The Face-to-Face Premium

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As a US celebrity businessman lauds the value of face-to-face - can we benefit from this, and how?

Also: more on industry advocacy, boosting Boost, and news!

"Thoughts & Observations" - the Podcast

If you prefer to listen... I am converting this newsletter into a weekly pod. It is still an experiment, using an AI model to generate a virtual conversation about the items covered in each edition.

Tune in to listen and download (available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and many other major podcasting platforms).

New and noteworthy - from my log:

Last week, I focussed on our industry advocacy. Keep your comments coming! I sense there is a wider discussion needed, and I will pick up on that again.

Here are some updates from most recent activities.

• Legislative Action Day bring 170 industry advocates to Washington, DC

170 business and professional events industry leaders and advocates from 30 states met with more than 130 elected officials on Capitol Hill as part of the Exhibitions & Conferences Alliance’s (ECA) annual Legislative Action Day ("LAD") - making it the largest such day to date. This year’s advocacy work focused on taxes and talent. On May 22, the House of Representatives voted to maintain several ECA-supported tax policies while creating two new pathways to help attract and train the industry’s next-generation workforce. Next year's LAD will take place on May 28.

• Brand USA budget under discussion

While the U.S. events industry is advocating, a U.S. Senate committee has proposed cutting Brand USA’s annual funding from $100 million to just $20 million. If it became law, it would drastically limit the organisation’s ability to promote the U.S. as a travel destination. The proposal is part of the ongoing discussion around President Trump's "One Big, Beautiful Bill", a budget reconciliation bill. The government funding into the country's destination marketing organisation is usually matched by appropriate contributions from the travel industry.

• UFI reports GED activities worldwide

Last week saw the 10th edition of "Global Exhibitions Day" - and UFI has released an initial analysis, stating that the GED theme “Exhibitions Unleash Potential” reached audiences in over 100 countries and regions, and listing specific activations around the world (which you can read here). In 2026, GED will take place on June 3.

• Wolfram Diener to be UFI President in 2026/27

Wolfram Diener, President & CEO, Messe Düsseldorf GmbH, will lead UFI, The Global Association of the Exhibition Industry as President for the 2026/27 term. UFI is led by a "presidential trio", and accordingly picks future presidents around 18 months before their main term begins. Diener will join the UFI Presidential Trio as Incoming President in November 2025. The UFI Presidential Trio for the 2025/26 term will, therefore, be: Panittha Buri (Vice-Chairperson, BHIRAJ BURI GROUP), President. Hugh Jones (CEO, RX Global), Outgoing President. Wolfram Diener, Incoming President.

Boosting Boost

Trade show exhibitors expect support to bring good leads to their booth - a growing business for event organisers that can deliver on that. But there is a lack of good solutions.

It is something I have spent a lot of time on in the past. Back at Messe Frankfurt, I established and built the Digital Business division in the early 2010s, and we were rolling out digital products and services that allowed exhibiting companies to boost their visibility around the trade show. It worked well, but we knew the big potential was outside of the event bubble, creating pre- and post-show visibility beyond the show's website and channels. On this, we struggled, as essentially we were too early with our ideas and solutions back then.

Times have changed, and the 80+ percent share of small and medium sized exhibitors that make or break every trade show are all somewhat digital in their marketing.

Happy to share that will advise Boost.Express in building a win-win solution for this challenge: A trade media network that brings together trade shows and exhibitors to collaborate on ads.

Embedded in the show organiser's offerings, it allows exhibitors to reach tailored audiences pre-show and generate a much improved pipeline of leads. The team around Beezar Sirini and Danis Nova are ready to roll this out to interested organisers.

The pendulum swings back

"When it matters, people meet." I posted this statement, together with the picture below here, a few weeks back. It struck a chord in my network.

Now, a few days back, US businessman and TV personality Mark Cuban posted this:

Several people have picked up on this (and a similar earlier post from OpenAI ’s Sam Altman – celebrating the fact that business leaders are (“finally”) embracing the business value and opportunities of Face to Face.

It’s a development I have been following and speaking about regularly. Like last week, on stage at the EEA Summit in Mumbai, when I was asked again to summarise the impact of AI-generated content for our industry. In three bullets:

• Digitisation, particularly the rise of AI, fundamentally changes how we perceive and trust digital information.
• Very shortly, it will be almost impossible to distinguish between real and fake content online.
• This means that the ability to verify reality through in-person interaction will become paramount.

Historically, face to face, or “IRL – in real life” is our “default”, it was taken for granted, and it was challenged since the dawn of digital technology: constantly questioned by “digital first” apostles as less efficient and more cumbersome compared to digital solutions.

Remember that “the internet will make business events unnecessary” in the 1990s? Or: “With Second Life, you don’t need physical meetings any longer” in 2007? Or: “These social networks will replace the need to meet in person” in the early 2010s? 

Some proclaimed that there would be an “Uber moment for events” with our whole industry model disrupted. Or a “death by thousand cuts” as smart digital solutions for separate show functions would add up to a new offer, like a puzzle. Most recently, we saw the “Metaverse craze”, again converting real life into a fully virtual space.

Now, a different narrative is emerging:

In our ever more digital environment, true human connections and physical meetings are becoming more special, more valuable – and people invest into them. 

Let’s dig a bit deeper, and add context. Because the business and policy advocates of face-to-face have been around for a while as well:

➡️ Here is what Steve Jobs told Walter Isaacson, the author of his biography, in the 2000s, arguing back then that face-to-face meetings would never go out of style. “There’s a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat. That’s crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions.”

➡️ Or take Richard Branson , 2011, who warned that people do way too much texting or emailing when they should be picking up the phone and calling: "The quality of business communications has become poorer in recent years as people avoid phone calls and face-to-face meetings, I can only assume, in some misguided quest for efficiency," says Branson. He goes on to explain how much more efficient a simple phone call is than email when it comes to solving problems, for example.

➡️ Fast-forward to 2023, and the first proper UN General Assembly in New York after the pandemic. There, Scott Hamilton, a former State Department official who has worked in Cuba, among other locations, described how the pandemic hurt diplomacy because “face-to-face, you can build trust and comfort between people.”

There is no shortage of quotes. And no shortage of corporate and political action that shows that the “when it matters, people meet”-principle is understood – across generations, geographies, and use cases. Three examples:

➡️ Most businesses have their staff back in the office most of the time, and even fully remote teams and businesses ramp up the time and money they invest in bringing their team members together in person.

➡️ Gen Z professionals look to skip screen time for face time both privately and professionally – see my recent exchanges with young event professionals from Singapore.

➡️ Dating Apps are described by VICE Media as “dead” or as “in trouble” by the BBC – with physical speed-dating events rising fast (again) and an in-person alternative.

Back to “us”, to the business events industry:

In the exhibition space, we started tracking Net Promoter Scores (NPS) at UFI, The Global Association of the Exhibition Industry with Explori in 2016. They were scarily low – as businesses were looking at the data reports they got from digital advertising (eyeballs, reach, etc), they were challenging business event organisers for comparable data to describe their Return on Investment (ROI). The pandemic gave us the answer in an unexpected way: by showing what was missing in the business relationship management that was reduced to “digital only”. Eyeballs cannot sign contracts, simple as that. So since the pandemic, NPS scores have jumped up globally, and significantly so:

Can we take it for granted that this will remain? Does AI have the potential to disrupt the human to human communication? Mark Zuckerberg and Meta are pitching a vision of AI chatbots as an extension of your friend network and a potential solution to the "loneliness epidemic". And I recently shared an example of AI-generated video from a trade show floor based on Google’s new virtual video tool:

Here is where the real importance lies. The development of AI may be slowing or stalling (see just released Apple research), but the existing level already removes the barriers for fake content almost completely.

For us, as the builders and operators of trusted meeting places and marketplaces, it means that what we offer will become a premium product in itself.

So: A lot to discuss if we want to really benefit from this - watch this space...

Recommended Reading: The NYT on how "Hong Kong Looks for Ways to Win Back Big-Spending Tourists"

The New York Times picks up on Hong Kong efforts to position itself as an events capital in competition with Singapore and other locations, including quoting my friend and colleague Stuart Bailey in the piece. If you read this newsletter regularly, you will have seen more context around this trend here.

Thank you, EEA!

I went to Mumbai a few days back to join this year’s Exhibition Excellence Awards & Summit -to reconnect with industry friends and colleagues, and to join the panel on ‘The Global Pulse’ with Michael, Bhupinder, and (filling in for Ravinder) Raghav. I also happily helped to hand out some of the awards. Then - to my own surprise - I got called up on stage to receive a ‘Global Impact Award’ myself for ‘Timeless Leadership Impact’. Thanks 🙏 for this recognition.

Let's connect in person - Shanghai and Berlin coming up in June

Next week, I will be on my way to Shanghai, where the SCEIA hosts a C-level summit for exhibition industry leaders. Like UFI's GCS in Europe and SISO's CEO Summit in North America, it brings together C-suite leaders from its own region and from around the world.

A few days later, I am off to Berlin for the "AUMA MesseTreff". Once a year, AUMA - Association of the German Trade Fair Industry hosts the entire German expo industry and international peers for informal networking. Bis bald dann!

Until next week!