Skift Take
The newest event tech is getting better at connecting attendees, establishing the business case for events, and sourcing more creative venues. But CMOs still don't have any really good platforms to track the entire attendee journey to help them develop solid one-to-one marketing messaging.
Event technology encompasses many different platforms and processes that meeting planners weave into the canvas of the attendee user experience in myriad ways.
Today, event tech is especially shifting how planners design conferences in terms of venue selection, attendee and brand engagement, and end-to-end event management.
As much as we hoped, 2016 will not go down as the year when the meetings industry shifted from its deeply embedded analog ways toward the light of a tech-enabled future. There's still a lot of education needed in the industry to drive higher adoption rates among meeting attendees and prove the deliverables for meeting planners.
According to a Global Business Travel Association (GBTA) study released last week, conducted in partnership with Lanyon, only 57 percent of planners use some type of meeting management technology, even though 96 percent reported that they find value in the software. Furthermore, a mere 58 percent of people who plan meetings and don't currently use event tech see the potential for technology to eventually improve their programs.
Meaning, 42 percent of those responsible for bringing people together to drive business forward, and who don’t use technology presently, are firmly ensconced in the past looking backward.
Skift spoke with a number of established event tech leaders at the IMEX America meetings-industry trade show last month for an update on how meeting planners are using digital platforms to marry online and offline connectivity in 2016.
Shift Toward Data-Driven Business Outcomes
One of the primary goals in event tech today revolves around leveraging data captured at conferences to align meeting design and business goals throughout the entire attendee journey. Event tech companies are providing CMOs with a wealth of data, but everyone is still trying to figure out how best to connect the dots.
“A couple years ago, event technology was all about engaging the attendees in a mobile and digital way because that's what the attendees wanted, so the purpose really wasn't to gather data necessarily,” said Emily He, CMO of DoubleDutch, a mobile app and event analytics company. “It was really to care for the attendees to give them a more memorable and satisfactory experience.”
Today, because event tech platforms capture so much more data on attendee behavior, he said, the focus has shifted toward “linking event activity and business outcomes” to inform overall event strate
