In many respects, the IT and networking solutions juggernaut Cisco Systems Inc. was better prepared than most to navigate the digital-event dystopia created by COVID-19. Back in 2009, amid a tanked economy that imperiled in-person attendance at Cisco Live, the company's flagship conference and trade show, Cisco made one of the most farsighted strategic moves since Apple brought back Steve Jobs: It developed a hybrid event that offered its vast audience of customers, industry partners, and IT professionals a cost-effective virtual option for attending technical training sessions. Even after the economy rebounded, Cisco Live maintained its digital component. Then in 2020, the coronavirus reared its spiky head and forced the company's marketers to cancel the in-person components and shift to an all-digital affair.

Building off their lessons learned, marketers dialed back the anticipated five-day conference to two, shortened the sessions to make content more digestible for an entirely online audience, and made it all completely free. Using a custom-built platform, the team created four channels that simultaneously aired a mix of keynote addresses, technical product sessions, and engaging panels. Cisco even managed to incorporate entertainment through musical performances and contests to keep the audience engaged. The event was a resounding success, attracting about 125,000 participants that digested an average of 3.3 hours of content per day.

With COVID variants and corporate travel restrictions still sowing chaos a year later, the upcoming Cisco Live 2021 would again be entirely screen-based. But the success of 2020 was going to be a tough one to match, in part because virtual conferences had lost their luster. "We had to tackle the growing digital fatigue and address the yearning for a more personal connection and unique ways to engage," says Kathy Doyle, global director, customer conferences for Cisco.

WORLD LEADER
Cisco Systems Inc.'s all-digital global conference delivered a perfect blend of education, inspiration, and celebration that kept attendees engaged over the course of two days. A New Dawn
To ensure attendees stayed engaged, Cisco again tapped Go Productions LLC (dba The XD Agency), a creative firm it has partnered with for the past five years, to help develop creative components, production, and global keynotes. The event teams made a bold expansion by deciding to launch Cisco Live's first-ever follow-the-sun event, which would asynchronously broadcast in local time zones around the globe using regional hosts and allow attendees to tune in during typical workday hours instead of asking them to log on late at night or the crack of dawn. And to maximize remote attendance and facilitate local networking opportunities, Cisco chunked the conference into three regions: the Americas; Asian Pacific, Japan, and China (APJC); and Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Russia (EMEAR) regions. While this would certainly give prospective registrants the ideal opportunity to attend, there was no guarantee it would keep them glued to their screens.

So the Cisco Live team got down to the nuts and bolts of constructing a next-gen digital conference that didn't feel like yesterday's news. In other words, they needed to "Turn IT Up," which became the pun-ish theme for the 2021 global event. The Cisco Live team leaned into the theme by ambitiously "turning up" internal expectations from the previous year, aiming to increase content engagement from 2020, which had garnered more than 4 million views, and surpass the average daily viewing past the 3.3 hours of the previous iteration. And if they hit the nail the head, they hoped to accelerate demand for Cisco's products and services as well.

To achieve all that, Cisco and XD Agency began dreaming up a broadcast studio that would capture viewers' imaginations with dynamic storytelling components. Marketers would also roll out a slate of new offerings, including a paid all-access pass, training sessions for earning continuing-education credits, a larger library of on-demand sessions, broadcast translation in nine languages, an engaging World of Solutions exhibit hall for premium sponsors, a host of entertaining brain breaks, and more. Cisco also wanted to celebrate the IT heroes who kept essential systems operating and secure during the pandemic. It was an ambitious vision, and the events teams had 13 weeks to turn it into a functioning reality.

Six weeks before the event, Cisco began teasing program highlights and inviting attendees via email and social channels to get set for its largest digital event to date. The pre-event call to action was straightforward enough: Register and build your schedule. Registrants could opt for a free limited experience, or they could spring for a $349 all-access pass that allowed entry to interactive labs, technical breakouts, continuing-education credits, and one-on-one meetings with experts in the field.

However, with hundreds of sessions available, marketers suspected attendees might get bogged down when curating their agendas, so they provided registrants with more than 40 suggested learning maps to guide them through educational tracks that met their specific learning goals. For example, someone focused on developing security expertise could reference the Cloud Security or Zero Trust maps to see which essential sessions they should slate on their schedules or watch on demand.

High Noon
For those tuning in from the Americas, the two-day global event kicked off on March 30 at 9 a.m. Pacific with a one-hour keynote featuring Cisco's chairman and CEO Chuck Robbins and several other senior executives speaking from the company's home campus in San Jose, CA. Remarks were given from a 56-by-48-foot broadcast studio that was nothing short of stunning. Theatrical lighting and multiple cameras panned with speakers as they moved about the stage and lent a cinematic quality to the broadcast. But it was the massive LED back walls and mid-stage columns – likewise clad in video tiles – that transformed what could have been a pedestrian address into digital gold. Stunning graphics and powerful animations not only complemented the topics but lodged them firmly in viewers' memories. At times, the content on the back wall "took over" attendees' full screens and offered glimpses of everyday heroes from locales such as Kenya, Italy, and Japan. "After a whole year of virtual events in home offices, it was a thrill to build a studio experience to elevate the keynotes," Doyle says.

Following the opening address, attendees hopped on one of six broadcast channels. Visitors making use of the free registration could access sessions on the Innovation and Leadership channels, which featured content from Cisco executives and information on the company's services. The other four channels – Applications, Infrastructure, Security, and Collaboration – delivered technical education exclusively for paying all-access passholders. Learning opportunities came in a variety of formats, including deep dives into Cisco's offerings, discussions of innovations, conversations with engineers, and demos of applications. Sessions included digital best practices such as Q&A functions and real-time polls to foster engagement and interaction. Additionally, Cisco released more than 350 additional anytime sessions that attendees could watch at their convenience, even after the event officially ended.

But even the most ravenous IT-content consumers can use a byte of dessert from time to time, so Cisco sprinkled healthy snacks of inspiration and entertainment between technical sessions. In one such interlude, tennis icons Billie Jean King and Serena Williams addressed equality, resilience, and the importance of giving back to their communities. In another, filmmaker James Cameron sat down with Cisco senior vice president Oliver Tuszik to discuss his own incredible technological innovations in film, his strategy for managing complex projects, and his passion for climate sustainability. Cisco also turned up the fun with prerecorded 15-minute musical performances from the likes of Train, Pentatonix, and The Killers, to name a few. "A hallmark of Cisco Live pre-pandemic was always the Customer Celebration, which featured big-name talent," Doyle says. "We wanted to bring that same level of entertainment to our attendees at home."

Cisco Live also helped participants connect in meaningful ways – one of the most difficult aspects of any virtual event. Cisco used its Webex Teams platform to create rooms for each broadcast channel that allowed attendees and experts to engage in ongoing conversations. Attendees could also opt in to PeerConnect, a peer-to-peer networking tool that matched attendees with similar interests. Plus all-access visitors were able to schedule one-on-one meetings with Cisco experts in the popular Meet the Engineer program.

Beyond the formal networking opportunities, Cisco Live prompted attendees to create and share content on social media by incorporating FanKave into the #CiscoLive Social Lounge. The artificially intelligent social-engagement and audience-interaction platform collected users' posts from Twitter and Instagram and created "leaderboards" of relevant content. Photo filters even allowed attendees to snap and post pics of themselves sporting augmented-reality Cisco Live "hats" like those worn at the in-person conferences, lending the virtual event that elusive sense of togetherness. Marketers' extra effort paid off, leading to #CiscoLive trending nationally on Twitter in the United States for more than two hours during the conference.

Meanwhile, the World of Solutions exhibit hall featured 16 of the event's premium sponsors, including Intel Corp., Amazon Web Services Inc., and NetApp Inc. But Cisco refused to settle for the generic microsites that were the scourge of the 2021 Consumer Electronics Show. Instead, the company teamed up with Helios, a Freeman company, to create a custom digital environment of 3-D exhibit experiences. Visitors could navigate the booths by clicking on waypoints and join live demos, chat with product specialists, and explore offerings along the way. In a testament to its appealing design, the exhibit hall generated more than 50,000 booth visits during the event.

The whole broadcast kicked off anew at 9 a.m. Singapore Time and then again in Central European Summer Time, catering to attendees' work schedules in regions around the globe. Considering that 16 percent of attendees logged on from APJC and 30 percent from EMEAR, the strategy provided a cohesive brand experience for many of Cisco's key partners and customers no matter where their office chairs, couches, or cabanas were located. Better yet, live regional hosts for each channel ensured audiences weren't met with sleep-deprived emcees, and teams monitoring the Q&A function made sure responses were personal and timely. Plus, the broadcasts were translated into nine different language to facilitate stress-free learning. The World of Solutions exhibit hall hours also remained open for five hours in each region to guarantee everyone around the globe had the same great Cisco experience.

Day two kept the same format of a keynote segueing to educational, inspirational, and entertainment sessions. Following 32 hours of content delivery, Cisco Live 2021 wrapped up. But following the event, attendees could continue along their curated educational tracks by accessing the catalog of on-demand content.

Bright Horizons
While Cisco's follow-the-sun event won't win any daytime Emmys, it did nab the Judges Choice Award, the top honor in the Corporate Event Awards. "A lot of thought, time and effort went into creating an innovative digital program, and the results are a testament to that," said one juror.

More than 105,000 attendees tuned in to Turn IT Up, 20,000 of whom purchased all-access passes, doubling the team's original goal. The keynotes and sessions netted a total of 11 million views, an astounding 266-percent increase compared to the 2020 event. Plus, Cisco Live 2021 boosted attendees' average daily view time from 3.3 hours in 2020 to 4.6 hours.

On the social media front, the event netted 3 million impressions and more than 80,500 organic engagements. But perhaps most importantly, a post-event survey found that 64 percent of attendees will invest in Cisco's offerings by an average of 6.4 months sooner than they would have otherwise, 80 percent plan to share what they learned with their colleagues or peers, and 75 percent agree they will apply what they learned to their job, business, or life. And while Cisco marketers hope this will be their final all-digital conference, they provided a master class in what large events are capable of as long as organizers are willing to turn it up. E