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IR in Focus | Season 2 | Ep. 6 - Keys To Successful Virtual And Hybrid Investor Events

Carmen Lilly

Hi, everyone, and welcome back to another episode of IR in Focus. I'm your host, Carmen Lilly. And in the next 20 minutes, we'll be discussing virtual communication strategies and take a closer look at some of the themes and trends since virtual hosting really took hold during the first COVID outbreak.

With me today is Trent Waterhouse. Trent Waterhouse is the CMO of GlobalMeet, a leading virtual event technology company with a scalable, flexible and secure hybrid event streaming platform built and supported by experienced event experts.

Trent has a proven track record of driving growth and innovation with 35 years of experience leveraging a field sales marketing model that aligns sales, marketing and R&D to think like a customer, act like a partner and measure success through customer satisfaction and net promoters.

Built for growth, Trent's unique blend of technology understanding and B2B marketing skills have been proven to help companies grow revenue profitably, improve customer experiences and build new partnerships and expand opportunity pipelines. Welcome to the show, Trent.

Trent Waterhouse

Thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to the conversation today.

Carmen Lilly

Yes, me too. And yes, it's been a while since the first COVID outbreak. And as I mentioned in the opener, I kind of really forced a lot of people's hands to meet virtually, and that's really when a lot of the virtual event technologies really took off at that time. So I'm curious how is the role of webcasting and virtual events really evolved over these past few years, especially since COVID?

Trent Waterhouse

The pandemic meant that every IR professional had to pivot quickly from in-person events to virtual events. But today, IROs are really leveraging the reach and the scale of hybrid events that enable stakeholders to see and hear directly from the C-suite whether those stakeholders are in New York, London, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo or for that matter, anywhere else in the world with an Internet connection.

There was a lot of technology startups during the pandemic that rushed to take advantage of the virtual event opportunities. But these days, it's a struggle because the banks, the public companies, the emerging unicorns, they're all seeking hybrid events where there's an audience in the room, but also an online audience that can engage from anywhere without the time, expense and carbon footprint of traveling to the event. I think that's really what's changed and evolved. What used to be virtual-only has now evolved to be hybrid always.

Carmen Lilly

And that's an interesting point really because just when you think about consumer behavior, you can't give something to them like freedom and flexibility and then take it away and expect to kind of go back to the status quo.

So I really understand how it can be a sticky point here, right? And what you mentioned now, the expectation is that there is a virtual component to these events, not just in person but creating some sort of hybrid event. And so with those kind of -- when you're seeing hybrid events kind of being the norm here, are there other notable trends that you've seen recently that you think will play a bigger role in the future?

Trent Waterhouse

We've been doing this since 1998, so for a long time. And really, over those decades, we've seen this evolution from operator-assisted teleconferencing to audio and slides and even to today's multimedia with engagements and sentiment analysis.

Every C-suite personality is different as to their level of comfort, but automated sentiment analysis of the transcript and the answers during Q&A or even a panel discussion, they achieve a whole new level of authenticity when the biofeedback markers that are enabled by video reinforce that leadership team member's calm confidence and commitment to the company's strategy and mission. It's really where the words take on that whole new level of authenticity when combined with video and the biofeedback that's enabled through the video interaction.

Carmen Lilly

Yes, that's right. And we do a lot of that type of sentiment analysis at S&P as well. And we definitely take the earnings call transcripts, and we throw a sentiment score on it. So looking at net positivity, looking at transparency, looking at something that we call fogginess, what sort of complex language are you using as an investor going to be able to understand some of the topics you are discussing based off your language complexity.

And those are all signals that I know that the buy side is definitely also looking at, right? Everyone wants not just the words, but like what are other pieces or signals that you can garner from the earnings report that can help you make investment decisions?

So it's interesting that you bring in like the biofeedback piece of this. And we all know, especially my listeners all know that all CEOs and CFOs are very different. And so that's an interesting piece to consider. So how are they -- with that biofeedback piece, how are they reacting to things like questions during the earnings calls?

Trent Waterhouse

Today's market that's seeking experiences, if you will, there's nothing better than when you can make that experience be authentic and you can see on the face, there's a true belief of that strategy of that company mission.

That's the magic as we've gone from audio-only to audio-plus-slides to today's multimedia with sentiment analysis. It's a perfect way to get the point across. And sometimes keeping it simple, the easier it is that something complex is to be understood, the broader it's going to be adopted. The more that a company can keep it simple and understand the growth driver, that helps out everybody.

Carmen Lilly

Keeping on this theme of emerging technologies that will play a larger role in the future. I did read through your April press release around AI. Can you tell me more about your leveraging that technology to support IR programs?

Trent Waterhouse

AI starts out being as simple as automatically framing a person in the video as well as cleaning out all the background noise from an audio perspective. So that's kind of, if you will, AI table stakes.

You then start to go into things like I might be talking in English, you might happen to be in Paris and you want to know what I'm saying in French, and you can have a ticker along the bottom of the screen that's doing a real-time translation into French, so you can read it, if you will, in your native language.

The next evolution of that is I'm speaking in English, but you're hearing me in French. That's kind of, if you will, some near-term practical uses of AI technology. But where we see it going in the long term is that these audio recordings and these video recordings, they become yet another piece of content that the corporation has in their business intelligence library.

And now you can start to incorporate these recordings in a business intelligence query or a search and now, hey, when was the last time that we talked about that particular business unit's growth or that particular product's expanding feature set, rather than hunting through and trying to watch and listen to a bunch of historic recordings?

You can actually just get a real-time result because all of that content that's in the audio and the video has been indexed and summarized to make it easy to find and easy to incorporate into your latest and greatest messaging out to your stakeholders.

Carmen Lilly

Yes, I really love that message. And something that I really enjoy that S&P does as well is taking a lot of these unstructured data and creating structure around it, databasing it. So you can do the search and like past transcripts or do the trend search or keyword search on anything that may have come up in these calls.

And again, just like being able to structure and database it, I think, is going to be immensely powerful for any investor as well as any kind of corporation who's sitting there thinking about like, well, how did we talk about this last time? Like what may have resonated? What may have impacted our stock price at this point?

Maybe it was the way I said something, right? So it's really forcing both investors as well as corporations to -- not only is it giving them better tools to understand what they're saying is impacting the market, but it's leveraging technology in a really cool way that you can kind of unearth some of those items and themes and trends.

Keeping -- and then moving back to thinking alongside industry trends, I understand GlobalMeet also supports sector events, right, so investment banking conferences. Are there any insights that you can share around some of the things that you're seeing or any themes and trends that you're seeing coming out of those conferences?

Trent Waterhouse

GlobalMeet has been a trusted recording, transcription, translation technology partner to the investment banks. It might be a health care event or a technology event or a consumer packaged goods kind of an event.

What we've seen the leading public company IR teams do is really focus on their messaging, but leave the technology details to GlobalMeet. And I think that's really the opportunity that gets created is let's let the IR professionals and the company executives focus on the message because the message matters.

And then we've got people pre-event, during the event on-site and post-event that are taking all the complexity out of the technical details. Conferences used to be kind of three-day, three-track events, and we've seen some of them shrink to be one-day, one-track in terms of duration.

But we think as the in-person audience or the in-person event itself shrinks in time, it makes that ability to bring in remote attendees, remote participants even more important. And that's really what the audio streaming, the video streaming technology enables.

The people that couldn't travel for whatever reason, are able to participate in it. And the bank remains in full control from a security perspective on exactly who can listen in. Not everybody has to be in the room to hear the message and understand the cross-company, cross-sector impact of the great thinking that's happening in the room at the event.

Carmen Lilly

Yes. Now that you mentioned that in thinking about in-person versus attending virtual, I imagine that collects some of that data, like who attended, how long they attended or how long they listened and things like that. How would you say GlobalMeet helps companies kind of measure the effectiveness of their virtual investor events or their hybrid investor events?

Trent Waterhouse

Great. I mean to me, it's about GlobalMeet capturing initially pre-event, all the registration data. During the event, it's kind of those peak audience times for particular agenda topics. When do the peak engagements, right, that are going on?

If there's a polling interaction or there's a sentiment reaction that's built into the platform, when were you getting the most engagement from the folks who were not only in the room but the folks who were attending virtually.

As you look at polls and surveys, downloadable content, it's tracking who is doing what, when. And it's that information that enables the event professional and the IR professional to continuously improve the stakeholder experience by focusing on what's most interesting, what's getting the most engagement and who, from a company perspective is getting the most follow-on inquiries about their particular product or growth prospects?

It really boils down to knowing these are what our GlobalMeet analytics enable. It's the who, the what, the when and the where that all gets documented and can be analyzed nine ways to Sunday on what was happening.

Carmen Lilly

I love that response because I'm a big believer in data and leveraging data to help make those decisions. And really, you're just generating more data to make more informed decisions. And I think that's a nice complement to your events, just kind of understanding who's doing what, who's clicking what, where does the interest lie with investors? And that really does help and shape and guide IR programs, just knowing what the investors themselves care about. And you can glean that data off of virtual attendance and participants. It's really cool. I really like that.

Trent Waterhouse

And it's about leveraging not only our analytics, but you were talking earlier about how S&P Global has a set of analytics as well. That's the point. By making all of this easily exported and shared and integrated with other tools, what we know through, if you will, the GlobalMeet lens can be combined with what S&P Global knows or what your marketing automation platform knows, what your client intelligence system knows about the particular attendees.

Carmen Lilly

Yes, absolutely. Pairing those data sets together really can be powerful for an IR program. So we're talking about some of the pros in virtual and hybrid investor meetings. Let's look a little bit more around the challenges. What are some of the common challenges companies face when hosting virtual or hybrid investor events? And how are those resolved?

Trent Waterhouse

A scenario that GlobalMeet has a lot of experience with is when there's a celebrity influencers, billionaires get featured and all the prior preparation in the world can literally go out the window in seconds when a private link and the associated passcode to the event are shared on social media by that celebrity, by that billionaire, 5 minutes before the event starts.

Whether it's private wealth management or asset management kind of an event that maybe 500 or 1,000 people are expected to attend suddenly goes to 25,000 or 50,000, 250,000 people, literally in that 5 minutes before the event starts.

It really emphasizes the importance of making a good technology partner decision for these events, where if you've got a global network that's purpose-built just to make sure that it's running all day, every day, no matter what, that's the magic of working with a company like GlobalMeet is we've had it happen to us before, if you will, seen the movie before.

And in that way, we can dynamically adapt on the fly to handle all that last-minute traffic that nobody expected because the featured guest decided to take a private meeting public, if you will, by putting it out on their socials.

Carmen Lilly

Yes. And I have to laugh because sometimes there are issues when there are entirely public platforms. I'm thinking about recently the issue that when Elon hosted Trump on his spaces on X and it just crashed the system. So there are public systems that are intended to hold a lot of volume, but may not pass the test at the end of the day. So it's interesting to hear that you have great experience in kind of managing a lot of that volume, and you guys really do meet those challenges.

Trent Waterhouse

Well, and that's the magic of our team of event experts where we've built, and we own our own separate dedicated infrastructure around the world versus something like whether you're going to do it on X or Meta, Google, pick your favorite Internet infrastructure. The point is it's built on Internet infrastructure and therefore, is subject to a lot of attacks kind of like what happened to Elon, unfortunately.

It's kind of the privacy, the security of a separate dedicated, if you will, off-net infrastructure protects from a lot of those cyber denial of service kind of attack events. The only way you know how to prevent those is you've dealt with them over the years for decades, and that's exactly what GlobalMeet has done.

Carmen Lilly

On that note, maybe could you share a case study or a success story where GlobalMeet made a significant impact on an IR event?

Trent Waterhouse

Our team of people, as much as you talk about technology, at the end of the day, it's the IR professionals working with our people that make the magic happen and keep the magic happening.

How our GlobalMeet team of event experts keep things up and running is absolutely amazing how they handle these unexpected increases in audience size, the presenter who drops off unexpectedly because they're coming in from a hotel room or a remote residence that just has got bad Internet connectivity, we saw this a lot during the pandemic.

The pets or the kids that come interrupt a speaker who was just simply presenting from home rather than from the office. One of our clients, they had successfully conducted more than 1,700 events all over the world without a single technical issue or outage.

Another one of our banking clients, you mentioned Elon Musk, Elon tweeted out the conference link, and it went out to all his followers. And sure enough, 50x more people than was expected joined on the platform.

If we didn't have our own dedicated infrastructure, we would have crashed. But because we do, we didn't crash, knock on wood. Instead, there just literally was not a problem at all. And that's what I would say when it comes to success stories, when everything is going right, it's easy to work with any vendor.

But when something goes wrong or something unexpected happens, that's where you find out the strength of the relationship and the value of the experience of the vendor that you're working with when that all gets brought to the table.

And nobody notices on the outside that anything was happening or that there was an issue. That's the magic, and that's where we're just very fortunate of having worked with 50% of the largest banks in North America, 25% of the largest banks worldwide in making sure that when their leadership team gets on and wants to share a message, our platform is just going to work, and their IR professionals know that they can trust us to handle all the technical details. So even if there is a glitch, nobody notices, that's what we're here to do all day, every day.

Carmen Lilly

It sounds like a very thankless job, but it sounds like you guys are very good at what you do. And I love that you brought up that with some of the issues when you do work virtual is you're in your home and you have pets and you have kids.

And life happens if you're at home. Imagine that. It's a strange world out there, but it's a lot of fun to see how technology is evolving and to kind of help meet people where they're at. Okay. So we're just about out of time. I'd like to close this podcast with just one piece of actionable advice for our listeners. So let me pose that to you. If you kind of skip the entire podcast episode just to come to the end for one piece of actual advice, what would you tell our listeners?

Trent Waterhouse

What I would share is that when your message matters, focus on the transparency and the authenticity of your long-term strategy while engaging your stakeholders at scale through digital communications channels. To say it another way, if you have an amazing story to tell, don't risk your brand reputation using technology that might not perform as expected. Work with somebody that's been doing this for decades and has that proven track record of making executives look great, whether that's to 500 people into a room, or 50,000 people online.

Carmen Lilly

That's a great piece of advice for our listeners, especially with IR groups, they typically run thin. So you really have to hone in and focus what are my core strengths, what should I focus on and what should I delegate out to the experts that may be beyond my wheelhouse.

That's all the time we have for today. Thank you to my esteemed guest, Trent Waterhouse from Global Meat. Thank you to my listeners for listening to this episode, and please contact me or reach out if you have topics or ideas that you would like to have featured on IR and Focus. Thank you again, and have a great day