Skift Take
Some industries are much slower to change than others, and the meetings and events industry is one of them despite strides made by some early adopters.
Reggie Aggarwal, founder and CEO of Cvent, a cloud-based events-management software platform, describes a meetings and events industry that is ripe for disruption.
It's an industry where conference attendees -- equipped with their mobile phones, tablets and higher digital expectations -- often drag events organizers kicking and screaming into the future (much as Skift discussed in this week's new Trends Report, The Future of Conventions).
"They're showing up with pitchforks and torches at the front gates of meeting planners and saying, 'Hey, I don't want to carry around brochures. I want everything on my mobile app, and so forth,'" says Aggarwal, who took the company public in August 2013 and raised $117 million.
Aggarwal's Cvent is automating the request for proposal (RFP) process and envisions the day when conference attendees arrive at an event, are automatically registered, and have their event experience so personalized that they get recommendations on which booths to visit on the trade show floor and which ones to avoid at all costs.
There will be a tipping point one day, Aggarwal advises, but it hasn't arrived yet.
Skift caught up with Aggarwal in Los Angeles on the trade show floor of the Phocuswright conference this week. An edited version of the interview follows:
Skift: What are some of the big trends you're seeing in the meetings space?
Reggie Aggarwal: There's a lot of changes going on in the meetings space. We like to say it's the biggest industry you never heard of with $565 billion to spend at your own meetings and if you look at travel, for example, it's $1.4 trillion and meetings falls within it. Almost 30% of travel is people going because of meetings or groups. It's a big space and it's changed a lot in a lot of areas.
It's a progressive change. It's what I call disruptive but disruption takes time. It hasn't been like the online travel agencies where they came fast and furious.
Skift: It's more of a conservative industry right?
Aggarwal: It is, yes. The reason is because it's more corporate. Everything is moving to the cloud, of course. Mobile in particular. It's transforming everything. It's something that we call the experience economy. What's happening is the experience economy is leveraging mobile and it's leveraging mobile simply because everyone who travels has mobile phones.
They're showing up with pitchforks and torches at the front gates of meeting planners and saying, "Hey, I don't want to car
