The Curious Route Back To The In-Person Conference

By Louis Garguilo, Chief Editor, Outsourced Pharma

Our parent organization has acquired one of the industry's fastest-growing outsourcing conference franchises. We’re back in the live events business.

And I mean “we.”

The next CDMO Live conference in October already includes several professionals featured in editorials here at Outsourced Pharma, half a dozen members of our Editorial Advisory Board, and potentially many of you.

I also mean “back.”

Some readers will remember Outsourced Pharma had a national conference-events platform for several years – until the COVID era struck in 2020.

So our return to live events is great news, and already we are planning more advanced ways to synergize our work here with that of my new colleagues, the co-founders of PharmaSource and CDMO Live conferences, Luke Bilton and Chris Kilbee.

This new partnership sets us to wondering broadly, as well:

As an outsourcing industry, where in fact are we regarding in-person and virtual events?

What do Bilton and Kilbee glean from our industry’s “conference history,” perhaps starting those few years back to the beginning of this decade? And what are their predictions for the future?

They are the right duo to ask. After all, they’ve made the daring decision to transform some virtual events into in-person conferences, and boldly named them CDMO Live Europe  and CDMO Live Americas.

A Brief Events History

I start our conversation from my reference point of 2020.

Conference attendance is climbing; meeting with prospective/existing CDMOs, and learning from peers, is considered indispensible to outsourcing professionals.

But then COVID stops it all. Overnight, the industry pivots to virtual meetings, digital events, virtual facility tours, and the like.

Early experiences are unsatisfactory, but necessity accelerates the technology and our willingness to adapt. We move from disruption, to adaptation, to wondering what the role of in-person events would now play…

Kilbee jumps in to say we should start a decade prior to COVID for a fuller picture, “to when we initially started gathering momentum towards virtual alongside large-scale live events.”

“It wasn’t the global trigger of COVID, but some of the biggest event organizers began arranging virtual and live events in parallel.”

That was the dawn of virtual.

However, says Kilbee, that first wave didn’t take hold. People weren’t satisfied a “non-in-person environment” was furthering outsourcing relationships or learning. The technology wasn’t quite right.

“Companies went right back to concentrating on live events,” he says.

When COVID struck subsequently, Kilbee was running a business in Southeast Asia with 65 events. “They went down to zero overnight,” he says.  “It was an interesting journey through those couple of years of only forced virtual events.”

“Remarkable was how quickly virtual just became the norm. I remember it vividly,” he adds. “There was general speculation of when or if the epidemic would end. Live events might never return. It feels fanciful to say that now.”

When the epidemic began to let up, live events restarted, but under severe restrictions. We all recall strict registration criteria, testing upon entry, masks and the like, and questions about international attendance.

“It was difficult,” Kilbee says, “but that time period also demonstrated professionals longed to get back together. That early period helped alleviate any doubts live events would return in full force.”

When the pandemic did finally dissipate, it was clear the yearning in biopharma development and manufacturing outsourcing professionals for in-person conferences had not.

New-Gen Conferences

“There’s now a next generation of live events,” Bilton says.

That is what he and Kilbee recently offered at CDMO Live Europe, and what we will bring to this continent for the first time with CDMO Live Americas in Boston in October.

This is an era “whereby people do not necessarily always want to meet in virtual-event forums,” Kilbee says. If they can identify a targeted, live event with the right people, relevant content – and qualified CDMOs, “drug sponsors want to get out to live events.”

“One big change,” he adds, “is years ago you might have gone to seven or eight events annually; now you'll go to three or four you feel are strong events for you.”

Bilton, for his part, believes live events have become stronger value propositions as you go over our events history.

Reasons for that include new societal and workplace challenges, such as more work from home, “and the constant digital and now AI focus on content.”

“Communicating in person, making connections and closing new business opportunities, those needs have grown stronger,” he says.

To be clear, though, Bilton believes for much remote work, Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, and the like, have a clear utility. 

“Some content delivery via today’s different virtual experiences works well. Short, sharp bits of content, 30-minute calls, that sort of thing. It can provide a good method of delivery,” he says.

However, these formats alone fall flat when it comes to the human connection;  business deals and final outcomes do not often get accomplished in virtual events.

So while we persevered through COVID and improved technologies, “that time reinforced that meeting in real life is as important as ever.”

All told, Bilton says we may have achieved a happy medium: live and virtual events of all kinds “have learned to play together quite productively.”

“But you are right," he continues, the COVID era precipitated "a rebalancing, and important changes in both formats.”

Today at CDMO Live conferences, that rebalancing and those advanced formats include building digital into the entire flow of an in-person event. Examples include utilizing digital-powered partnering and curating meetings among sponsors and CDMOs.

Serendipity at live events still has its place, but Bilton and Kilbee say today professionals prioritize smaller and tightly focused gatherings as more desirable than pacing around large and overly diverse trade-show floors.

“And now,” Bilton says, “AI actually reinforces the importance of our events on the learning side, because AI produces so much content crap out there.”

“We are flooded with suspect content, and too little authentic conversation.” Live events, on the other hand, “produce natural discussions and content from sources you see and trust.”

In fact, we have plans to cross-pollenate the content readers find most valuable here on Outsourced Pharma with some of that natural discussion from our events.

We’ll talk more about content – and individual goal and business alignment as well – when we continue our discussion next.