Rash of New Virtual Event Consulting Companies Coming into the Market

VirtualEdge talked with Aaron Cole one of the founders and CEO of Clear Skies Virtual Event Producers, recently about what has become a common occurrence in the virtual event industry…experienced webcasting and event producers leaving to form new companies to service the growing demand for virtual event and meeting solutions. Many of the startups have a similar story to Clear Skies, 10 plus years of working in the virtual event and meeting space; in this case, most of the team is from Microsoft Live Meeting where they did extensive webcasting and webinar programs.

“Our existing clients are more of the traditional brick and mortar types of companies versus tech companies and they don’t have the staff and expertise to produce webcasts and more sophisticated events in-house,” said Cole. “We offer a full service model where we provide everything from planning to production and management but there are cases where we just support specific pieces of the event as well.”

Companies are increasingly looking for consultants that have experience across multiple platforms and technologies because there are so many options and a wide variety of meeting types and needs. “We plan to remain platform agnostic so that we can offer our clients the best solution for their event needs. But that is a lot of work keeping up to date on all of the solutions available—something our clients couldn’t do internally,” noted Cole. “We [at Clear Skies] need to be the ones out there spotting trends and bringing them back to the client because they are just too busy running their business.”

What Clear Skies is looking for now is more interactivity and moving away from the older webinar model where people showed up, consumed the content and left. “These [types of webinars] have been working pretty well for clients in terms of generating leads but it is time to take it to the next level.”

At Virtual Edge, we think we will see more and more of these new firms being born and the continued expansion of digital agencies and event management companies moving into the virtual event space as their client's marketing and colloboration practices change forever. See more about Clear Skies at Clear Skies Virtual Event Producers