Simulive? Simulated live? Just what are we talking about? Where should this fit in your marketing mix? And how do you get the most for your money?
In this episode of #ThoughtLeaderConversations, V2's Sr. Program Manager Jessica Bradford and Roger Courville partner to talk about the why, what, and how of simulive (or simulated live) events in a way that will equip any marketer to think more strategically with regard to their webinar/virtual event goals.
Along the way they talk about...
Understanding simulive: Gain insights into what simulive (simulated live) webinars are and how they blend pre-recorded and live elements to enhance your virtual events.
Maximizing flexibility: Discover how simulive webinars can accommodate speakers who are unavailable during the live event, ensuring high attendance at peak times.
Audience engagement: Learn how to maintain live interaction elements such as polls, surveys, and Q&A sessions to keep your audience engaged.
Overcoming challenges: Explore solutions for common issues like last-minute speaker unavailability or coordinating global speakers with different time zones.
Preparation and production: Understand the importance of rehearsing, having quality audio and video, and avoiding over-editing to ensure a natural and authentic presentation.
Creative use cases: Hear about innovative ways to leverage simulive webinars for high-demand speakers, contingency planning, and maximizing the impact of your content through repeated broadcasts.
And more!
As you'll hear, the depth of value creation is in the details, and of course V2 would love hearing your story, your goals, and determining together if it makes sense to partner on executing together in that direction.
Series: #ThoughtLeaderConversations
Sponsor: V2, LLC -- virtual and hybrid event production, www.VirtualVenues.com
Host: Roger Courville, CSP, https://www.linkedin.com/in/rogerc/
Keywords: #webinarmarketing #simulive #simulatedlive #virtualeventproduction
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UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:00] Roger Courville, CSP: Simulive? Simulated live? Just what are we talking about? Where should this fit in your marketing mix? And how do you get the most for your money? Hey, hello, and welcome to don't make these mistakes with your simulated live webinars. My name is Roger Courville and welcome to another episode of thought leader conversations sponsored by the crew here at virtual venues, where you can take your your virtual and hybrid event production team needs to a blue chip crew who can help you achieve excellence and results by helping you focus on something other than the tech and the process and that kind of stuff.
Hey, I am tickled because with me here today is fellow industry old timer, senior program marketing manager here at V2, Jessica Bradford. Jessica, before we get rolling, Welcome and tell us a little more about yourself.
[00:00:57] Jessica Bradford, Sr. Program Manager: Thanks Roger for having me back. Um, I am a senior program manager here at V2. So that means I produce webinars for some of my more, some of my more higher touch clients.
Um, right now, I'm working with ServiceNow is one amongst them as well as FICO. So a lot of clients kind of in the financial industry as well. Um, anything that's a little bit out of the box might be a little bit more than what we typically do on a day to day. They throw at me.
[00:01:27] Roger Courville, CSP: Which is a great way of a very nice way of saying Jess knows her crap and whether video editing or getting down into the weeds with some particular platform, whether it's zoom webinars or on 24 or something like that, just knows how to help you get where you want to go.
So, uh, but today we're talking about a very specific kind of use case. Jess, what is Simulive or simulated live? When it comes to virtual events or webinars.
[00:02:02] Jessica Bradford, Sr. Program Manager: Well, I thought you would never ask. Um, so, Simulive Webinars, or Simulated Live, as you said, um, is a presentation that is either completely pre recorded or has pre recorded segments that are blended with live.
So, like, What you might refer to as a sim to live in that instance, um, and this hybrid approach or that pre recorded approach, um, allows you to have a pretty awesome polished presentation while kind of maintaining that element of live with this same sort of audience interaction.
[00:02:35] Roger Courville, CSP: When you say maintain that element of life, What are you talking about?
Let's just be clear.
[00:02:42] Jessica Bradford, Sr. Program Manager: Well, when you're doing a simulated live webinar, you can include all of the same elements that you would as if it was live. So, polling questions, uh, surveys, uh, a live demonstration, all of those things. Things can be prerecorded and presented, um, as if it was broadcasting live. So the audience would have no idea that this was something that was prerecorded, um, on a different day than what's actually being broadcasted on.
So literally, you can make this. Just like it was live. So it's, it's pretty cool, actually. Yeah,
[00:03:20] Roger Courville, CSP: which, which is rather interesting. What's the word I'm looking for? A rather interesting intersection or melding of modalities that interestingly we don't experience when we're in person. Right. I mean, in person, somebody's on stage and, and they make a presentation and possibly we got a camera crew there and we record the thing.
And now you're either they're live or, or you've got the recording of the thing being live. And now we're talking about blending those elements where it still shows up. Maybe you still kick it off at 11 a. m. on a Tuesday morning, but some elements are live and some elements are pre recorded or put together in advance.
And, uh, I think that's kind of interesting with regard to the new potential that that brings to somebody's marketing mix. So put on your, your possibility thinking. Why would someone do this? What are the different use cases of why someone might want to do something simulated live?
[00:04:35] Jessica Bradford, Sr. Program Manager: Well, there's a lot of reasons why you might do this but the big one or a couple of the big ones that I would say I run into is Speakers not being available So let's say you have, you like really want to do this on September 21st at 11 a.
m. Pacific because you know, that's a really good time, um, for your audience to join. You've done research, you know, like that's a really good time of day and that's the day you want to broadcast this live, but your speakers or, um, speaker just can't be there that day. They could be traveling. Um, they could have, you know, they're being, they're taking the day off.
Um, you mentioned Roger that you had a situation where you had a surgeon or a doctor who was presenting and he was going to be on call that day. So there was a likelihood he was going to have to step away. Um, so any of those kind of situations, um, make it great to then pre record the content at a different time.
And so you can still broadcast it at that peak day and time that you want, where you know the audience is going to be able to join and. Your attendance is gonna be, you know, as high as you can get it.
[00:05:44] Roger Courville, CSP: Yeah, that, well, I, I remember that one particular thing, uh, situation because it was an actual client scenario.
[00:05:52] Jessica Bradford, Sr. Program Manager: Uhhuh ,
[00:05:53] Roger Courville, CSP: and the prerecord actually was done as a contingency plan. Because the plan was still to have the surgeon speak at the live event. The backup was done because between when the whole thing got scheduled, and then when the thing went live, in between, the surgeon got, I don't know, the next month's schedule or something and went,
[00:06:17] Jessica Bradford, Sr. Program Manager: I'm
[00:06:17] Roger Courville, CSP: gonna be on call and if my pager goes, this is back in the days of pagers, back when, you know, Those of us who have white hair, uh, still
Um, but if my pager goes off, I, I have a commitment to go , to go , run, do emergency surgery, to do the heart transplant or whatever, whatever his, his thing was. And so the, the backup recording was made actually as a, as a contingency plan. But, you know, interestingly, you just brought up something, Jessica, that, that to me is a really important part of that, that value creation process, right?
Because you just said, hey, what if you've got this, you want to do the event on September 21st and your, your presenter's not available, that could be something, you know, back in July when, when, when you're planning the event. Or it could be the kind of thing that comes up between, right when you start planning the event in July and what happens on September 21st.
Absolutely. And you go, oops, because it was gonna be the VP of of X, Y, Z. Now VP of X, Y, Z decides it's more valuable to, you know, fly a year up to close the deal as opposed to present at your webinar. Now what exactly,
[00:07:32] Jessica Bradford, Sr. Program Manager: or you know, I've, I've had a lot of clients switching to Simulive more and more because they've just.
I've ran into so many issues like that where somebody has a family emergency last minute, and we've been in situations where we're going to run a live webinar. We've been kind of like, Oh, like really like scrambling, like now what are we going to do? We have to get somebody within like the, you know, within two hours to try to come cover for that person.
So it's just, it's nice to not even really have to worry about that,
[00:07:58] Roger Courville, CSP: you know? Right. So that's a, that's a bit of the why. or a number wise and there's a, just to be fair, a range of potential reasons why someone might want to consider this as a modality. But let's talk about the how when it comes to just what you have seen, because I'm in, you know, I'm just going to look right into the camera and look at you in the audience in the eye.
And I'm going to say, if you don't know Jessica Bradford, you really should because this gal knows her crap. Uh, over the years, we've seen a lot of these things. And the question is, what makes them sing versus the don't really produce? What, what have you seen? Uh, and maybe we even parse it out. There's the promotion part.
There's the production part. There's the presentation part. Pick one of those. And how do we, how do we help someone? Just get excellence out of a simulated live event.
[00:09:05] Jessica Bradford, Sr. Program Manager: Sure. Well, let me start with the, um, I would say presentation creation coordination part. Um, that part, honestly, shouldn't be much different than if the webinar was live.
You should still plan on rehearsing. knowing your content inside and out. And I don't mean reading from a script. I just mean organically feeling comfortable, confident to present that, that content as if it was live. And if you are,
[00:09:36] Roger Courville, CSP: wait a minute before you go on, I just got to say this. Don't ever read from a freaking script!
That's what Roger's gonna say right here. Don't ever read from a freaking script. Okay, Jessica, back to
[00:09:51] Jessica Bradford, Sr. Program Manager: you. Some people are good at reading from a script, but you know, usually you can tell. Um, but yeah, what I was gonna say was, yeah, so with the coordination part, it really shouldn't be, With the prep, I should say, it shouldn't be that much different, really, right?
You still want to know everything inside and out. And if you're doing interactive elements in this presentation, which, which you really should, um, make sure you practice with those just the same. So before you plan on doing the recording, it's good to just do a rehearsal. So you know, okay, I'm going to do a poll here.
Practice launching that as if it was live, right? Um, practice doing your demonstration. All of those elements that even if no one's being recorded, just make sure you're running through them. Because I think, I feel like with that piece, a lot of people get wax in that. They're like, oh, we're recording this, so I don't really need to rehearse because like, I'll just mess up a bunch of times and then we can just edit it.
Which you can do, but It saves everybody a lot more time if you just kind of prepare a little bit more so pretty obvious, but a good reminder
[00:10:53] Roger Courville, CSP: Let me interject There's the opposite of that too, right? There are people who who freeze up because it's being recorded right now Because because here's the thing if we're just having this natural conversation and and I make a mistake I don't I don't Stop to think, Oh, I just made a mistake.
It's just part of. You and me having a conversation. In fact, the academic world calls those disfluencies, but when, but when somehow, when it, when the recording starts to happen, there are some people who just freeze up, right? It's like, Oh, Oh, I didn't say it quite right,
[00:11:36] Jessica Bradford, Sr. Program Manager: right. It's psychological, a hundred percent psychological.
And, um, yeah, I honestly think, and it's funny because I've had people say, I didn't. Make this many mistakes when I've done this live and I'm like, yeah, it's, it's funny how that happens. And that's why, again, I think practicing again, you don't have to try to make it perfect, but just so you feel comfortable doing it, like just doing it in the recording as if you were alive.
Um, and then like you were saying on the flip side of that, Roger, um, with the production, yeah, obviously you want to have the best audio and video that you can have. You want to have your lighting be as best as you can. Um, and then honestly, Just go through. I always tell people just go try to go through it once.
If you have to break and re restate something, fine if you really feel like you need to. But I feel like if you, even if you have ums or you pause or you know, you're, you gotta grab something over here, you know it's best to honestly just try to get through it one time because honestly, that's always the first takes is usually the best.
And you don't really want to. Like we were talking about over edit. Trying to edit every little, like, pause out every little mistake. It's okay to be a human and realize, like, we pause to think, right? About our responses, to think about, you know, especially if you're doing interactive stuff. That's, that's expected.
And honestly, I feel like if it's too perfect, people might know it's recorded.
[00:13:05] Roger Courville, CSP: Right. We're
[00:13:05] Jessica Bradford, Sr. Program Manager: trying to make it feel like it's not. So, um, you know, just be careful of over editing and trying to make it too perfect because humans are not perfect. I'm going
[00:13:16] Roger Courville, CSP: to put an exclamation point on that for this reason.
And, uh, you know, I come at things from a different perspective cause you're producer extraordinaire. And my, my basis of life was, uh, was. Uh, presentation skills training. And one of the challenges to your point is, is when it is too perfect, it can be unnatural.
[00:13:48] Jessica Bradford, Sr. Program Manager: Mm hmm. Right? Some people might pick up on
[00:13:51] Roger Courville, CSP: that.
Totally. And authentic beats perfect every time because your goal isn't perfect delivery of content. Your goal is to reach through the medium and connect with the person on the other side. Right? It's not connecting to, it's connecting through and, uh, and honestly, people don't expect you to be perfect.
They, they want value and if you can bring them something of value, that's, that's a powerful thing and that's one of the powerful parts of, of this medium. Of course we need to pay attention to those kinds of things that might hurt your process, right? Right. Like if. Right. Uh, if you had too many ums and ahs, then that process, right?
A few ums and ahs are part of just how we communicate is over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over Then we hurt the process of communication. So there's, that's, that's, yes, yes, partner, uh, to point and I'm going to, just put an exclamation point on this, uh, authentic beats perfect every day, right?
Remember in this particular contest, we're talking about simulated live. In fact, ideally, they don't even realize that, that the presentation part or the presentation part that we flew in, because I, I'm sure you have too. We've, I've done events where one or two of the presenters were live. One of the presenters was pre recorded,
[00:15:28] Jessica Bradford, Sr. Program Manager: and
[00:15:29] Roger Courville, CSP: that's okay.
[00:15:30] Jessica Bradford, Sr. Program Manager: That's okay. What
[00:15:31] Roger Courville, CSP: is you shouldn't know? The point is, the point is you're delivering content. You're delivering value. You're interacting with polls and questions and chat. People who put something into chat are getting responses that like they're actually there and there's a reason for them to be there live.
Hallelujah.
[00:15:52] Jessica Bradford, Sr. Program Manager: And you know, one cool thing I feel like, I actually feel like people don't often take advantage of, especially Sim2Live webinars. So, you know, maybe you're not doing the live, but a lot of times the speakers will come on and they'll do a live Q and A. So like I mentioned Sim2Live, so the bulk of the presentation is pre recorded, but they still have time to maybe come in at the end and come in and be on camera to answer questions or be behind the scenes and answer questions.
And honestly, in those instances, I feel like they get to more questions. Because they're just all they're focusing on behind the scenes while the presentations playing back right so they can really deep dive into the questions have more thoughtful responses, um, than if it was live. And the other thing in terms we were talking about how.
with the production, what you want to try to think about with the Sim2Live. And if you're pre recording and then coming back to do a live Q& A, you'll want to try to make that seamless as possible. So remember what, you're going to have to wear the same thing that you did when you recorded. You want to be in the same place, right?
So you have the same background. So you want to use a virtual background, then that will make that easier if possible, but you want to try to match the lighting. So as best as you can, so that you can have that kind of seamless experience.
[00:17:13] Roger Courville, CSP: I want to highlight that because that is a piece of wisdom and experience, and I don't want, if somebody is listening to this right here and now, I don't want that to have slipped past because somebody's just kind of like got us out in the background. Did you just hear what Jess said? If you're going to like record it, then when you actually show up to do live Q and A, you Relative to being in a sense next to your prerecord, you're going to want to, Oh, I don't know, wear the same shirt and have the same lighting.
So it doesn't look too obvious that the previous version was of you is the, uh, the Memorex version. So, uh, that's. That's awesome. Thank you, Jess. So there's the, the why, there's a bit of the how, and by the way, um, there's a, you'll be able to find the transcript of this on our website at virtualvenues. com forward slash blog.
And, uh, Jess wrote a blog post about, uh, about this very thing. Jess, any other operational things before we close out with a few what ifs?
[00:18:21] Jessica Bradford, Sr. Program Manager: Um, I think the big thing is again, just. Like I mentioned, don't forget to engage your audience. That's really huge. Obviously live or simulated live, but you know, I feel like sometimes people will record something, play it back, and then they don't really think about adding those things because they think it's going to be too hard.
Um, when I honestly promise you it's not. It's the same. Don't be scared to add those same things you would do live. Polls, live demonstrations. Don't, don't be afraid to talk to the audience when you're recording. Thank you. As if they're there, even if it's just me that you're talking to, I will cheer you on.
We're here. We want you to, to, to engage with them because again, that's what's gonna keep people staying on your events and, and coming back for others. So I think that's it.
[00:19:10] Roger Courville, CSP: Yeah. You know what? I think that's worth even just, uh, underlining for a moment because the tactical how of how that happens is obviously going to depend on what platform you're using, right?
I mean, a lot, a whole lot of stuff on, on 24. Zoom meetings, Zoom webinars, et cetera, uh, Webex, et cetera. And the tactical how is going to depend on exactly which one of those platforms we're, we're helping you execute on. Right. Um, for instance, on, on 24, um, playing a pre recorded video of a presentation, um, still means that the entirety of the console.
All of those interaction and engagement tools are all still totally at your disposal, right? Do I want to have a link to somebody's LinkedIn profile? Do I want to have, you know, what am I doing about handouts and downloads? Uh, et cetera, et cetera, right? How you do that in Zoom might not operate the same way, but it's still great.
To your point, it's still great to be thinking about, Hey, we have a chance to be engaging an audience, uh, in real time. Some part of it is pre recorded. So
[00:20:32] Jessica Bradford, Sr. Program Manager: just
[00:20:36] Roger Courville, CSP: let's think forward a little bit for our like closing couple minutes here. What are those what ifs? What are those kind of maybe use cases that people maybe haven't thought about?
And I know we've talked about a few, but What if when you're helping somebody with a bit of possibility thinking going? Oh, I hadn't even thought about that. What what if we did or what if we did that? Just out of curiosity any particular use case or tactic come to mind.
[00:21:09] Jessica Bradford, Sr. Program Manager: Um, You know thinking about that. I you know the with the with the option of simulives you Might have the ability to get speakers that you wouldn't normally if you were doing
[00:21:26] Roger Courville, CSP: Yes,
[00:21:27] Jessica Bradford, Sr. Program Manager: so it's not much and then maybe like external speakers, right?
So maybe they're pretty booked But like hey that we can jump on to record this even though we can't be on the broadcasted live date So that's something that you could you know I think used to your benefit. Um,
[00:21:47] Roger Courville, CSP: No, let me wait before you, before you do the next one. Since, since I spent a whole lot of years on the road as a professional speaker, let me, let me assure you that is a killer potential place to create value because, uh, cause here's the thing.
Let's just use the webinar virtual events industry as an example. Most events happen Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings. Right?
[00:22:14] Jessica Bradford, Sr. Program Manager: But
[00:22:16] Roger Courville, CSP: if you want to get somebody's time, maybe they're available on a Monday afternoon or a Friday afternoon and you can get them recorded. So that you can run the event when you want, right?
Or as a guy who's done a lot of professional speaking You know, hey, I'm gonna be traveling But I have availability on a Saturday morning to make a recording for you. Yeah Especially for those not
[00:22:44] Jessica Bradford, Sr. Program Manager: after guest speakers like you
[00:22:47] Roger Courville, CSP: Right. If you're pursuing one who is in demand, physically or literally, you can get them for cheaper if you're getting them outside of, of primetime hours.
[00:23:01] Jessica Bradford, Sr. Program Manager: Right. Yeah, that's true. I didn't even think about that part, but yeah, absolutely. Um, Let's see. Um, I, I think I kind of just want to circle back to something you mentioned, but you could use this as a backup plan, like, like you did with that situation with the surgeon. So if you're even slightly worried that something could happen with one of your speakers, like I mentioned, this is a great option, um, to just have.
And then you have that extra recording, which never hurts either. Um, so I think that's a really good, um, uh, example of why you might use this. Um, Also, I've had situations where I think we touched on this too, where you just can't get all the speakers together at once to be on a live event, like either there's time zone differences, like, like with ServiceNow, they have, they're just our own internal speakers.
They're such a global company that they just can't coordinate them to get them in the same place at the same time. It's just too hard. And even then we'll just record them separately. And then edit it together and you would never know. So, I mean, there's, there's just, there's a lot of options. It's very, very, a flexible medium, which, um, yeah, I think that people, where people are starting to take advantage of, but there's just so much opportunity.
[00:24:23] Roger Courville, CSP: I haven't, I haven't seen this any time. Um, but way back in the day, and this is going to date me, but right after nine 11, um, a very, very large tech company hired Rudy Giuliani, who at the time was the, uh, mayor of New York, right. Uh, a really big deal right after 9 11, right? Regardless of what you think about politics, there was this moment culturally.
And, um, at the time I even remember this, I can probably, I could probably share this, uh, now, but at the time paid him a hundred thousand dollars. And he came on and spoke for 20 minutes on an event. That first event was, uh, was actually all live. So he spoke and then after that, because they had a security, uh, web based security product, uh, then the product manager came on and did a product demo and blah, blah, blah.
But they recorded Rudy Giuliani and then they re ran that event more than 70 times where Each time number two and time number 72 was, was the kind of the, the big name speaker being run again. And then each time the product manager would come on into a product demo and blah, blah, blah. And it was a radically successful thing.
We did more than 70 events with, with, uh, you know, with Rudy Giuliani. Speaker , and he only spoke at one event. So there was an example of both a a, a strategy based on both a live event, but then in a sense the simulated live after that too. So, um, all kinds of crazy things that you can accomplish. if you just allow it to be, uh, allow yourself a little bit of creativity relative to maybe just thinking about how you've always seen webinars quote unquote being done.
And, and I'm proud to say I work with a killer team here at V2, including Jess, who, who has done so many of these things and, and has that experience of editing video and working with presenters who, uh, uh, it's just an exciting thing to even. Describe because I know how good this team is at helping clients get where they need to go.
So Jess, any other questions that I should have asked you that I haven't asked you?
[00:27:02] Jessica Bradford, Sr. Program Manager: Oh, thanks Roger. No, I mean, I think we covered all the big ones. I'll probably think of something later after this course, but if I do, I will throw it up onto blog, um, make it available. But thanks again so much, Roger. This as always is super fun to just be able to, uh, have a chat with you and, you know, talk about all this stuff that we've been doing for a long time together.
[00:27:26] Roger Courville, CSP: For a long time. I consider it
[00:27:28] Jessica Bradford, Sr. Program Manager: would be 40 years combined.
[00:27:30] Roger Courville, CSP: We are, yeah, right. We are seriously glad you've been with us on another episode of Thought Leader Conversations sponsored by the crew at virtualvenues. com and we will see you next time around.
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