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#WeAreCondeNast - Head of Strategy & Experience
28 September 2020
Kim Vigilia from WIRED U.K. takes us behind the scenes on the WIRED Health:Tech conference.
WIRED U.K.’s first virtual conference, WIRED Health:Tech, took place last Tuesday. We caught up with Kim Vigilia, head of strategy and experience at WIRED U.K., to find out how it went.
Born in the Philippines and raised in New York, Kim studied advertising, communications and behavioural psychology at Boston University. After traveling across the U.S. and Europe in her mid-twenties, she realized she wanted to make a more permanent move across the pond. She transferred from the New York-based events company where she was working and settled in London, continuing her work in digital strategy and later co-founding a niche conference company. When the opening at WIRED came up, Kim couldn’t miss the opportunity to work for a brand that encapsulated the things she loved: the future, startups and nascent trends.
Kim will be celebrating her fourth year at WIRED in November and has just successfully wrapped up WIRED U.K.’s first virtual conference. We talked with her about her role, and the challenges of planning a virtual event.
What does a typical day look like for you? At the beginning of an event cycle, my days are dedicated to developing the event product, making a strategy and getting everything into a plan. Closer to the event, I could be doing anything from sending out marketing campaigns through 20 media partners who are all promoting the event; writing the script for the virtual broadcast; fixing the website or running a content call with a speaker, and you know… lots of little things. I manage a team and make sure that everyone is working together, collaborating, communicating, and that we're all still happy to keep pushing forward together as a unit. I also make sure that everything we're doing is tied to driving revenue.
What is the most surprising thing people may not expect about your role? The events team works in between commercial and editorial, so I have to understand the editorial vision, respect it and help bring it to life, and I have to support and deliver the commercial partnerships. I think when someone sees what I do, it’s usually based on the end product, so they might not have realized how much legwork and planning happens behind the scenes to make it look seamless.
What is the most rewarding part of your job? I see everything from the very beginning; from when speakers are being confirmed by the editorial team, or when we’re just planning the content for a 20-page delegate book. For me, it’s most rewarding to be a part of that entire process and see how the concept comes to life, and how customers engage with our events.
How has the pandemic affected your work? My first concern was to make sure our products and teams were protected and that we kept our partners happy. The first thing I did when we went into lockdown was to train a team of Zoom super-users to be able to shift what they were doing from on-site events to being able to technically handle virtual events. Within the first 10 days, we were able to put together a proof of concept for what the style could be. Then three to four weeks later, we presented the first public WIRED U.K. virtual briefing, which was 25 minutes long.
Our first WIRED Health:Tech virtual conference, which took place last Tuesday, grew from that model of “Right, we're in lockdown, no one can go in person, so what can we put out there in order to keep people still engaged?” So the pandemic did change how we did things, but it didn't change my job. My job is always about how I bring content to life, engage and create experiences. I just had to find a different platform.
What role do virtual experiences play in engaging our brands’ fans? It’s important to maintain contact with our community. With events in particular, if you pause for a year, there are so many people waiting to take your spot and it’s really hard to get back in. Wired Health:Tech was our way of saying, “We might be doing things differently, but we’re still here, we still have an amazing, compelling speaker faculty. We’re still highlighting and celebrating the innovations of these disruptors.” The speaker faculty for Wired Heath:Tech was astounding. We had the rockstars of the science and medical world and they all joined in real time. It wasn’t a pre-recorded, I-can-watch-it-whenever event. You had to log in at a particular time, bring your notebook and prepare to watch the broadcast live.