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I have had the honor of working on a lot of truly innovative and amazing virtual and hybrid events, so I asked a former client and collaborator to give an example of one of his hybrid events from the pharmaceutical industry. This is a hybrid event that I had the privilege of working on with Spiro Yulis, CEO and Founder of SkyArx, a pharmaceutical and healthcare marketing and event company.

A global top 10 pharmaceutical company was launching a new respiratory product and wanted to include virtual events as part of its promotional strategy for communicating with health‐care professionals. The marketing team had experienced limited success with traditional webcast programs for other product launches and was looking for a more innovative, engaging, and personal virtual solution.

After consulting with the client on a variety of approaches, they decided on the delivery of a hybrid solution broadcasting to live and virtual audiences.

The primary speaker for the series, an international thought leader in respiratory medicine, presented as part of a live dinner program in front of 75 physicians at a restaurant in a major market. His presentation was broadcast to audiences at 15 other live dinner programs across the U.S. as well as hundreds of at‐home viewers.

We featured all these remote audiences across the country on‐camera as part of the broadcast to create a sense of connectedness among participants and foster a more personal and engaging question‐and‐answer session. We also enabled audiences from their homes or offices to participate and ask questions as well.

Each live program site was staffed by a single‐camera broadcast crew to capture audience activity that was integrated into the broadcast. The show opening included a “round robin” of live introductions of each location, where the local pharmaceutical representative program host shared a greeting from their audience with some local flare. Live footage from the sites was peppered in throughout the broadcast, with a fun and lively second screen gamification activity mid‐program to keep the audience energized.

Participants from all sites were invited to ask the speaker questions live, on camera, at intervals during the broadcast, showing in split‐screen with the presenter. Offering a real‐time, on‐camera, verbal exchange with this national thought leader was a big draw for them, and a differentiator from typical webcasts where audiences are limited to typing their questions into the perceived “great abyss” of a webcast platform, only for them to go unaddressed during – and after – the program. The “1:1” live interaction with the speaker and the ability for each of the live sites to see each other on camera were definite keys to success.

The final participant total (live and at‐home) was a record for this company's virtual events in the respiratory category.

Results:

 Registration for the event was 77% higher than that for the company's previous product launch webcast. The program format created significant buzz with physicians, who then recruited colleagues, including some from practices previously flagged as inaccessible. The program also opened many doors for the sales team.

 64% more participants joined this event than this marketing team's previous satellite national broadcast.

 In a post‐event survey, 82% of participants reported that this was the most engaging hybrid virtual event in which they had participated. The real‐time “face‐to‐face” interaction with the speaker and a feeling of connectedness with the other live sites were cited as the top two reasons.

 The company's leadership team was so pleased with the event and resulting product inquiries that they replicated this model across three following product launches.