COVID-19 marked a permanent shift in the events industry—one many felt was badly needed—and we are humbled and motivated by the opportunity to play a role in its evolution.
Ever since we founded Bizzabo, in the dawn of the age of mobile technology, just about every industry around us has gone through a significant transformation. When the company was founded, we were still phoning taxi dispatchers, renting movies from a store, buying (or burning) CDs, and doing most, if not all, of our shopping in person with cash.
Much about our world is dramatically different now, but until recently the events industry remained largely the same. Previously, the industry had no external pressure to evolve, facing no outside threats to its supremacy, with no reason to believe change was safer than the status quo. Unlike other industries, disruption would have likely never come in the form of a smaller, nimbler, well-funded start-up, and the industry could have continued on gently tiptoeing toward progress at a safe speed for the foreseeable future.
Instead, our disruptor came in the form of a global pandemic, and now events will be rushing toward the kind of innovations that will make the industry more resilient, more sustainable, and more impactful moving forward.
The Event Impact Gap™
Event professionals now have a mandate to create immersive, personalized hybrid experiences, combining their deep knowledge of in-person event strategy with the opportunities presented by digital tools and capabilities. Unfortunately, many still struggle to deliver on that mandate.
The challenges that organizers face can be summed up in what we call the Event Impact Gap™: the enormous chasm between the aspiration that event organizers have to create immersive, connected, and personalized human experiences and their ability to deliver them with their current technology, skills, and processes. From our own experiences and from speaking to hundreds of event professionals, we've determined that four major problems have caused the Event Impact Gap™:
1 Data: Customer and event data are either missing or captured in isolation, so it's hard to see and measure progress toward business outcomes.
2 Audience Engagement: Event leaders do not have the tools or frameworks to truly connect with audiences. As a result, audiences remain siloed and not truly present.
3 People and Process: Event professionals find it challenging to stay up to date with the operating know-how and the concierge-level service needed in this evolving event landscape.
4 Technology: The available tools are neither intuitive nor truly flexible, preventing event leaders from being able to design unique experiences in a hybrid world.
These critical problems have only been underscored by the opportunities and challenges of the hybrid era where brands, enterprises, and nonprofits depend on event professionals to create personalized, multichannel experiences that deliver measurable results, regardless of the attendees' location.
Throughout this book, we will review ideas, advice, and examples around these four problems of the Event Impact Gap™.
Data
Data has the potential to capture, connect, and leverage event leaders' most valuable customer and experience data, but many event professionals still struggle to effectively utilize their data. Doing so, however, becomes even more important in a virtual environment, where data is more readily available.
Data has impacted nearly every industry in a dramatic way (and arguably none more than digital marketing), yet live events seemed relatively immune to the data revolution—at least until now. As technology becomes a bigger piece of the live events puzzle, data will turn ROE from a gut feeling into a precise measurement, and that measurement will help the industry articulate its value in precise terms.
Rexson Serrao, the senior director of marketing technology (brand and events) for Salesforce, explains that he, like many others in the industry, had gotten accustomed to repeating the previous year's success and had not really taken a hard look at the company's data assets. It wasn't until the disruption of the pandemic that he began to question conventional wisdom, specifically as it concerned data.
“One of the most important takeaways is, go back to the first principles, go back to the why, get back to the basics, and look at the data in a whole new way, not just reporting on stats, but looking at some of those insights,” he said, on an episode of the IN-PERSON podcast published back in June 2021. “You start to challenge the data a little bit and start to ask, ‘I get what the statistic is, but what did it actually drive?’”
“One virtual event was able to generate, just in terms of raw count, more data points than the entirety of our in-person portfolio last year,” Rexson explains. “Trying to make sense of that really was the biggest challenge.”
Data has the potential to inform internal decision making, improve audience experiences, and ultimately drive ROE. Doing so will require the collection and utilization of basic metrics like conversion rates and speaker performance; engagement metrics like networking effectiveness and satisfaction scores; and growth results like pipeline acceleration, communication engagement, and sponsor ROI.
Realizing the full potential of this trove of data remains a significant barrier to closing the Event Impact Gap™, and one we will explore further in Part 2 with the help of a variety of industry leaders.
Audience Engagement
Moving forward, audiences are going to have far greater access to far more events through virtual and hybrid event formats. As seen during the pandemic, however, attendees will also have the option to attend only the one or two sessions that are specifically relevant to them, rather than commit to a full day's (or multiple days') worth of scheduled programming. As a result, organizers will seek to deliver highly targeted and highly relevant content that has real value to a niche audience. That is a far cry from the event programming of the past.
Combining the availability of data and the need to deliver real value to attendees will eventually lead to a highly personalized event experience. Rather than delivering the same message to 15,000 guests, events will increasingly offer those same attendees 15,000 unique experiences based on their specific needs. Artificial intelligence tools are already improving the way in which prospective attendees discover relevant content, speakers, and networking opportunities.
Moving forward, we envision the industry adopting a model similar to content streaming platforms, where attendees are recommended content based on their interests and previous habits. Rather than spending hours digging through agendas to find the handful of presentations that offer real substantive value, organizers will utilize big data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence tools to put the most relevant content front and center. Such tools are already being utilized by content streaming platforms, e-commerce brands, and even social media platforms to provide personalization at scale.
In Part 3 we'll discuss how event professionals can close the gap around personalized and engaging attendee experiences using examples from the dawn of the live studio audience, eSports, the NBA bubble, content streaming platforms, and original studies conducted on virtual and hybrid event programs.
People and Process
Overcoming the challenges and meeting the opportunities presented by the hybrid era will require event professionals to develop new skills and further develop some of their existing expertise.
Historically, we referred to event professionals as planners and managers, and as their titles imply, they were largely responsible for logistics. Moving forward, event professionals will still need to manage traditional responsibilities associated with in-person events, such as venue contracts, catering,