Keep it real. Events are the most authentic medium to promote commerce and communication
ES. Can you please tell us how did your journey in the trade fair and conference industry begin?
Vijay Sharma. I started in events right after completing my Masters in the United Kingdom. However, it was not your traditional events company; instead, it was rather a carbon credits trading company that relied on events for new business opportunities. Afterwards, I relocated to Singapore and started working for a local events company, for a short period of time, before being recruited by Koelnmesse. I spent over a decade in the Singapore office and was fortunate enough to work on multiple industries – food, technology, gaming and media – with some of the kindest people in the industry. It also afforded me regional event management experience as we were organizing events all over Southeast Asia, including Hong Kong. In hindsight, I believe the impactful work we delivered working with (hi-tech) venues, service providers and other stakeholders imparted the valuable lesson of collaboration.
Next stop was India, I relocated and joined Koelnmesse India in early 2022 as General Manager and was part of the management team. After growing up in Koelenmesse, I shifted gears in late 2023 and joined jwc Consultants as Senior Consultant. Implementing and executing events for over a decade – in Asia-Pacific – while working with venues around the world laid a solid foundation to work with the team at jwc.
ES. Please share some highlights of your experience at Koelnmesse?
Vijay Sharma. I believe one of the highlights of my career while working with Koelnmesse was at the start of the Pandemic. I dont intend to bring the memories of it, though I believe the Pandemic refreshed our collective memory of what means to have live events and the impact they have – socially and economically – over a wider community. Anyways, one of our flagship technology events became a collateral damage of the pandemic. We had to postpone the event just two weeks before the start of the event. The experience was shattering as we were accountable to our sponsors, exhibitors and visitors. Mind you, it was a first for me, and I didn’t have any experience with crisis communication and management until then.
But as a team we didn’t lose our cool. Every member of the team took responsibility to effectively communicate with transparency. Eventually, we successfully organized Koelnmesse Singpaore’s first digital event. All stakeholders appreciated our transparency and we lost just 5-10% of the event revenue. It was a lesson in building community.
ES. According to you how can the exhibition fraternity benefit from AI’s advanced marketing? Is AI a threat to the industry as it may perform quadruple tasks for which manual labor is needed?
Vijay Sharma. With my limited experience, after speaking with some industry leaders and observing trends in our industry, I can say with some confidence AI will transform the industry. The way I see it, AI could disrupt almost all job functions – marketing, operations, sales, finance and project management – in the next couple of years. Marketing is a low-hanging fruit area.
Currently, mostly it’s about content generation. But I see some smart marketers are leveraging AI for the entire campaign planning, including automating workflows and social media activation with limited human intervention. Which brings us to the second part of the question. I don’t think AI is a threat to the industry, in fact the successful deployment will make events more efficient operationally and financially. Though, it could potentially displace jobs in the industry wherever algorithms can automate repetitive tasks. Humans using AI will have a competitive advantage over those not using AI.
ES. As a distinguished member of the jury, what message of congratulations and expectations would you like to convey for the upcoming 8th Edition of the Exhibition Excellence Awards 2024?
Vijay Sharma. Awards are a key catalyst for motivation. I was reminded about that when I myself won the UFI Next Generation Leadership Grant. There is a sense of pride and humility which comes along with awards. To winners, I would say embrace the victory and use it as a self-driving mechanism. And who didn’t make the cut this time, take pride in being nominated and use the platform to build on your efforts. Lastly, my hat tip to the wonderful team of Exhibition Showcase for bringing out the best in people and industry.
ES. In your opinion, how has the year 2023 i.e. the revival year treated the industry businesswise and how progressive it was in terms of marketing?
Vijay Sharma. Data suggests the Indian industry – organizers, venues and service providers – had a phenomenal 2023. For a lot of organizers, they are already at 2019 levels when it comes to revenues. Also, venues witnessed increased utilization rates compared to previous years, while advanced bookings for the next couple of years remain strong. But the rise in inflation and limited participation from China have affected the international participation rate and net square meters sold. Affecting the bottom line, especially for small and medium events.
New world-class venues added to the venue capacity should bode well for the industry. It reflects increasing confidence from policy makers and companies in events to create business opportunities locally and internationally.
Regarding marketing, I think Small and Medium Enterprises continue to rely heavily on events to enter new markets and find distributors. Organizers should consider tapping more social media and digital tools to enhance the customer value. In this way, an event can offer year-round customer engagement. I am seeing a lot of successful global events are already moving in that direction.
ES. How do you measure the impact of your initiatives on the communities and marketplaces you’ve developed?
Vijay Sharma. This is a great question. Earlier in my career it was all about closing deals. Then as I started engaging more with the community – especially with our tech events – it dawned on me that we are adding a lot of value to Singapore and people’s life through fostering of connections, bringing global knowledge to local ecosystem and showcasing the potential of a country. It also took time for me to realize, sometimes, the benefits added by events are compounding in nature. I also started believing we should judge an event’s success not just on commonly accepted metrics – number of exhibitors, visitors, net square meters sold – rather also find ways to measure their impact on the local and global economy.
ES. Please tell us about the milestones in your bucket list that are yet to be achieved
Vijay Sharma. I hope that India will host the World Expo in the near future. It would be an honour to be associated with it in some small way.
ES. Any message that you’d like to share with the industry at large?
Vijay Sharma. Keep it real. Events are the most authentic medium to promote commerce and communication. They will be even more appreciated and carry a premium in the future as we all get inundated with synthetic, AI-generated content. It would be smart of us to use digital technologies to our advantage wherever we can to build our communities and forge human connections.
