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Do This, NOT That: Marketing Tips with Jay Schwedelson
Ep. 311- How the 'Forgetting Curve' Impacts All of Us!🟪w/Editor of Event Industry News - Adam Parry🟪
00:21:40
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- [00:00]
Adam Parry
Foreign.
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Jay Schwedelson
Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers. You'll walk away from each episode with actionable tips you can test immediately. You'll hear from the best minds in marketing who will share tactics, quick wins and pitfalls to avoid. We'll also dig into life, pop culture and the chaos that is our everyday. I'm Jay Schwedelson. Let's do this, not that. We are back for do this, not that podcast presented by Marigold and I am very excited. I'm going to tell you why who's here. So first off, we have Adam Perry, who's the co founder and editor of Event Industry News. But why am I excited? When I got into the event space and I didn't know anything about it and I launched my first event, every person I came across said, do you know Adam Perry? I go, what's an Adam Perry? And the more I got into the space, I found out that this guy was like the Yoda of events. Like he is the guy that knows everything, knows everybody. And the reason is he is the co founder of Event Industry News. This is it. This is the publication everybody reads. If you are an event management production, if you're putting events together, small events, big events, all kind of events. And then he also co founded Event Tech Live, which is the event for technology within the event space. And he also has their awards. Okay, there's the event industry awards that he also is doing. He's doing all this great stuff. And today we're going to be talking about something called the forgetting curve, which is going to blow your mind and reshape the way that you think about content and how you're consuming it. So I'm super excited to have him here. Adam, welcome to the show.
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Adam Parry
Jay, thank you very much for having me and what a fantastic introduction. I wish I could be introduced like that all the time.
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Jay Schwedelson
I'll follow you wherever you go.
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Adam Parry
Sounds good. It'll be amazing.
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Jay Schwedelson
All right, so before we get into this whole forgetting for the forgetting curve thing, you know what, what's your story? How did you wind up becoming the Yoda of events?
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Adam Parry
By pure chance, I think under how did I become involved in the events industry should be the subheading. I fell into it and that was certainly, certainly the case for me. Flashback to 20 plus years ago. I was working in kind of sports and marketing and as part of that was involved in helping football clubs here in the UK and things like that activate on their event days and things like that for their fan days quickly transitioned into more of the print and editorial kind of side of things. And then actually found myself working with a company called Scripps Media here in the uk and they had this one publication called the Main Event, and that was focused on festivals and outdoor events. Anything taking place in a greenfield site. That was a great foray into the industry that got me to see how festivals were truly put together, where it went from a green field to this big mega event with tens, if not 50,000, 100,000 people in a field having a good time over a weekend. But what struck me at the time was that we were only reaching a really, really small proportion of people through that publication because we had a cap circulation of like 10,000 in the industry. And it also dawned on me that we were only kind of really focusing on one event type. We weren't really talking about trade shows, corporate events, brand brand experiences, all those kinds. So event industry news really came from this idea of leveraging technology, leveraging mediums like this, podcasts, video interviews, other social media at the time, and really having an uncapped audience. And that's what brought us to event industry News, which is now, as you said, one of the leading publications in the events industry, covering the entire market. And then what led us to the events was really kind of a selfish passion of I'm a huge geek, I love technology, I'm the first adopter and constantly buying the latest things, seeing how it works and playing around with things. And I couldn't really find any information about what was happening in the event space, so we started to write about it. So a huge trying to draw from our audience to that content. And then actually the awards was the first event because what we wanted to do is provide a platform for recognition for those developing those technologies and harnessing those technologies. That quickly transitioned into this conference and that quickly transitioned into a trade show because our audience, yep, wanted the education, wanted the content, but they actually wanted time with these companies that were developing and delivering this technology to see how it works and how it does. And that's brought us to having this event which needs 12th edition now in London. And we recently launched a US version over the last couple of years. And next edition will be in kind of the east coast. So, yeah, that says, in a nutshell.
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Jay Schwedelson
Really, you know, what I don't envy for you, and I deal with it a little bit. So I put on, you know, I market to marketers for some of my businesses, which is very hard because they're very critical of everything that I do. And for you to put on an event for event professionals, you're literally inviting the most critical audience possible to say, do I suck at this? Because you actually do this. So I know you're good at what you do because you wouldn't be in the 12th year of doing these events about events, because they're just too. I mean, do you get a lot of, like, a lot of criticism?
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Adam Parry
Do you know what? Criticism? Absolutely, and rightly so. Right. We're. You know, the one thing that criticism comes from in the events industry is actually just people wanting to push things to be. To be better and to be the best that it is. You know, I'm still that person myself that kind of walks around the show or an event, and I'm like, oh, I would have done that differently. I would have done that differently, and stuff like that. But, you know, I think, like you, it used to kind of really irk on me, but now it's kind of like a water off a duck's back. And at the end of the day, if they're still talking about it, they're still fans as far as I'm concerned. So that's the approach we take.
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Jay Schwedelson
I love the vibe. I love it. You're chill. All right, so let's talk about something. You know, it's funny to me. You are. You're an early adopter. You're all about what's new, what's emerging. And yet this idea of the forgetting curve, which I want you to take everybody through, dates back to the 1880s. I mean, you're going retro with your early adoption here. So what is this, and how does this apply to the event world? And why should we care?
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Adam Parry
Well, it's interesting you say, isn't it? Because sometimes what's in the future is perceived by what's in the past. Right. And the challenges that we might have had in the past are still present today, but can be overcome by what's coming in the future. And I. I'll be honest with you, Jay. I only recently came across this concept, but it resonated so well with me because I realized that I'd suffered from this and now I had a name for it. And the forgetting curve was really introduced by a German physicist, psychologist called Herman Ebbinghaus. If I've. I've butchered that, I. I'm very, very sorry, Herman. But it illustrates how information is lost over time and actually how inefficient the human brain is at retaining information until we take the steps in order to retain that. And actually, we see the most significant drop within the first 24 hours. So that could be a meeting, it could be a conversation, it could be a chat with your significant other, it could be going to see your kids at their play, whatever this Is, internal meetings, etc. And without reinforcement, we forget a huge proportion of information that could be really, really valuable to us as individuals or as a business or as an industry. And I think it's one of those things that as individuals we need to hone as a skill to get better at that, as employees or as business owners, as entrepreneurs, we need to hone a skill and get better at it. And I think actually technology is rapidly evolving to a place where it is going to support us and already is. And I think that will start, we'll start to see that transition into the events industry. Because I also think the events industry suffers greatly for this because of the way the events are designed currently.
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Jay Schwedelson
So take me through that in practical terms. Okay? Whether it's some small event, I'm going to some massive conference, or an all day, you know, hands on deck meeting in my company, what should I be doing to make sure that I can retain enough of the information that I'm receiving?
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Adam Parry
Yeah, I mean, so, you know, many event attendees, including myself, we go to these events, we book the flights, we take long flights in, sometimes Internet, internationally. We arrive, we meet up with friends, we probably go out for drinks or some dinner, have a lit first late night, then we're straight into the event the next day we're rushing around again. We're looking for people that we know, we're trying to connect with the people that we've pre scheduled meetings with, we're trying to get to the keynote session and engage with that all while we are also still keeping in touch with our families, keeping in touch with our teams, you know, and how are we processing all of that information and retaining it effectively? And the honest answer is we're not. You know, we're not in an office environment where we've got a note taker or we've got a pad and pen, or we can send a quick email to somebody and then that retains that information in those environments where, where participants were rushing through all of that and trying to absorb and rely ultimately on something that's quite inefficient, but having other impacts of things, maybe like alcohol or a late night and things like that, that deteriorate or diminish our ability to also retain that information. And it's also the sheer volume of stuff, right? Like we might not have seen somebody that we've seen, we've seen for such a long time and we're catching up and there's all this new information about them personally. Might be a customer, a client, might be meeting with, a prospect and then it might be the keynote, like I said before, where we're trying to absorb this information. And ultimately, you know, there are a few things that we can, we can do and we've been doing these for decades, if not for, since the beginning of the, of time when the pen and the paper were invented. Right. We can take notes, but again that's not super, super efficient. We now have devices that we carry around with us like iPhones and Android phones that do have recordings on, but that's not kind of really that socially acceptable at the moment to say, hey, can I, can I record our call, can I record our conversation? And things like that. But actually what can be done prior to that is there's a lot of memory training out there, there's a lot of actual memory training online and that can help you in your personal life, in your work life and in these event experiences. And it's about like how you structure those memories and how you actually don't worry about the big picture stuff but actually take the key, key things and store them in your memory so you've got good recall when it comes back to those. And there's lots of stuff like. But I also think that technology is going to play a role as well. And we're already starting to see personal devices emerge. There's one in particular by a startup called Congo, based out of New York, which is very much aimed at the event experience, which is kind of like a little pin that you wear and that can help you start and stop record call conversations just like this and retain that information and then use AI to dig into that and follow up. And ultimately most of us are going to an event with the objective of one or two things, networking, learning or selling. So I think we're going to start to see maybe larger organizations such as Apple or Samsung and things like that start to build these devices as part of their ecosystem. Like we now have AirPods and things like that because people will want to retain that information the same way. You know, as we were saying earlier, we're all using kind of note takers. Zoom's got note takers integrated, Google's got note takers integrated, you've got Fathom Fixer. All of these other tools that now on a day to day basis on meetings, which are another form of event, help us to retain that information and act upon it.
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Jay Schwedelson
You know, I think probably the thing I'm going to take out of this that's the most actionable for me is just being intentional before I go into any of these settings, whether it's a big conference, all day, meetings, whatever, but before I get there, be like, okay, here's how I'm going to consume the information. Here's. I'm going to kind of boil it all down and then what I'm going to do afterwards. And it's almost like the same way that you get your plane tickets and you have your plan of how you're going to get there and what you're going to do. Is it right to think that you need to have a game plan before you step foot into that environment to know what you're going to do and what your plan is afterwards? Is that like, is that the way to do it?
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Adam Parry
Absolutely. I mean, we're all, we're all time poor, aren't we? Essentially, you know, and when we're in an event within an event environment, even more so because there's so many things pulling us left, right and center. And I think absolutely having a really good game plan on who you are going to spend time with because there's also people that will, will suck time away from you. Right from the important stuff. How those, how those discussions are structured, where they're structured. Obviously meeting somebody in, in just serendipitously as you're walking down a, in a venue, something like that can spark a great conversation. But unless it's in the right environment, you're probably not going to retain a huge amount of that, that information where if you take it off and say, hey, let's go and sit down for five minutes, let's have a coffee, let's take five minutes away, that's going to have a positive impact on you retaining that information. And I think when it comes to content, it's also having the foresight to say, hey, maybe when that session's finished, I just spend the next five minutes writing down my thoughts in my phone, sending myself an email, or even better, just giving you, just speaking to a voice note, because that's much more contextual, there's inflection, there's a lot more that you can say than potentially right and just giving yourself that five minutes before you move on to do something else. So you've got that really solid recap of this is what I learned, this is what I'd like to act upon, and this is like what I'd like to do next. And I think so.
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Jay Schwedelson
Let me. I'm curious about something, though. A lot of people, they get the opportunity. You're going to go to the event, but the reason you're going to event is you need to come back to the company and now present to us everything that you learned. So everybody else that didn't get to go this year, they get the benefit of you being there, is there? I know this is off script. I'm just. Since this is your world, is there a right way to kind of plan for that and do that? Because I feel like that's a big thing that people have to do.
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Adam Parry
Yeah, absolutely. There is a right way to plan for that. And that's obviously communication with the team on the objectives of attending the event in the first place. So many people actually end up going to events just because they've. There's other people there, right. That they know and they get sucked up in that FOMO kind of side of things. But what is it, what is the objective of you being there? Because actually, the return on investment can be many different things to many different organizations and many different people. Some people are there just to sell and network and connect with people. Others are very much there to learn and get that information back into the business. So the framework should be there. Maybe it's something I should create. Maybe it's something you should create. J. You know, as well, in terms of like, what does that framework look like? And it's probably more personal to each company and each individual than maybe a blanket one. But again, just coming back to one of the ways that we're trying to approach this as an event organizer, right. One of our biggest challenges, and this is a challenge for every organizer, is maintaining consistency on getting audiences to return year on year. And when you do that, that's where your major growth comes from each year in your overall audience size, which we all know, exhibitors, sponsors, whoever it is, they love big numbers. We've taken the step of going well. We can only trust the attendee and the exhibitor and the sponsor so far. So what can we do to help support getting the right information back to them effectively so they can then present that back to the business? So almost doing it for them. And one of the most recent ways we've done that is, well, we filmed all of our content since we've. Since the inception of the event. We've now got technology and we've now got partners like a company called Voxo, who take that content live at the event through an audio feed, transcribe it through AI and create a Deep Dive document and a key takeaway document for every single session that we have. The speaker gets that to share. Every attendee can access that within minutes after the session. And we also host that on the event Tech Live website and we publicize that consistently to our audience and remarket that content, allowing them to know that it's there. So in that way, we've kind of taken some of the hard work out of it. So, Jay, you can go to a session at eventset Live, you can watch it, you don't have to worry about the notes. And then shortly after you'll get that key takeaway document and that Deep Dive document that then you can retain, take back to the business and refer to at any point in the future. And that's all packaged up part and parcel of attendance.
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Jay Schwedelson
You got it. After this is over. You're telling me how to do that? Because I think there's so much value and it's not just for big events. I mean, this could be for a webinar, this could be for a podcast, this could be. There's so many applications there and I think the key takeaways is so important, it drives me bananas. Everyone's always like, send me the slides. I need the deck. Everybody always wants the deck. Nobody does anything with these decks. They just have these giant files sitting around somewhere like, like. But your key takeaways, I think that's great. Yeah, I didn't know how you do that.
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Adam Parry
I honestly. Well, to be fair, it's just a partnership with a great company. And don't get me wrong, I'm sure there are others out there. I'm sure there are going to be more of companies out there, but Voxo is the one that we work and it's worked flawlessly for us. And actually, Jay, what I must say is, you know, for as long as we've recorded content and put that on demand, in terms of video content, the first year we worked with Voxo, the post event engagement with that content was like 100x on that from that video content.
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Jay Schwedelson
Unbelievable.
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Adam Parry
And that's just because it's more digestible, more shareable.
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Jay Schwedelson
Yes.
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Adam Parry
More usable. And actually I do now believe, you know, I wish we could do more with it, but I'd love to build GPT, have all of that content in there and then put that out as a resource as well so people could search that which we're restricted a little bit by the number of documents and things we can have in those systems at the moment. But again, I see that it's the future of what I will be as an event planner. I'll take all of my content and I'll create it into an accessible element of an LLM that any of my attendees can then jump back into, ask questions, deep dive into it and get answers.
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Jay Schwedelson
You know, it would be so awesome is then you tie that in with some of the image generation AI tools and it takes the key takeaways and it turns into social posts, you know, with your branding on it that the attendee can then go and post online and take the key takeaways as posts for them and just get it just going everywhere. I mean, there's so many applications. I love this idea of key takeaways. All right, before we run out of time, I want everyone to, we're going to put it all in the show notes, everything you talked about. But Adam, how does everybody get involved with your world? What do they follow you? Event Industry News. Tell everybody everything.
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Adam Parry
Yeah, sure. Event Industry News is event. All of our content is free to access. We don't get anything. That's not true, actually. We get our reports, but in full transparency. That's because they're sponsored and those sponsors pay a lot of money to sponsor those, so. But again, there's nothing chargeable. So we have reports on the future of AI, on event technology, on today, sustainability, all that kind of stuff. So event industrynews.com is the place to check us out there or go to LinkedIn. We have a hundred thousand followers on our LinkedIn page for updates, Twitter, all those good places. Me Personally, I'm on LinkedIn at Adam Parry, if you want to follow me there professionally. Instagram, you're going to see pictures of my kids and my wife and me and the food that I eat. And if you're crazy enough to go on TikTok, you'll see silly picture videos of me working out in the gym. So that's, that's generally me and I'm an open book. If anybody wants to reach out to me, hang, chill, have questions, wants to pick my brain, then they can do so. I'm always happy to help.
- [20:36]
Jay Schwedelson
All right, everybody, follow me. It's Adam Parry. P A R R Y. The guy is awesome. Event industry news is awesome. And get excited. Adam is going to be speaking at Event Tastic. That is the free virtual event, the world's largest event about events. It's going to be amazing. So he'll be there in June. Can't wait to see you there, man, and appreciate you doing the show.
- [20:57]
Adam Parry
Thank you very much for having me, Jay.
- [20:59]
Jay Schwedelson
All right, later. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice. But the party's not over. Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketers. And hook us up with a five star review if this wasn't the worst podcast of all time. Lastly, if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100% free, visit guruevents.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like Daymond John, Martha Stewart, and me. Guru events.com check it out.