By Simon Hughes - If you have a moment and want to be inspired by some great work do please click on this link: http://www.eventphotographyawards.com/2015-finalists/. It takes you to the Event Photography Awards 2015 finalists. The winners were announced at the Barbican last night and many of the conversations that followed the awards ceremony revolved around the need for the events industry to truly embrace the fantastic potential that first class content from events brings to all of us in the age of smartphones and 24/7 social media feeds. Yet on my way to the event I passed a sign that read "The smartphone generation doesn't look up to see where they are going."
Spend any time in any city around the world and I'm pretty sure that you'll find yourself agreeing with this notion. It's as if that classic hit from AlbertoY Los Paranoias 'Heads Down No Nonsense Mindless Boogie' has finally come true. (If you've never heard this do give it a listen – it always cheers me up.) Everyone is now boogieing along, heads down and ignoring everything else around them.
As demonstrated by the range of fantastic work on display at the EPAs, we cannot afford to ignore the skills and craft that create such great content for us. Nor can we ignore the challenge of working with this content so that it enhances the offer that events of all types offer as one of the most compelling channels available to communicators today. As the latest Bellwether Report from the IPA has shown, event budgets have increased by almost 6% as confidence amongst the marketing fraternity reaches levels unseen for the last eight years. Yet this success also creates the demand for extended reach and hard metrics that go way beyond the experience of the event itself. To adapt a phrase, it's all about the measurement, stupid.
Many of the brilliant images in the awards have captured the experience in a creative way that in turn creates the opportunity to bring the event to life across other channels, delivering extended engagement and those all important hard numbers. The challenge for the event industry is not just coming up with the strategies to maximise that kind of exposure, but to ensure that we are equipping our people with the right skills and knowledge to maximise the reach required. I worry that we are already way behind the curve on this. There are plenty of really brilliant digital marketing companies out there that are leading the way in ensuring that their clients get the best reach, deepest engagement and most brand loyalty. We need to keep pace with them.
So we need to foster the skills sets that allow them to make the most of great content. We need to understand not just how to use brilliant images but how to brief the photographers in the first place to ensure we get content that will engage, surprise and intrigue. We need to have that photography brief developed in the context of the communications strategy for the event. We will need to allocate resources so that tactically we can get images and words out there at the right time to the right people. We will have to live in the right digital spaces so that we can respond to reaction and create effective engagement. So apart from editorial skills we will also need community management skills and curatorial skills as well. We create a wealth of interesting, compelling and unique content at every event we deliver. Now we need to deliver on these digital skills as well. Click.
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