The format war is over, and the result will surprise nobody who spent 2021 squinting at a grid of muted faces. In-person won, decisively. The live room has reclaimed the centre of the post-pandemic events mix, and the organisations that swore during lockdown they would never fly 400 people to a conference again are flying 400 people to conferences again. Yet look closely at any serious events program and virtual is still in the kit somewhere — an all-hands here, a speaker series there, a line in the budget that survives every cost review. Virtual did not die. It specialised.
Which makes the useful question in 2026 no longer "which format is better?" but "what is this event for?"
Purpose decides, not budget
Format choice gets argued on scale and budget, but purpose is the variable that actually matters, and it is the one we push clients to settle first. If the session exists to inspire, motivate or celebrate, book the room; no webcam reproduces the charge of a live crowd responding in real time. If it exists to inform, educate or simply reach people, virtual is not the consolation prize. It is frequently the better tool.
That one distinction settles most format arguments before they begin. A sales kickoff meant to make a scattered team feel like one team is a motivation exercise — it wants bodies in a room. The compliance briefing for the same team is an information exercise, and flying 400 people interstate for it is theatre with a travel budget.
What virtual became
Three roles, essentially. Virtual is the budget shock-absorber — the format organisers reach for when the program has to survive a cost review with its ambitions intact. It is the distributed-workforce tool: all-hands meetings and sales kickoffs are its natural stronghold, because that audience was never going to be in one place anyway. And it is how you put a genuinely global name in front of your people without airfares or a three-day travel window.
The fees reflect all this. Virtual engagements typically run at 50 to 70 per cent of the in-person fee, since the travel and the time commitment fall away. You can argue — we occasionally do — that a fee should reflect the value delivered rather than the postcode it was delivered from, but the market settled at a discount regardless, and the upside for organisers is real. The budget that once bought a single annual keynote can now fund a quarterly speaker series.
One warning before you bank the savings. Virtual is harder for the speaker, not easier. A physical room generates energy for free — laughter travels, attention is visible, silence has texture. On camera, the speaker must manufacture all of that alone, into a lens, and not every excellent stage speaker translates. The gap catches organisers out every season. Demand evidence of virtual craft — polls, live chat Q&A, breakout facilitation — rather than assuming it travels with the showreel. Then hold the production line: a mandatory tech rehearsal, hard-wired internet, broadcast-quality audio, and recording rights licensed separately, typically in 30-to-90-day windows. Keep the virtual keynote itself to around 30 minutes plus Q&A — the settled convention, and a sound one — and keep the whole online program short. Screen fatigue is a design constraint, not a moral failing of your audience.
Hybrid is two events wearing one name
Hybrid gets described as the compromise option. It is nothing of the sort — it is the most expensive and most difficult format on the menu. Our view is blunt: hybrid is two productions and two audiences wearing one name. Full in-room production plus broadcast infrastructure, serving two attention patterns that have almost nothing in common. Fund one event and promise two, and both audiences will notice which one you actually cared about.
The classic failure is attention asymmetry. The physical room always wins the facilitator's attention — online attendees sit through tech failures nobody in the venue notices, get skipped in Q&A through simple distance bias, and quietly log off, invisible to a stage that never registered them arriving. The fixes are equally blunt. Appoint a dedicated online facilitator whose only job is the remote audience. Design the whole session virtual-first, so the room adapts to the stream rather than the reverse. Or drop the pretence and run two separate events, each built properly for its audience. What you cannot do is point a camera at the back of a ballroom and call it hybrid.
And the 2026 twist, for anyone still treating in-person as the expensive indulgence: the live room is gaining value precisely because synthetic content now floods every other channel. Your people can generate a competent summary of almost any talk without leaving their desks. What they cannot generate is a room full of colleagues reacting to an unscripted human moment in real time — which is quietly becoming the strongest argument for paying for one. Virtual for what must be known. In-person for what must be felt. Hybrid only when you are prepared to fund both properly.