Deepak Choudhary is one of the best in the event management business. In 2002, he co-founded India’s first Event Management school named EMDI. He was also the Founder of IISM, India’s first sports management school. Later, he went on to establish so many things throughout his illustrious career.
Deepak Choudhary is now the Co-Founder and Director of Event Capital, India’s leading Live Event Intellectual Property rights company with Laqshya Media Group, which he established in 2013. Over the years, Event Capital has partnered with Bollywood Music Project, India Bridal Fashion Week, Times Travel Show to name a few.
Deepak Choudhary talked extensively about IPs (Intellectual Properties), the role of IPs in event management, and what’s the future of event management in this current scenario. According to him, “ It looks from the outside that events have become irrelevant, but that’s not the case. Sure, they are going through a phase where they are struggling and it’s going to be difficult for the next one and a half years. But event management will get back on its feet soon.”
During the time of this pandemic at Event Capital, they decided to go back to basics, that way they can keep events and event management very relevant. As the director of Event Capital, Choudhary said, “Let’s go back to three basic areas which are to understand technology, understand the digital medium and we already have IPs, where we have already audiences.” He talked about event IPs and how these have an audience, an ecosystem and a community and how one can build them gradually and finally monetize the same as a business. He also emphasized on the fact that one needs to satisfy his/ her existing clients or audiences instead of bringing new ones.
What are events? From a seminar to a wedding reception to a roadshow to a cricket match, everything is an event. Choudhary suggested many ways one can build a career in event management. He said, “You need four kinds of skill sets while you define a career in event management. One is a mindset where you can think creatively, second is the marketing capability where you can bring more consumers in, third is sales where you have to understand the revenue and fourth is production and technical. But I suggest you don’t go for the fourth one. You should choose the other three as career paths but you can have the fourth one as a skill set”.
Choudhary also shared some information about ‘Edutainment’, an online virtual exhibition where a prospective student can check about other institutions and interact with their counsellors and at the same time various people from the media industry will come and interact with the students virtually.
He also mentioned about the social influencers nowadays, the likes of Bhuvan Bam and CarryMinati and how they can create a festival or event on the current topics. He added, “They always follow the current topics and create an event out of them. That way they can get more fan following. These social influencers have created this social nation across YouTube and other platforms, and now social nation on the digital platform has more reach than IPs on the digital platform”.
Speaking about the importance of education for event management, Choudhary said, “While education is important for each career you choose, for event management, event education is important. Event education is needed from the perspective of networking. You get to meet the whole system, you get to work on events and you get trained by the people from the industry. So, automatically, the importance of education falls in place. I founded EMDI in 2002 after realizing the need for education in event management. We’ve given birth to many industries with this education”.
Lastly, commenting on the situation and how people can improvise in the next 12 months, Choudhary said, “Growth of a person happens by three things – meeting new people, reading and going to new places. Now the third one is not possible at the moment but do the first two things very aggressively. Read as much as possible and don’t wait for things to happen, and you have to get the idea and jump onto things. Lastly, you have to communicate with lots of people, gain more knowledge, and watch more online content”.
The author, Debkinkar Maity is associated with Adamas University Media School.
