Bizzabo Delivers Flawless Virtual and Hybrid Events With Cloudinary

Though Covid was devastating to the live events business, event innovator Bizzabo was determined to support its clients with flawless online event experiences. With Cloudinary, the company updated its platform to deliver exceptional online and hybrid event experiences that are engaging, human, and impactful. This has helped Bizzabo extend its competitive lead and lay the foundations for a profitable future in our increasingly visual economy.

About

Bizzabo’s Quest to Build the ‘Event Experience OS’

Founded in Israel in 2012 but now headquartered in New York City, Bizzabo seeks to change the way the world runs professional events. It does this by powering in-person, virtual, and now hybrid experiences with its “Event Experience OS,” an open platform for event experience leaders to create shared experiences that matter.

Much more than event management software, Bizzabo provides a rich set of data tools for organizers who also use the platform to engage audiences, build lasting communities, and demonstrate “ROE,” or Return on Events. Easier said than done as Bizzabo Product Lead Eidan Apelbaum says, “All of us have attended events, but few of us have been exposed to how complicated it is to run one.”

That complexity is due to a range of factors, from the varied interests of marketers and attendees, and the need to organize multiple sessions at different price points at different times. Bizzabo works to simplify all that by offering a one-stop-shop for the whole event process from ticketing, registration, agenda, and event website building, onboarding speakers, engaging with partners, and management analytics.

THE CHALLENGE

Social Events in a Solitary World

Though virtual and hybrid events had been around for years, after the pandemic struck in March 2020 they provided a lifeline for business and a vital way for socially distanced humans to connect. “Events are a social gathering, and the challenge of COVID has been a big one for us,” says Apelbaum. “The huge constraints imposed by COVID plunged all of us naturally social animals into a solitary world.”

Bizzabo set out to reshape its offer to address the new logistical challenges and usher in better event experiences than ever before. And while acknowledging that people have become proficient at running and taking part on video calls, Bizzabo knew that to foster human connections and generate excitement during virtual events takes more sophisticated skills, processes, and tools. Part of this is making a strong visual impact 
using images and video to replace or augment the live experience. Another is 
minimizing logistical hiccups and latency when it comes to delivering content and 
enabling it to be shared.

As more people took part in virtual events during the pandemic, it became clear that event participants, producers, and VIP speakers had different content-related needs. Participants want to be able to chat and share content with other guests in virtual breakout rooms. Event producers need to dazzle audiences with sharp, flawless video presentations at scale; sponsor logos and product images must appear vividly and load fast, regardless of a participants’ viewing device or bandwidth. Speakers, who often only attend briefly and are used to being supported by a production team at live events, must get a seamless virtual experience: “VIPs need self-explanatory software that easily connects to their mobile phone or desktop. They need to be able to easily do things like change backgrounds and pre-upload content so they don’t need to use screenshare. There are countless details to manage.”

THE CLOUDINARY SOLUTION

New Conditions, New Solution

Apelbaum says the answer to many of these challenges has been Cloudinary: “When COVID struck we built tools with Cloudinary to enhance our platform to deliver scalable video and images in the virtual world — and increasingly, in the hybrid one, too,” he confirms.

Cloudinary is supporting Bizzabo in three different areas: virtual events, “simulive” events, and video on demand (VOD): 

Virtual: Cloudinary helps deliver event content in a way that is very easy to consume, whether it’s overlays, branding, backgrounds. This makes it so much easier for Bizzabo to build engaging sessions that are really differentiated from a typical Zoom meeting. 

Simulive: Cloudinary supports this increasingly popular prerecorded format by making it easier for Bizzabo customers to build content in advance, store that content, transform it, and optimize it for different participant viewing platforms. 

VOD: This recorded content is now being stored in carefully architected, Cloudinary-powered virtual libraries that customers access to search and select the content they want.

THE RESULTS

85,000 Events in More Than 100 Countries and a 500% Increase in Attendance

Cloudinary has proven key to Bizzabo’s success, with more than 85,000 events now having taken place in 100+ countries. Since March 2020, Bizzabo’s pivot to pairing Cloudinary-enhanced in-person conference tools with a new virtual event management platform has led to a 500% increase in event attendance, doubling of revenue, and even more VC and third-party investment.

But Bizzabo is just at the start of what virtual and hybrid events can offer. “The way that we deliver content in the future will be very different; technology will play a major role in our ability to not only receive content from attendees, but actually engage with the context.” Bizzabo sees developments like AR and greater use of personalization as key trends here, but also the power, using tools like Cloudinary, to work with content at scale and in advance, creating rich experiences that allow people to attend and engage from wherever they choose.