The Power of Hybrid Events, with guests Trae Stanley and Benjamin Jansen with Audion

Welcome to the Oil and Gas Sales and Marketing podcast, where every week, your hosts, Mark LaCour and Matt Bertram share proven strategies and real-world tactics to help you connect with customers and close more deals. Let's do this. Hey, welcome back everybody. This is, of course, the Sales and Marketing podcast.

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leave us a review. And we have some awesome guests today. We have a Benjamin and Trey joining us today. Hey, guys. What's up? What up?

How are you? This is fantastic. So Trey, I have known you for, I don't know how long, you actually trained my son years ago to be our in-house videographer. My son now is in the Army and I can't talk about what he's doing because he's a military intelligence.

But it was just an amazing time. I got to know you personally and professionally, and now you're working with Benjamin. And if anybody out there, and I'm going to go ahead and give you all a shameless plug up front, if anybody out there needs professional videography work, these are the guys to reach out to. Trey does a lot of our work still at OGGN, Benjamin and his team are doing things that

are just freaking incredible. We're going to have a link in the show notes so you can reach out to them. So now that I've given you a plug, Benjamin, before we get into the thing I think that you're doing, it's so cool. Can you give us just a brief history of your company? Because y'all were doing some amazing stuff, but I'd love to know where it started.

For sure. Actually, can we just stop there? Because I feel like that was great. We could just cut and just be done. I don't want to screw this up now. Now I'm worried I'm going to like say something to people who are like, I don't know if this

guy's that great. Seriously, Audion's been around for a long time. We're going on two decades now. We started off pretty much solely as a marketing agency, and we did a lot of digital. So we did a lot of web builds, a lot of SEO, SEM. We've been in that space for a long time.

All the things that go along with that, including graphic design. Over the last decade, our content and our focus has really shifted to digital and more importantly, like live delivery. So broadcast video, that's been a lot of what we've done. That really came to a head post-COVID, during COVID. That thing really kind of like launched the full hybrid and virtual push for us.

And the reason that happened was we were on site at an international conference and we're seeing people come into us and go, oh man, I can't catch my flight home. I can't get back home. Or this person can't get here. That person can't get there. And we're like, man, this looks to be kind of serious.

After that event, everything kind of shut down and went really slow. And we were like, is the industry going dark? What's going to happen? Where are we going to go from here? So we spent about two weeks hunkered down in a production facility we had in Austin. It was our live studio where we'd bring people in to shoot content.

And we said, how do we keep this going? How do we keep our clients afloat? How do we keep people communicating? What do we do? Fortunately, because we had been doing live broadcast on site for so long, we had the tools in place to transition.

We were able to make some quick changes utilizing NDI video and some really kind of exciting technologies. And that allowed us to do fully virtual and full hybrid produced content. So we could get one or two people in the studio, but then everybody else could be remote, all the other presenters. And we could push that out to an audience of any size.

That was a game changer for us. For two years, we did not leave that facility and we're hunkered down and we're running four to five broadcasts a week for clients all over the globe. And it was really exciting coming out of the pandemic into that. We've been able to translate that into an onsite full hybrid event, whether it's corporations, whether it's NGOs, whether it's nonprofits, military, oil and gas, all those people.

We work for all those people and are able to bring that to them onsite. So it's been a very organic growth. It's been a very long road. But what's insane is like the ramp up over the last three years, it just shot through the roof. It was like, we were chugging along doing our thing and then we were forced to adapt.

We did it and now it surpassed everything I could have ever imagined. The pandemic year was just a crazy year. So crazy. Us too. We actually grew 107% during the pandemic. I couldn't buy microphones.

We couldn't buy camera lenses. I had to hire people that I couldn't meet. We were buying airplane tickets that day. It was just insanity. It was crazy. But we did come out of it a different company and we did come out of it in a way that's actually

still been in fitness now, which sounds like the same thing that happened to you. I want to back you up a little bit, Benjamin. So when you say hybrid events, some of the people that are listening may not know what that is. Can you explain what that is? I can.

And it's interesting here because I feel like this is still the wild, wild West. Everybody kind of remembers the heyday of SEO and a lot of buzzwords getting thrown around and people were like using terms incorrectly. This is kind of the same thing right now because there's not a standardized version of what it means to be a hybrid event. You're hearing that a lot for just one way pushes or virtual events.

But a true hybrid event would be that you would have an in-person component, whether it's a pitch day, whether it's a product launch, whether it's a sales update, whatever it is, that would be in-person. You would either have remote presenters that would come in that the people in the room could see and that you would have a virtual audience that would have full to a communication. That is a true hybrid event that you're bridging the virtual or the world that's outside of

those walls with what's happening in that room and creating that kind of, I mean, pick your buzzword, outreach, transparency, whatever you want to call it. But to have a true hybrid event, you have to have all those elements and that's where a lot of stuff's falling short because people are going, oh, hey, we're going to do a hybrid event and they put everything on Zoom and do a Zoom webinar. It's like, well, okay, you did a Zoom webinar.

That's not a hybrid event. It's different. So this has opened the doors to a lot of things because maybe your CEO can't make it in. Maybe your keynote speaker can't make it in. Maybe your lead product engineer can't be there that day. You can still bring that guy in, have a fully produced broadcast where you're directing

the content. You're pushing that content out in a way that you want people to see it and absorb it and not just give them a big screen with a thousand faces on it and all these people trying to figure out what they're supposed to look at, you know what I mean? And I love it. And it's a lot more than just in case people can't come into the actual event.

It's also things like cost savings, right? So you're not paying airline flights or people to jet all around the world. You're also able to access your people on their time schedules so that you're able to get everybody together at one place. And then for the oil and gas industry, there's also a little bit of a safety component here, right?

People aren't being transported. They're not flying. They're not driving. The odds of them actually getting hurt trying to make it to the event is much less. Now, I guess they could still trip over in their house or something, but still you're actually touching a lost time instance.

Yeah, my COI doesn't cover that. It's a hire us. If you fall in your house, I'm sorry, you have to have your own insurance. So, Trey, I kind of want to pick your brain a little bit. We have a lot of marketing leaders that listen to this and videos becoming more and more important in marketing, even in oil and gas industry, even though we're a few years behind.

The amount of gear that it takes to do this right, companies could learn how to use it and buy it, but it just doesn't make fiscal sense, does it? If you could do a couple of events a year, it makes more sense to bring a team in that has all the gear that knows how to use it so they can set up, get it running. Can you kind of talk through that a little bit? What does that look like from a hardware point of view and how much easier is it for Audion

to come in and just set everything up? Yeah, I mean, if you're a company that's doing it all yourself, you are having to make investment and gear that you don't need except for maybe four times a year. You're probably not buying the best gear that you can and solving all of the solutions exactly how you should. So, you're making compromises along the way.

I think that Ben and I had a client a couple of years ago in the financial industry and they wanted to push their C-suite team out to the rest of the company across the U.S. They had a single camera that they were running with an HDMI cable into a laptop into StreamYard and they did that three times and each time they had catastrophic events happen. For some reason, StreamYard just went down that day. One time, the camera cable snapped in the middle of it, I think, and then they were

scrambling to replace the HDMI cable, I mean, just mess upon mess and it was because they were understaffed and under-resourced. And so, yeah, we come in with all of the gear, like exactly all of the gear that you need with backup gear. We've faced each of these problems dozens, hundreds of times and we know how to problem solve in the moment because there's always some little thing that happens, whether it's

with your schedule or with talent or with gear and we can keep a cool head and solve those problems. Dre, what I want to say is I think that also it's really important to understand that live events and streaming events take completely different technology, completely different skill sets than just someone shooting video. So if you're recording video that you're going to go edit or B-roll or something else

like that, that's one thing and that's a whole set of equipment. And then streaming is this whole new layer of stuff and especially when you're trying to mix in hybrid events, so live and in person, it takes quite a bit of expertise to do that. I mean, we've done videography for a long time, but streaming is a different level. That's not something that you just want to do on a whim and having those kind of problems, I can totally see it happening because you just don't know what happens with technology

sometimes. Yeah, I want to tack on to what Tre is saying here too, because we will come on, say you're doing a quarterly report or product launch, we will come on site, we will drop a fully, our ecosystem will be closed, but we'll drop a full 10 gig network on site so that we can do NDI video. We will have LTE backups on site so that if the stream goes down, we can fail over.

We have battery backups so that it can fail over all of that. We've encountered these issues so many times, we have backup servers in place. So if the server goes down, we don't die. I can't tell you how many clients we've picked up from StreamYard or from some of these big event platforms because simply because they don't have backup, like literally they just don't have a backup in place.

They go, oh, well, we're, I won't say the company's name, but it rhymes with Schmishment. And they're like, hey, yeah, we don't need it. We're huge. We don't do that. You stream to this target, we'll be fine. And then it fails and we have a backup deployed and it's fine.

It is an interesting new set of problems and all that stuff can be overcome, but boy, it's a lot to wrap your head around if you don't do it every day. And I want to throw some real world stuff here. So Trey, you have live streamed both our API Houston chapter meetings several times. You've done a bunch of work for Halliburton, Halliburton Labs to watch the crew show up and to see multiple 4K cameras all connected remotely.

There's not cables in the way to see a director or producer sit there and from large monitors with live switching in front of them to see everybody mic'd up not once, but twice in case something fails. And then to see all that having backup connectivity to the internet with guaranteed bandwidth. It is a totally different level, but the end product is phenomenal. So if you're a company out there and you want to show your best foot forward in these hybrid

events, I'm telling you now, do not get a consumer camera and plug it to a laptop and hit zoom. It's not the same thing. However, the ability to do this sort of thing has now opened up all kinds of windows and it's very cost effective. Even thinking about things like going to a conference.

I had this discussion with another company a while back and one of their things was you could virtualize the conference environment and I started thinking about it. It's common in this industry for companies to spend millions of dollars on a single conference and in today's date, you're not going to return on that investment like you did in the 80s. So why not virtualize it so that you can reduce your cost and you can have all your people on and you could reach a bigger audience.

And if you wanted to, you can have a smaller booth at a conference, but bring that in remotely as well. How cool an experience would that be for your buyers and your users or your product or your service? It would just be incredible. Great way to educate, learn and have a little bit of fun.

But to do it, you have to have the right company with the right expertise to do it. Mark, you could have your SMEs virtually be available to answer questions in the booth. You could schedule their calendar where you don't have to bring them all in, but you could tap your whole technical staff to really offer a more robust experience at the conference throughout. I think there's a lot of different.

I never thought about that. So guys, we hit all the major oil and gas conferences. We'll have a podcast pavilion this May at OTC. It's too late to do it now. Matt, next year, let's reach out to these guys and let's do that. Let's get a virtualized setup where we can bring in some of our remote people live at

the conference. We'll do that for 2025 for OTC. So I'm actually write that down so audience, you can look forward next year. That's awesome. Actually do something like you do something different. Can I bring you on sales pitches with us?

I don't know if I need a little bit, but if you can't tell of the pair, I'm the sales guy. Yeah, I love it. I mean, you hit all the points. That's what it's all about. It's all about that.

Why would you put together an event, a massive event, let's say hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, and you're only going to allow the content to be shared with the people in the room? Do you know how many people you're excluding from that? And in this day and age, how many of your customers, peers, potential clients will only interact with you in a digital space?

There are people that will never see you in person, never get to shake your hand, never get to see your product up close until it's deployed. Why would you exclude that for such a minimal cost when it's we can deploy that technology now to where you can just expand that beyond what you ever thought was possible? I do want to throw a note here if you're listening and you don't understand the whole thing. This is not just live streams.

So the content, the video and auto is also recorded. So you can use it later. You can chop up. Content for your marketing machine and for also for your sales team. So it's kind of the best for whatever. Yeah, I do have a funny story trade that I bet you don't even know because we were

so busy to have a chance to tell you. But one of the times that you were live streaming at the API meet in Houston, it was when we were doing the robotics stuff for Trans Ocean. And we had a young woman in Nigeria that was going to university and study in robotics. And we had ABB, the process control company in the UK, also on the live stream. They started chatting while the API meeting was going on while you're live streaming.

She was looking for an internship and she picked up a paid internship from ABB because she was on the live stream. They were in opposite parts of the world. How beautiful that story is that that this young woman got an internship paid because she joined the live stream and then that's directly to your point. You have people joining the live stream that normally would never know what you're doing.

And that's sometimes when the magic happens. Yeah, I think the other thing that you kind of touched on is after we've recorded everything and everyone's connected virtually, you can chop that up and you can turn it into a lot of other content pieces. Ben and I and the other people in our team, we have a lot of experience creating content for social media, for all the different broadcast platforms.

And we're pretty well versed. And that's just like an added benefit you get when you work with people with experience. It's like this creativity that we're all having right now. This is like what our meetings are like all the time. Like, oh, what if we did this? What if we did this and people get very excited?

Like, oh, I didn't even think of that. Yeah, from shooting behind the scenes content to when the guys are loading in to maybe catching some testimonials or interviews on site while you're doing the feed. I can load you up with six months worth of marketing content from a single day shoot or from a one day event. You get all of this added value because you've got the guys on the ground

with the gear to do all of these things. And that's part of something that we try to do every time we go out. It's not just like, OK, what's the box? OK, it's this stream and this thing. Let's get that done. It's like, no, what other value can we provide while we're on site

that's going to set you up for success to keep this thing moving forward? Yeah, it's strictly from a sales point of view. Let me tell you the value when you're able to bring prospects in and they can in real time not only see what your product or service does also talk to your existing customers without you there. But you have your subject matter experts there to answer any technical questions

that might come up. It is magic from a sales point of view. The sales just happened automatically because it's not a one on one thing. You almost have like this community that's interacting in real time, both in video and audio and your prospects learn in five minutes, something that would have taken them weeks to figure out.

And I promise you, your competition is probably not doing this. So it gives you a leg up competitively. I think it's all money. Like I really think that video is where it's at. YouTube is the second biggest search engine. Everybody would rather watch a video.

Typically it's gravitating that way. You need high quality authority content. I think you need mics. I think sound quality is super important when you're making those shorts in those videos, when people are watching, it needs to be engaging. There's a lot of things that you need to do when you're looking at thought

leadership building, and really it makes a difference when you have a high quality team behind you and being able to repurpose all that content. So you get multiple benefits and ROI streams from one shoot. So I like everything we're talking about. I saw like five, six years ago. This was the trend happening in Google and search engine optimization.

And look, it's coming to fruition now and it's bigger than ever. So I would encourage you however you want to do it. But certainly I can tell you, if you just go out there and buy a camera and you try to shoot with a regular mic, you're not going to have the same impact. You really need a high quality team behind you. I do want to ask a question for Audion.

Does it make a difference if the people that are remote are in different countries? I mean, are you able to capture anybody and everybody as long as they have internet connectivity? That's right. Yeah, we do this huge conference for a big accreditation body. They've got, I think there's 15,000 people over the course of four days

and they've got 10 breakout rooms. We stream all of those in their general session. Everybody comes together for the general session. It's massive. Their keynote speaker is almost never in person. It is almost always remote and we bring that in.

They fly these huge screens up. We do it. They have direct to a communication with the audience, with the emcee, with everybody. Those people are hardly ever in person. We produced. Yeah. Last year, the person was in house arrest.

That's right. He was under house arrest. And I wish we could tell that whole story. But yeah, is this a Bitcoin conference? Close. It was not. It was actually for a fraud group that does fraud stuff. This is what I love about this show.

It was insane. He could not leave his house, but he could join us. That's right. We just did somebody in New Zealand and for their big event. And we remote produced the whole because every one of their presenters was virtual. We produced it from our studio and just brought everybody in virtually.

So that is a huge point, I think, to really drive home about all this stuff is just the way that you can really bring people together that you couldn't before. Because for some reason or another, they can't make it. And just to tack on to that, too, the worry that a lot of people get about this kind of stuff, especially when they're putting on conferences, is that they're going to cannibalize in person attendance.

And I will tell you that after 10 years of streaming and the last couple of hybrid, that simply does not happen. All you're doing is expanding your audience. All you're doing is making this information more available. You don't have a choice. You have to figure out how to start doing some of this stuff.

Or you're going to lose market share. Period. That's just a hundred percent. If you don't understand how to do this sort of stuff, you will be left behind. Even if you're an all filled service company, I'm telling you, you need to understand this is the next generation of buyers is how they learn this, how they buy. And this is a great resource.

So Ben, because we're getting close to the end of time, I do want to ask you, let's skip all the technology and everything else from a pure engagement point of view, if one of our listening companies wanted to engage and learn more, how does that work? Do they reach out to you? What happens after they reach out to you?

Yeah, Tray and I just talked about this recently. We did a little chat together. For us, it's really a discovery process. It's we really want to understand your needs. We don't want to shoehorn you into a solution. So it's a very simple conversation.

They can always go to the website, contact us there. You can email me directly, call us. We're always available to chat and then figure out what it is that they really need. Because a lot of times people don't know and they're like, well, hey, I've got this product. We've got to get it out there.

So we're thinking about doing X. And it's like, well, have you thought about doing it this way? Or we have an event coming up. We just want to record it. And we go, well, have you thought about maybe streaming it and then letting us shoot some B roll, getting you a sizzle?

Maybe we can do a couple of testimonial videos before it goes out. You can use for your marketing while we're prepping people, all those things. So for us, the discovery process is massive because typically we uncover a lot more need than people realize that was there and they get it within that same budget or within that same value. Everybody walks away happy.

So we're pretty easy. I love for people to just call me and I don't care if you even hire us. Call me and ask me about what's going on. It's so important to us that this proliferates and that people understand the gravity of this and that people don't get left behind. That we're happy to just share the knowledge too.

We'll just talk to you and let you know what we think. And honestly, if we think that you could do it with your iPhone and you could do it with a USB mic, we'll let you know that and we'll get you set up. I'm happy to do that kind of stuff. Some of my favorite things about y'all is that you don't try to make people buy stuff they don't need.

You're really trying to do good work and we try to do the same thing. I just love that. It makes the world a better place. Couple of things, audience, the link to both Tray and Ben's LinkedIn profile will be there if you want to reach out to them directly. The link to their company will be there if you want to reach out to them.

Like Ben said, if you have an idea, if you have a need, reach out to them and just engage in a conversation, they're not going to try to sell you crap. They're going to understand if they can help you fix a problem and they're going to work with you on that. Couple of other things, you know the deal. We have our two newsletter, our Sunday update, All In Gas Events newsletter,

both the links in the show notes go sign up for that. We finally got everything straight, Matt. So in the Sunday update, we now are actually helping house pets that need a forever home. It took a little while for us to find an organization to work with, but bottom line is you're helping pets that need a family, find a family. And then for our events newsletter, if you want to know where all the All In Gas

events are, it's just an easy resource for you. Matt and I's social profiles are all in the show notes as well. I am Matt excited for our new podcast, the Ben podcast with our high schoolers. They got their first ban on TikTok. They're pushing the elements where TikTok took down one of their posts and I told them that's your marks of success.

So you haven't checked out our high schoolers podcast, just look for the Ben shows everywhere podcast are. That's awesome. This is the point where we do our LinkedIn fail or tip of the week. Ben or Trey, you want to jump in there? Have a LinkedIn fail or tip of the week?

I hate to monopolize this, Trey. You want me to? No, you got this one, Ben. Look, I feel like I've taken over this whole conversation. But yeah, I have got a big one and it's the appropriate marketing. It's such a common thing now because we have so many tools available to us

that people are now getting into the habit of either creating templatized marketing that they're putting out visuals. So whether using Canva or some sort of AI software and appropriating that marketing as your own when it was just generative stuff that you put together and put out there that has nothing to do with your voice as a company or your brand identity or whatever, but it's fast and it's easy

and it gets out there. The problem with this stuff is that it just gets so lost in the mix. So you're already, if you're lucky and somebody is subscribed to you or connected to you, there's like a less than six percent chance that you're showing up in their algo. Now you're pushing out content that looks like everybody else and has

nothing really to do with your identity other than you could get it out really quick and you think it looks kind of nice. That stuff is just getting lost over and lost in the mix. So the big thing that we tell people now is just be true to your brand, find that voice, be true to that identity. We have lots of ways that we can help you express that and turn it into more

of a conversation marketing thing to where you're really putting some stuff out there that's engaging and getting that response back rather than just generating things because you have to. I would almost tell people don't do that, that that's all you can do. Just don't do it. Maybe reply to things and be part of the conversation that's online.

Don't put that kind of stuff out there because I feel like it's really hard to come back from that. Yeah, finding your voice, I think that's so important. I'm sure you guys talk about that a lot with companies and marketing, but if you lose your company, your brand's voice, I mean, who are you? People get so confused so quickly.

You just start posting stuff that does nothing to do with your core mission and your core values and then all of a sudden people are like, I don't even know what this company does and you've lost sort of their trust in you as a company. Ben and I talk about this all the time like keeping that trust, keeping people since that like, oh, they know what they're doing.

They know who they are. Availability, yeah, that's everything. People are getting it with like 5,000 advertising messages a day. And if you sound like everybody else or they can't identify who you are and why they need to hire you or what your value proposition is or what your brand is, I mean, it's gone.

It's lost completely. I 100% agree. And automation, if you're hitting people with like bad messages, it's diluting your brand. Your brand quality, your brand value is going down in people's eyes. It's actually a negative effect.

And Mark's talked a lot about the laser focus marketing and really that messaging that cuts through everything. It's so important. Like a lot of the marketing that you want to do, you want to even go back to like, who are you first and how do you want to communicate yourself before any of this stuff happens?

And I think a lot of people are in a hurry and they're just skipping it and they're just pushing something out there, hoping something sticks on the wall. I think that the pendulum is going to swing the other way at some point because I think it already is. I think people are just realizing it. So damn, this LinkedIn fail could have been a whole episode because I bring us back.

Let's talk about it. And not only are you all right from OGGN's point of view, we've experimented using AI to produce content. And in the very beginning, like two years ago, it actually would rank. It would do pretty well. Now the algorithms, at least for us on LinkedIn,

I think are recognizing when it's AI produced content. It goes nowhere. So not only are you diluting your brand and you're losing your audience, you're wasting your time. I love your idea, Ben. If not, just reply.

Engage in conversation with a real person online. That's worth way more than AI-generated content. Just that's generic. It's out there. So this was solid, guys. Unfortunately, it's time to shut it down.

Ben, Tray, thank you for joining. This is awesome. We have much more to come with you and your company. So stay tuned, folks. Matt, it was good seeing you, even though we don't usually do this stuff remotely anymore. It is time to get out of here.

So remember, folks, make a difference and not a sale. Check us out next week for another enriching and cheeky episode of oil and gas sales and marketing podcast, a production of the Oil and Gas Global Network. Learn more at oggn.com.