle the situation of a hybrid environment. With events now happening in-person rather than virtual, a lot of challenges are arising for organizations and employees who are travelling for the event on high flight prices and long distances. Not just employees, even vendors and distributors are now preferring hybrid environments after the pandemic. He says, “Will events exist? Absolutely yes. Will these in-person meetings happen? Absolutely yes. But can we continue to take some of the learnings we have had going virtual over the last few years and put them into practice in the marketing domain or internal communication domain to drive better ROI, better productivity and there’s probably nobody better to discuss that than the people present here today.”

The discussion ventured from how hybrid events are a boon for organizations and the advantages that it brings. They spoke about how their brands have leveraged virtual and hybrid communications in their day-to-day work. The speakers also delved into the deeper challenges of hosting events and the ways in which virtual experiences can be integrated into in-person events.

The discussion ventured from how hybrid events are a boon for organizations and the advantages that it brings. They spoke about how their brands have leveraged hybrid communications in their day-to-day work. The speakers also delved into the deeper challenges of bringing hybrid events into the organizations and the ways in which virtual experiences can be brought into in-person events.

Speakers spoke about how virtual has made their brands, employees and their lives easier. Ganga Ganapathi said, “The one challenge that virtual events can help us overcome is the large-scale communication formats with the leadership team. The marketeer, the CTO, the CIO, the procurement person, the legal person are never available at the same time in an office space. However, if there’s an option to bring them together virtually, it makes everyone’s life easier. Maybe that's one good use case for hybrid events.”

Piali Dasgupta touched upon the cost-effectiveness of virtual events, especially for Columbia Pacific Communities which does events for the elderly and it is hard to bring everyone together through travel which would otherwise cost a large sum of money. Despite the technical glitches that one may have to face, Dasgupta believes the positive side of virtual events are way too many. “It’s (technical glitches) nothing compared to the upside of virtual events, the fact that we are able to do this at a fraction of the cost it would have taken to do this physically, which would mean we would have to bring people from all ten communities in different cities to one place. The sheer logistics of it is quite nightmarish.”

Moving between the conversations, the speakers discussed the advantages of virtual and hybrid events. The likes of Zoom and virtual communications have indeed boosted their employee and client morale, increased the chances of multitasking and have made educational progress in their organizations, speakers agreed in unanimity.