Events for Thought Leaders | Anthony Vade

---

The future of events for thought leaders.

An interview with Anthony Vade about creating meaningful and impactful events.

Today’s guest is Anthony Vade, the Experience Architect at FMAV, an audiovisual and event technology company that is helping event planners and thought leaders transform how events are produced.

Anthony starts by explaining what an Experience Architect does and how he is helping to transform the events industry to be more than just a box of gears.  We discuss the Event Design Collective and the Events Canvas. Then, we talk about what the core principles are and how this powerful tool is helping uncover what the needs are and how to get everyone in alignment with what the event should be.

In addition, Anthony gives some excellent advice for speakers seeking to find a solution in our COVID-19 world where digital presentation is the only available avenue. Furthermore, we garner some insight into the technology available and what the future of events might look like using VR, AR, XR, or a mix of these exciting technologies.

You can find a sample of the uses of technology Anthony spoke of here.

Three Key Takeaways from the Interview:

• When planning a digital event thought leaders need to consider time frame and intimacy.
• Thought leaders will want to ensure everyone involved in an event and on the same page about what they want the event to accomplish.
• If thought leaders are going to produce digital content, they have to ensure the audio quality is good or risk losing the audience.

---

Join the Organizational Thought Leadership Newsletter to learn more about expanding thought leadership within your organization! This monthly newsletter is full of practical information, advice, and ideas to help you reach your organization’s thought leadership goals.

And if you need help scaling organizational thought leadership, contact Thought Leadership Leverage!

---

Transcript

Bill Sherman Hello. You’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. I’m your host, Bill Sherman. And today we’re talking about one of my personal passions, organizational thought leadership. That is the people who create, curate and deploy thought leadership on behalf of their organizations. My guest today is Anthony Vade. He’s the experience architect at FMA. And he specializes in thought leadership for the events industry. The events industry is going through a massive digital transformation into technologies such as extended reality. As part of his thought leadership. Anthony is helping to transform how stakeholders plan and produce events. He’s the Canadian director of the Event Design Collective. I sat down with Anthony to talk about two main topics. First, his journey and thought leadership. He’s become an ambassador, evangelist and frequent speaker in the industry. I also want to talk to him about his role as a thought leader inside of his own organization. Let’s get started. Welcome to the show, Anthony.

Anthony Vade Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Bill Sherman So let’s start with the question. I had described your by a little bit on the introduction, but let’s go a little bit deeper. What is FMV and what do you do as an experience architect? Help, help our listeners understand.

Anthony Vade So I’ll give you very high level overview of what FMV is. So we were the results of the coming together of a whole bunch of audio visual and event production companies in Canada and sort of started around 5 or 6 years ago, ranging from traditional hotel heavy to concept production to all sorts of different technologies that are involved with connecting with audiences in any way, shape or form. If there’s a stage and there’s some technology around that stage. All these companies provided those solutions. And then we came together and formed for maybe the largest Canadian company of our time. Now, we got a lot of attention in that and we recently got purchased by PSA V, just to add some more letters into the alphabet Soup, who is the largest global audiovisual provider for the events space? And they specialize in hotels and venues. So I’ve started working more closely now with the global team as well in my role as an experience architect, and that that role is an interesting role. I spend about a third of my time and probably about a third of my time is focused on connecting with with clients in the marketplace and doing some sales enablement with them, and in particular bringing in design methodologies and design thinking principles to help them create more meaningful events and more purposeful events. So I work very closely with the sales organization on that side of it to partner up with specific accounts and to make sure we have those kinds of conversations. I spend about a third of my time on product development, sort of R&D stuff, making sure that there’s a connection point between the sales team and our clients and the techniques that are making the call tools that we bring to the market. And in the final third of my time is spent on industry ambassadorship, like advocacy work, public speaking, sort of being a thought leader within the industry and helping event planners around the world understand design methodologies and how to activate technology with purpose and reason at their events.

Bill Sherman So let’s explore that last third a little bit deeper. And so you talk about being an ambassador. You could also use the term sort of evangelist as well. So let’s talk about what is your thought leadership at this point and how did you find yourself in thought leadership? I’m assuming you didn’t wake up one day and said, thought leadership? That’s the answer. So how did you get to where you are today and what message are you communicating out?

Anthony Vade So it’s a funny story because, yes, you’re right. I started off as as attacking the industry. I was pushing buttons and faders and I actually landed in with a with a startup company that was very new. They had very few employees running very lean, as many do, and we all had to put on many hats. So I started so I started to dabble in a bit of the marketing side of things. And we started to and I moved through that organization and we were connecting with industry and we recognized that there was a lot of need for education around the complexity of technology, especially in the event space. So through those marketing initiatives, we started to recognize we can make these connections with the industry and with our client types through educating them and sort of demystifying a lot of the smoke and mirrors that exists in the technology field. So we were doing more and more of that, and then I started moving through other companies and around the world, and I got more confident at the public speaking part of it in particular, which is pretty rare for technicians in the AV biz. We like to be behind the curtain, hidden away at the tech table rather than on the stage. So when AV companies and these tech companies started to see that I was comfortable with being on the stage and that got a lot of interest and I found that that my career started. Aggressive new opportunities were opening up for me because I could do those thought leadership activities. I was confident on stage and so I got better jobs as a result, and it progressed me through my career in many ways. So it was kind of accidental. But then as I saw the benefits that could come from it, I jumped in like headlong and sort of really, really pursued it as an opportunity to progress my career.

Bill Sherman So now when you’re on stage or virtual stage or communicating a message. Tell us a little bit about that message, because I think you’ve got an interesting story in terms of how you’ve been helping the industry see around corners and figure out what’s next. So what is your thought? Leadership?

Anthony Vade I started to recognize that that maybe companies around the world were doing the same thing. They were educating planners in the market on what we call a 1 to 1. It’s entry level audio visual. And they’ve been doing it for years. And I mean, I’ve been in I’ve been in the industry for 20 years and everybody’s been running a 1 to 1 for years. And it started to dawn on me that why do we keep running the basics, especially if perhaps it’s not sticking? If we have to keep teaching and the same thing, then that is either not relevant to them or we’re not teaching it well enough. And so we started to look at that very critically and started to analyze what thought leadership was for an A-B company. And we decided that we had to reposition it. We had to get away from this entry level 1 to 1, give the industry a, you know, a bit of credit that they are capable of more. And we shifted all of our thought leadership to more outcome focused, more results based, and then they can learn the basics the way 1 to 1 can be learned through us, focusing them through understanding the outcomes and the objectives and how we go through the process for that. If that aren’t so.

Bill Sherman Yeah, I think so because and I want to go into target audiences. You’ve talked about event planners. You’ve also got on the events side the stakeholder, the executive who’s putting on the event and is looking towards an outcome. Because whether you’re flying people in for a show or taking even taking them offline for a virtual event, if it’s a sales team and you’re trying to bring them up to speed with information about either their products or new marketing campaigns, etc., that’s an investment of time that they can’t be selling. So let’s talk about how you shifted the conversation either with the event planner or the client so that they understood you’re approaching this from a different level.

Anthony Vade Yeah. So what we recognized as well, and it really led us to our work with the event Design Collective as well. We recognized that the there was a disconnect going on between either the in-house planner that works for the company and, you know, their bosses are the C-suite. They’re the ones at that table or the third party planner who’s coming in to that corporation just to take on that contract, to manage that event. But there was a communication breakdown where they were talking about different priorities and different things. We found that the C-suite and the senior decision makers were looking to create events that were really focused on big behavioral changes within their organization. They wanted the event to help them get their sales team thinking in new ways, or they wanted to shift culture within the organization, alignment, cohesion, all those good things you hear when you have big, high level strategy within organizations. Whereas planners were very pragmatic, very functional, and they’re very much short term focused. We need to get through this event. And they tended to brush over the big behavioral elements to it. And in this disconnect, we were caught in the middle as the AV company, not quite sure what to provide, what solution, where and when. So we had to find a way to bridge that gap in communication between the planner and the decision maker and the outcome owner. And we had to take on some sort of design methodology to do that because we couldn’t approach it from the world and be siloed in our mindsets. We had to find a way to have a communication between all of those levels, whether it’s C-suite plan or and ask the supplier to make sure that we all understood each other better. So we found the event design collective and the event canvas methodology because it enabled that, because it approached the communications, the style of conversation that you need to have at those different levels of authority around event ownership.

Bill Sherman So let’s talk about your work with the Event Design Collective as well as the event Canvas. Tell me a little bit about those and how they changed the conversation. How thought leadership helps you have a new conversation with your audience?

Anthony Vade Yeah. So I, I learned about the methodology about 3 or 4 years ago and just jumped in headfirst. I was so impressed. When I first heard about it, because it is a different way of looking at events and there’s a couple of core principles behind it that we hold as true, and that is that a successful event changes the behaviors of the stakeholders associated with it. So people come into events thinking, feeling, saying and doing things one way. And through the experiences that we design, they transformed in positive ways. So we create positive behavior change and and successful events are designed for multiple stakeholders and for those stakeholders personally. So what the methodology, what these three amazing gentlemen in in Europe had developed was a visual way of communicating that so that we so that we could enable each other to understand. Like I was just chatting about understand each other’s worlds and each other’s priorities and then collaborate so that we can intentionally design, we can build a narrative that explains how the event creates value for all of the stakeholders. We can all agree upon that, including the stakeholders agreeing with us that they’re going to contribute in the ways that we ask them to contribute, and then we can align the entire team towards that goal that we have or that narrative that we’ve created around the event. So it’s a really powerful tool, one for uncovering what the needs are because it’s hard to guide somebody if you don’t know where they’re looking to go. It’s just either you just aimlessly wandering around. So the methodology gives us the ability to sort of map out where we’re going to take whatever change needs to occur in these stakeholders, Where we’re going to take away the end goal is and then all agree through the process together. Doesn’t matter if we’re the CEO or if where the contracted event plan or the AV company coming in. We all know our role where we sit on the steps we need to take to achieve that end goal. That alignment is huge.

Bill Sherman You talk about alignment and you’ve spent some time talking externally with the client, the owner, the outcome owner, as well as then the event team. Let’s talk internally and let’s talk about getting a sense of alignment. When you said we need to change how we talk about events, how we propose, how we pitch. How did you get that buy in and talk about that journey? Because I think that’s important because before you can go and evangelize to the world, you have to get the alignment internally as well.

Anthony Vade And we kind of did it backwards. That’s the funny thing. We developed a very robust and the I mean, the leadership structure certainly changed within our organization. But the traditional FMB leadership structure was very focused on being being planet centric. So we built this whole to market strategy around experience based selling. You know, Joe Pine and James Gilmore’s experience economy was, you know, a lot behind that to position us differently in the market. So we had that strategy that outlined really robust, and then we started deploying it and we had to reeducate a lot of our sales force internally that you don’t sell on features and benefits of your product you sell on, on how it changes that buyer’s life, how it improves things for them. And that was foreign to them because they have companies sell boxes, we sell boxes full of gear, we push them in, we set them up and then we pack them down and pull them out. That was then. They understood that especially the veterans of the industry, to now all of a sudden say, hey, your boxes and important anymore and you’ve got to stop selling the box and start selling you And the experience of working with you was really tough. And we struggled for a few years. And then to make it even worse and we’ll probably dig into this later, make it even worse, we got we got some buy in from that and it was successful. And then we started looking at ourselves and going, Are we living this? Are we actually applying this to our events and to our company culture? Because if we’re telling our customers to do it, we better do it ourselves. Otherwise we’re being pretty hypocritical.

Bill Sherman You mentioned a point that I want to explore further. You talked about getting the buy in from your leadership, and you mentioned Joe Pine’s book, The Experience Economy, and you also have talked about the event Canvas. And so I have this mental image and I’m assuming it’s wrong and this is what I’m going to throw it out lightheartedly. You walked in at one point to your leadership team and said, I read this read this great book called The Experience Economy. Here’s this great tool called the event Canvas. We should change everything on how we go to market. Talk about how you make that transformation. Because I’m sure it wasn’t as simple as everybody going, yeah, of course, that’s obvious.

Anthony Vade No, And I was lucky that I had a couple of team members that were already in the mindset. And we were also very lucky, as I mentioned in the opening, that we had an organization that was made up of many other organizations going through lots of mergers and acquisitions, and those are disruptive times anyway. So as we were bringing in all these different companies, change was normal, so it wasn’t so difficult to get. People to adopt new ideas because everything around them was shifting and moving. So I had that to my advantage. And most people would think that’s a bit that would make things harder. But we found that actually having constant change made things a little bit easier. Now, that being said, we needed to make sure that those key leaders and luckily our CEO was right behind it and was a fan of the experience economy in that kind of selling. So it wasn’t too hard to but we had to agree amongst the group who believed that this was the way we had to get together and talk about it before we went out to everyone else because we needed to understand each other first. If we’re going to evangelize this way of selling, in this way of changing our organizational culture, we need to make sure that this core group who believes it agrees on the same stuff that we don’t just a we happen to read the same books. We needed to actually focus some time and say, okay, what did the book really mean to you? Or what did that example in your career previously mean to you? To understand each other that deeper and then build our own direction so that when we went to the rest of the organization, we were saying the same story, singing the same song, however you want to say it. But we all agreed that this was what our version of that culture shift looks like before we start to impose it on others.

Bill Sherman And I think that’s a critical component is you have to have not just one person within the organization championing it, but you have to get consensus from enough of a critical mass. And that’s usually some senior leadership who buys in and says, yes, this is the vision. Because for an organization that has many moving parts, as you’ve said, you can’t transform overnight and even to change the message to your clients. This is who we are now and this is how we’re going to work with you going forward. Takes consistency from the many touchpoints the client will hear in conversation. If you’re out saying one thing as the evangelist and all the following touch points don’t line up, then the client goes. There’s a disconnect there. Anthony said some cool stuff about designing the experience, and we create this cool canvas and we’re bought in. Then they asked me, How many boxes do you need for the event?

Anthony Vade Yeah, and that’s a sticky situation because you have two kinds of external clients. So you have the one that will call you out on it and they’ll say, This isn’t right. And then you have the other guy, which is even scarier, the one that will just walk away because they haven’t gotten that consistent message. So then you start to see members of your team start to lose these relationships on these accounts because of it. And all of a sudden you have a team member who then is against what you’re trying to create the change because they have had negative consequences from the change. So it’s a very much a balancing act of when you bring change into which part of the organization. But the key the one thing that has to happen the whole way through is that clear communication on the why, on the purpose behind the change and then addressing each individual within the organization for their personal steps through that change. Some will be ready to run headlong. Others will need to be guided through. And you need to not only have a view on those two, but see how they’re interacting with each other as well in that so that they’re not alienated. You’re not creating a divide within your organization because of this culture change you’re trying to create.

Bill Sherman And I think that’s sort of the magical moment or liminal space for thought leadership. It’s not just seeing around corners. It’s not just seeing a possible future. It’s about making it actionable and taking it down into next steps so that you understand your target audience and recognize they have different needs, different challenges and say, Here’s how we go on this journey together, and here are the steps that you need to take if you want to reach this vision. Because if you just paint a picture of the future and you don’t give them steps, it’s like showing them the far side of a gap, like without providing a bridge. And so they’re looking across, they’re seeing the other side. Well, that first step is that, see, there’s nothing to support them to get across to the other side of the chasm.

Anthony Vade Yeah. And if you let me riff on the organizational side of it as well, the other thing we recognized and because I was I was experienced architect number one. And so the organization hadn’t had someone like me within it. And we were very conscious that if I came into this role, having come from a sales and technical background, that how was I going to connect with these with these individuals, especially the veterans who were in that traditional mindset? And we started to recognize very fast that this new upstart coming into this space and this new role was actually would work against me. So I had to shift my focus instead and find the team members that were interested and then shift the ownership and the power onto them that it was no longer my idea. It was their idea and I had to be willing to. Give up the pride and the ego that would go with perhaps being an organizational thought leader and release that to each of the individuals and make them the thought leaders and lift them up so that the others around would see that and would then go, actually the whole organization is changing. It’s not just the loud guy who just turned up in the new row.

Bill Sherman You point out something interesting there in that many people think all leadership is getting on stage, standing in the spotlight and look at me. But really, it’s about enabling other people to understand the idea and embrace it so that the idea can reach scale. Because if you’re one voice, you can’t take an idea to scale as fast or effectively as if you have more people with you. And so in some ways, it’s about being involved in a conversation and being part of the conversation and recruiting people to join that conversation rather than telling them, This is what you must do. You’ve got to join existing conversations.

Anthony Vade Absolutely. And it’s something else that I notice that it’s aside from the altruistic benefits of that, to be able to, you know, to be able to push the needle forward as you have to within the organization. It’s also a lot to wear that center stage on yourself. There’s a reason that celebrities burn out and have breakdowns. And so there’s this there’s a certain self-help thing to be able to say, okay, this is I’m not the only one under the spotlight. I’m going to bring people up with me as well on to stage. And so I’ve tried wherever possible to involve other team members that are interested in thought leadership, that are looking to expand their role within the organization and coach them a bit on that center stage stuff and make them start to be comfortable with it and do more, more collaborative based external thought leadership. So presenting with a co-presenter has been amazing and it’s helped me change my style and improve the way that I go on stage. And it’s and it’s helped them to learn a bit of thought leadership as well. And now it’s not as much on my back to handle all of Canada and other markets and they can sort of pick up some of that because they’ve learned the story. They’ve know now our style of delivery. And once again, it continues that other people in the team see them living, breathing these values that that we espouse. And so it’s a win win win really in that situation.

Bill Sherman It takes it from a single voice to a movement. And there’s much more power in a movement when you have many voices who agree, you can change an organization, you can impact an industry, you can get people to see the future much more clearly.

Bill Sherman If you are enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about the podcast, please leave a five-star review and share it with your friends. We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all major platforms as well as at LeveragingThoughtLeadership.com.

Bill Sherman So let’s talk a little bit about how you’re getting the message out there. I know you and I were both Pre-covid-19 Road Warriors and we’re on the road a lot, right? And I know you did a lot of speaking and events. How are you getting out the message now? What modalities are you using? How are you communicating this vision for what events can and should be? What tools are you do you have in your toolbox?

Anthony Vade So it’s funny, I had I was I was chatting with someone yesterday. I had six speaking engagements booked between March 1st and August 1st, and now we’re on midway through August. I’ve done over 20. But they’ve talked.

Bill Sherman To me about that transformation because I know you went through a period where you said yes to almost every event that came up. So tell us about that.

Anthony Vade So like the rest of the world, the events industry in particular has been hurting. We got hit very hard. We were the first ones to shut down. And so we as an organization, to me personally recognized that there would be a lot of people who needed help. They would have never done a virtual digital. They don’t have a social media presence. They’d be a lot of planners and a lot of clients out there who are lost, completely lost in this forced digital transformation. So I said, okay, I’m going to put everything I have into this because I’ve been running webinars since I think about first 1 in 2011. And like regular monthly webinar stuff. And I did my first hybrid event in 2003. So none of this stuff was new to me and I was pretty well-established. I had to buy a little bit of gear, but not much. So I said, I want to be able to educate the industry and help them, at least not be scared at the start of this. Let’s build some confidence up. And so we went out pretty aggressively speaking at as many online digital virtual events as we could. And the early message really was, don’t worry, plan is you got this. Everything seems different. But it really nothing’s changed. We’re still creating events. We’re just using a different modality to do it. And then what happens after we get the confidence level back up? The industry got flooded with technology solutions and platforms with every startup under the sun. So now we’ve started to move into the changing that dialog a bit more around that. You’ve still got this, you can still achieve the outcomes you’re trying to achieve. And now let’s try and understand the pieces of this puzzle and how we can design experiences using the different tools that exist to still achieve the behavior change.

Bill Sherman So since I have you here and your expertise is on events, and many of our listeners who are responsible for thought leadership for their organizations, we’re expecting and sort of calendared for 2020, 2021 that they would be able to rely on the in-person events as part of their thought leadership strategy. I’d like to ask you that question as to how do you see things changing and what advice would you give for fellow thought leadership practitioners who are now sitting in their organization saying, okay, we were going to have our subject matter experts and our thought leaders on stages at conferences? What should they be doing? How do they connect with their audiences through events in this environment?

Anthony Vade So the biggest challenge with any form of digital connection is it’s is time frame and intimacy time frame in respect of. I talk about this a lot in my presentations that we have the ability and we also have the detriment of warping time. The time zones are no longer relevant, whereas when you have an event in a hotel ballroom or a convention center, it starts the doors open at 9 a.m. and it finishes a 5 p.m.. It’s a very finite time frame, whereas when you’re in a digital space, somebody could be tuning in from Vienna and someone tuning in from Sydney, Australia and you don’t have any control over that time. You can try and schedule things and say 9 to 5, but you can’t guarantee the behaviors like you can with a captive audience in the space. So what a lot of planners are learning this now and they’re looking at how they approach content delivery in this digital space. And I’m seeing a lot getting prerecorded videos now created. So we have thought leaders, subject matter experts actually submit the videos and then come back for Q&A sessions rather than delivering fully live, which allows them to release it earlier so they can put out the webcast with that recording and then have that speaker come in live at the end or come in.

Bill Sherman That’s much more like a flipped classroom model. Yeah. In education. Yeah.

Anthony Vade Yeah, yeah. So really I’m start to see that about that. Come in. Now I’ve had a bunch of conversations with speakers from around the world who have lost most of their business because of this. And they’ve, they’ve reached out to me because they know I have systems and I and I built these kinds of home studio setups before and so a lot reach out. What do I do? How do I do this? And the biggest tip I’ve had for all of them and hopefully some of the listeners of this can take it as well, is get your audio sounding right now I’m in I’m not in my usual studio today so I’m not sure how good my audio sounds, but I’ve appeared on a few different things and the audio hasn’t been perfect on the other end as well. And that’s the thing that really affects people in digital experiences. So you can certainly have and we’ve been very forgiving about backdrops and webcams and home setups in that respect. But if the sound isn’t good quality on on, on a webcast, then you’re going to lose your audience very, very quickly. And your 90 minute presentation probably isn’t going to get viewed the whole way through in a digital space either. So we need to look at condensing as part of that time warping exercise. But that being said, I’ve had the opportunity to run a bunch of workshops online. The thing that we thought we couldn’t do in digital space, everyone said, Are we going to be able to do speeches? But there’s no way you can get interactive workshop and going. And I found that it can actually work. It’s not the same. It’s not the same as face to face, but we can certainly run workshops online and people stick around and they’re really engaged, the ones that turn up because there will be some attrition. We need to deal with that too. But the ones that turn up are so passionate and so ready to interact with subject matter experts, and the desire to connect with thought leaders is still there. It’s stronger than ever. It’s just we have to address it differently in this digital space because there are limitations.

Bill Sherman Well, and you’re tapping potentially a larger audience of people who couldn’t get away on those dates for a conference or who had to choose between two panel sessions and said, which one do I go to? They have more opportunity to interact right now. And so I take that message as there’s a hunger for information out there and for insight. And so how do you create environments through events which aren’t just simply, okay, we’ve got The Brady Bunch Box of Doom on Zoom, right?

Anthony Vade Yeah, very much We and I think on demand is a huge part of that and really building our strategies around that the beauty of digital and this is this is what’s going to empower everybody going forward as we move back in to face to face and live events is we get so much rich data and analytics out of it to understand how people are behaving around content. And the smart planners are really, really leveraging that and really optimizing a lot of those experiences to extract that data so that they can make better choices in the future. And I’ll give you an example. We do a webinar every two weeks which has been running since March. We on average we get about a thousand live viewers each episode, but we also get at least 2 to 300 new views on each of our on demand videos. So we have all the videos from the previous week’s available to them. So they come in, they watch the live session, and then they go into the on demand and they watch a recording of a previous session as well. Now that doesn’t even come in to most event planners. Minds that that’s a thing because we’re stuck in that. Ballroom opens, Ballroom closes. But in this digital space, your content can live on for a year or multiple years as well. And I’ve spoken with a lot of keynote speakers that are very uncomfortable with that because they see their value as being getting on that stage. And if it’s available online, I lose my value. But I think there’s more value to be had from those thought leaders than they give themselves credit for. And what we’re going to see in thought leadership is a transformation of how thought leaders approach their content and their audience members. And I think intimacy is going to be a big thing that comes out of that that they haven’t had in the past.

Bill Sherman So do you have any advice on creating that intimacy through the digital event? You’ve talked about it a couple times. Can you go a little bit deeper? Give us an example of what can be done to create that intimacy, either from the technical side or from the presenters side? How do you create that intimacy and engagement in this new modality? What I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of bad examples. I think what’s excellent.

Anthony Vade I think one of the key components that seems to happen every time I personally have a good experience not even delivering, but when I have a good experience as an attendee, an event, it tends to be highly engaged. Moments and intimate moments are all dictated by the size of the group. If you put 200 people in a Zoom chat, you’re going to hear from a handful of people. I think the numbers, 7 to 10 people will talk in that scenario. So you can’t really with these big groups of people, it’s very hard to create that intimacy. So I’ve focused all of my efforts. I’ll do my address to the big group. I’ll do my 30 minute keynote that that will set things up. But for most of the people who engage with me, I say, okay, let me do my 30 minutes as you’ve asked. But I also want to run a workshop the next day. And this is this is the opportunity as well for you to get around some of the pricing issues. If you’re not getting paid, I’ll say I’ll run the workshop. It’s only 25 people. It can only be 25 people. They need to register ahead of time and you client should charge more money for that. This should be an optional module that you add on and then I’ll do a profit share with you on that optional model so you can help to fund me because I’ve given you a great discount. What I would normally charge you because it’s digital and everyone’s asking for that and we need to get away from that. That’s a whole nother conversation we shouldn’t get into right now because I’m very passionate about that. We need to charge more.

Bill Sherman In protecting pricing. Absolutely. Yeah.

Anthony Vade But it allows one to plan against the thing they’re comfortable with in that keynote. And then I can have the workshop with 25 people who have signed up because they really care about what I’m talking about and they want to digging into it and we can get a bit more intimate and a bit more engaged around that content specifically for that target audience.

Bill Sherman So I know that what you guys are doing with technology in terms of possibility of events is pretty amazing, is going to change some of what we think of as a stage either physical or virtual. Can you talk a little bit about that transformation? Because I know that that’s a project that you’ve been involved in deeply.

Anthony Vade Sure. Yeah, It’s an interesting situation that we’re in. We’re in this kind of forced transformation. It’s disruption, I guess they call it that that’s occurred. And we were we recognized early that we needed to plan transitions into whatever the new normal is without knowing what the new normal is. And we recognize everybody’s in this virtual stage now where we’re presenting from home with our webcams and all that. But that was never going to be the final step in, in our opinion. We’re going to get back to some sort of hybrid model.

Bill Sherman And first stage is professional lighting. Professional sound. Yeah, that sort of big reveal, that big event feeling, right?

Anthony Vade Yeah. I mean, either way, we’re going to end up back in that space in hotels and convention centers. But there’s this gap. There’s this gap between your home office and the traditional stages. And so we started looking at, okay, with this around the world, there’s all these different regions with who can and can’t come into venues. And just it was too hard. So we started building what we call presentation stages in our warehouses and our and our storage facilities around the world to allow presenters to come in to not just a broadcast studio because a lot of presenters have never been on television. And that’s pretty intimidating and pretty scary to be in a broadcast space. So we wanted to make these presentation stages feel, look and feel like a hotel or convention center stage would feel to that presenter but be delivered to a virtual audience. So it’s kind of the next step out of the office, out of the home office, with the kids screaming. It’s a controlled space with good lighting and we’ve got amazing, big extended reality led video walls that they can interact with if you want the really heightened experience. But even just. Scenic decor behind them, maybe some custom branding, but just a bit more of that stage feel that they’re familiar with the production standards that they’d be used to in that that are appropriate for the viewers at home to feel like it’s more polished. Like you said, it’s a bit more of a show.

Bill Sherman So give me an example on extended reality. I know you’ve used the term and we hear of virtual reality, augmented reality, extended reality. What is it from the speaking an events perspective and how does that go beyond what we see in the box on Zoom?

Anthony Vade Yeah, I’ll give you the quick explanation on the three main ones that get talked about. We thought that virtual reality was going to be the answer for events many years ago when we it was the biggest nonstarter ever because virtual reality is about immersing an individual in a fully virtual environment. The only thing real in that, in that experience is the person wearing the headset. And that’s not what events are. Events are about connecting humans to humans. So that’s why I never took on augmented reality, had a bit more of an interest and we think in Pokémon goes the thing that kicked that off. But augmented reality is about placing virtual objects in the real world that you interact with through some sort of device, your phone or an iPad or something, and it’s basically adding additional content into the real world. Then you get into extended reality or XOR, and that’s the next level again. So that’s putting virtual objects or virtual elements into the real world that a speaker or presenter or anybody really can interact with in real time. And those virtual objects can also react back to that individual. Sounds a bit crazy. And then and then we then there’s one more step where we talk about mixed reality, which is combining those different kinds of realities virtual, augmented and extended reality. But what we’re doing with extended reality in our presentation stages is we have cameras set up that watch the cameras. I don’t want to get too techno here on yet, but the cameras watch the cameras so that the computer knows what the cameras are looking at in the space. And then the computer in real time generates the video content behind the speaker. So it adapts so that the eyeline of the camera is perfect, as if the audience member was the camera there in the room viewing it from that from that angle.

Bill Sherman That sounds amazing. The challenge is trying to describe it over a podcast recording. So let me ask, do you have a clip or an example that we could maybe link to in in the podcast notes?

Anthony Vade Yeah, I can. I can certainly provide, yeah, there’s a bunch of stuff I can give you on that. And you know, the stuff in The Mandalorian is a great example of that to how, you know, the main thing about extended reality is it allows the presenter to have real time interaction with the video content by they actually can control the video content and how it works. And we haven’t even seen it yet. It’s so cutting edge that presenters don’t even know what is on the horizon for them and how it’s going to unlock their ability just to make these onstage experiences that are going to blow people’s minds and really deliver impactful messages.

Bill Sherman Fantastic. So if you’re listening, be sure to check out the notes in this podcast to see an example of what Anthony is talking about for extended reality. So I want to ask you a question. And think back a little bit. Imagine yourself a few years ago before you started seeing yourself going into thought leadership. And as you were evolving. What advice would you give yourself? Because what we see now is like you, there are many people who are emerging unexpectedly into thought leadership, and they’re taking on roles here this year in 2020. And they’re saying, where do I start? What advice would you give your past self? How would you advise someone now?

Anthony Vade I think the key is to make sure that the team is aligned around why you’re doing thought leadership. Because if they have different expectations on what’s going to be achieved from it, if sales just thinks the thought leadership is going to generate immediate leads that are going to result in immediate business, if they think it’s going to help Q3 and you’re at the start of Q3, you need to do some expectation management on that because thought leadership takes a bit more time than most sales teams expect. And I, I expected it to go faster than it did because I think because I came from sales, let’s be totally transparent. But it is a long game. And the other thing for those just getting on stage for the first time and this took me a long time to get right is avoid over preparing and over scripting because it makes you more anxious. And the audience wants good things for you. I always thought, you know, they say, imagine the audience naked. That’s just creepy. But I like the you know, I always got on stage, especially when I was a bit younger and got on stage and was very anxious of what does everyone think of me? And we think that they’re going to see every mistake you make in your presentation, especially if you’re on a webcam now and in an unfamiliar environment for those veterans out there. But the same is true. The audience most of the time is looking at you on stage or in your home studio and saying, I hope this goes well for the person. We’re not as nasty as we think we are online.

Bill Sherman And I think that’s a great point to wrap up on, is that when people are hungry for ideas, they’re open and receptive and they want you to be communicating a good idea. So there’s a good well-wishing on both sides. Yeah. Thank you very much for joining the conversation, Anthony.

Anthony Vade My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Bill Sherman If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please join our LinkedIn group. Organizational Thought Leadership. It’s a professional community where thought leadership practitioners talk shop about our field. So if you’re someone who creates curates or deploys thought leadership for your organization, then please join the conversation in the organizational thought Leadership LinkedIn.