The future rarely shows up as advertised

Exactly 17 years ago, I moved to New York City to become head of strategy at Jack Morton Worldwide’s “most important” office. Most important because of its place in the agency’s global network and because it had just been flattened by the first nine months of the GFC. As I got my feet under the desk (and sadly there were plenty of empty desks to choose from), two competing visions of the future were emerging across the US events industry.

One was anchored by a broad look at what was happening to attention in a world being transformed by technology (sound familiar?). Channels were multiplying, audiences were fragmenting and trust was getting harder to buy. Legacy 20^th Century brands long used to renting eyeballs and selling fictions would have to learn how to earn both attention and trust.

So the opportunity was to take Jack Morton’s live event capabilities, historically anchored in B2B conferences and trade shows, and apply them to consumer-facing experiences that would build lasting brand equity. Following this thesis would involve an exciting pivot toward a world that was already arriving, but it would also challenge everything about how the agency currently operated.

The other vision was more comforting and convenient, a disruption-lite paradigm that would be much easier to adapt to. It imagined the event industry’s traditional B2B strengths could be replicated and monetised in virtual reality, as if we were rebuilding the concept of trade shows inside a banal corporate version of Second Life. Think digital conference centres, digital lanyards and digital carpet. The future would be more of the same events, just lovingly recreated in procurement-friendly pixels.