Why do young participants leave a continuing education course that has only been running for twenty minutes? And why does walking past the industry stands feel to many like running the gauntlet? In episode #136 of the podcast 'Queens & Sons of Dentistry', recorded at Dental Summer in Timmendorfer Strand, the Berlin-based dentist Valeria Sabet analyses what organisers and the dental industry have to adjust to if they want to reach the incoming generation of dentists.
Up to 320 dopamine hits per hour
Sabet sees the core of the problem in the changed attention span – a result of social media culture. On platforms such as Instagram or TikTok, every swipe delivers the next dopamine hit; the brain becomes accustomed to seeing something new again and again at short intervals. According to the figures she cites in the podcast, young people using a smartphone reach up to 320 dopamine hits per hour – before social media, when watching television for example, it was perhaps ten per hour. This leap has consequences for every in-person event: anyone expected to follow a talk for over an hour, with the next speaker following on directly without a break, is at some point simply exhausted. Sabet reports meeting colleagues outside at Dental Summer even though their course had begun only twenty minutes earlier – with the explanation that they could not take any more just then.
The ideal talk: short and with the key message first
From this observation Sabet derives concrete rules for speakers. In her assessment, a talk should not exceed 15 to 20 minutes. The key message belongs at the beginning: naming the problem and supplying the solution straight away, so that listeners know from the outset where the journey is heading. Anyone who places the message only at the end must assume, in Sabet's words, that the younger generation will no longer hear it because they switched off long ago. The slides also have to change: less text, almost 'meme-culture-like', so that the core statement on the image is recognised immediately.
Mini pitches instead of coffee-break approaches
Sabet is particularly critical of the classic interplay between congress and industry: the exhibitors wait outside for the coffee break – at precisely the moment when participants feel they have already heard too much and want to drink their coffee in peace. On top of this comes a characteristic of the younger generations: millennials and Generation Z alike do not want to speak to strangers as long as they have no idea what those people are actually about. Her counter-proposal: after a specialist talk illuminating a problem, two industry partners with different solution approaches each receive a mini pitch of 90 seconds to five minutes. Participants then get a few minutes to discuss the matter among themselves – women prefer to make decisions in group exchange anyway, through social feedback. In this way a genuine hook arises for approaching a stand deliberately – or an informed decision not to. That is in any case better than enforced stand visits: with a wink, Sabet reports on the 'illegal stamp mafia' – companies that have obtained their own stamp sets in order to stamp participant cards several times over.
What formats such as Dental Summer do differently
That it can be done differently is demonstrated for Sabet by Dental Summer itself: the average age there is, by her estimate, around ten years below that of comparable events. As reasons she cites many breaks, varied event formats – going out to celebrate in the evening or jumping into the water – and the certainty that a break will come after half an hour to an hour at the latest. The 150 exhibitors can also be explored spread over several days instead of in a single bout of sensory overload.
Young teams and social media as a success factor
Asked about companies that are doing it well, Sabet names several examples. BFS has built up a very young team, gives its social media team a great deal of freedom and actively approaches young female dentists such as herself or the Generation Z dentist Anna Neubart in order to invite them to talk with the management. Straumann runs its own network for women with 'Women in Implantology'; Camlog is also making a good start in the direction of the younger generation. She describes the opposite model just as clearly: an estimated 90 per cent of firms take care of neither students nor assistant dentists – yet come flocking 'like vultures' as soon as self-employment is on the horizon. The loss of trust in this gap is enormous, because everyone still remembers exactly who took care of them when they had nothing themselves. And a company without a social media team risks, according to her account, the worst-case scenario: she describes the case of a business that treated a younger person condescendingly – without suspecting that this person had a large following and made the incident public.
For organisers, speakers and manufacturers, a clear picture emerges from this: anyone wanting to reach Generation Z has to condense content, create genuine occasions for conversation and be approachable digitally – long before students become practice founders.