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CHAPTER 4 The Age of Disruption

In the previous chapter, we outlined four challenges presented by the Event Impact Gap™—the gap between the event that event organizers want to achieve and what current tools, and knowledge with those tools, enable them to achieve.

One of these challenges is the ability to capture, connect, and leverage event leaders' most valuable customer and experience data. Key to understanding how the events industry can overcome this challenge is understanding how new technology and the data that they can surface have completely disrupted events as we know them.

Disruption is a word that gets tossed around so much in the tech industry that it's almost a joke to title a chapter about it. But the 21st century, at least up to this point, has truly been shaped by technological disruption. So much of our world has been changed so dramatically in such a short period of time that it's easy to forget how far we've come. Whatever friction you experience with a product or brand today could be solved by a start-up you've never heard of tomorrow; in 10 years, that same start-up could grow to dwarf the legacy incumbent.

We now live in an economy where just about every industry has to adapt or else risk obsolescence. The typical examples include taxis (Uber), hotels (Airbnb), music (Spotify, Apple Music), and video stores (Netflix, Apple TV, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video), but just about every industry is facing some kind of disruptive competitor—one that is using data to gain an edge on their established veterans. When people say that every company today is a tech company, what they mean is that every company needs to undergo a digital transformation and adopt a data-driven strategy in order to compete in the 21st century.

The eyewear industry—once dominated by a small handful of global conglomerates like Luxottica—is now struggling to compete with start-ups like Warby Parker. Warby Parker was founded as a website that sold prescription lenses at fair prices with a strong focus on digital marketing and email communications. They also leveraged a popular try-before-you-buy program as a way to earn consumer trust while building a database of user preferences to help inform their future selections. As of 2020, Warby Parker had 125 stores across North America and a $3 billion valuation (Crook, 2020).

Replacing razor blades and shaving accessories used to be similarly costly and inconvenient, and up until recently the industry was dominated by a small group of global players. Today, subscription services like Harry's, which was recently valued at $1.7 billion (Bertoni, 2021), and Dollar Shave Club, which was sold to Unilever in 2016 for $1 billion (CNBC, 2019), use data to build online communities around shaving and grooming with millions of members.

Even grocery stores and gas stations offer incentives and rewards programs that collect data and tailor their experiences to the individual consumer, with deals and promotions that respond to consumer shopping habits. Whether in banking or education, prescription medication or insurance, the prevailing theme of the 21st century is that the organizations that best utilize data to improve the customer experience win the day.

This trend of offering bespoke services at scale is often referred to as mass personalization, and we believe this is where the event industry is heading.

For example, the team behind Salesforce's Dreamforce uses behavioral data from its virtual events to say, “Hey attendee, I saw you do A; I think maybe you should go watch B,” explained Salesforce's Rexson Serrao on an episode of the IN-PERSON podcast published in June 2021. “I think the future of personalization is really merging it with this idea of journey.” From before the event begins to while it's happening to after the event concludes, organizers should tailor the experience of attendees based on their unique interests and needs. Otherwise, “you're missing an opportunity to take them on their personal journey with your brand.”

In other words, data is and will continue to shape the experiences we provide to attendees—before, during, and after the event day.

Looking back at our example of data disruptors (Spotify, Airbnb, Netflix, Amazon, etc.), we see that industry heavyweights that believe they are immune to personalization are eventually (and inevitably) proven wrong, while those that see the writing on the wall and adapt accordingly ultimately thrive. Data, when gathered, stored, and utilized properly, can help businesses of all shapes and sizes improve the customer experience, streamline their internal processes, and improve a wide array of business outcomes.

This pattern has been repeated countless times in a range of industries in recent decades, yet ours has largely remained immune to such changes—at least, until now.

The current evolution of data collection and utilization has the potential to elevate events from a standalone channel and a “black box” of data to a powerful insight generator for digital marketers, sales teams, executives, and other stakeholders. In contrast to its previous standing as a team that was overlooked in the past, events have become much more of a priority because of the never-before-seen data that we're now able to utilize.

As Devin Cleary—who led event programs at HubSpot and served as vice president of experiential marketing at the enterprise software firm PTC before joining Bizzabo as vice president of global events in March 2021—puts it, “Each event is a moment in time where you've got the largest pool of people together, and you're able to engage your audience and test out new ideas. As a result, events are able to surface data on attendees that other teams within organizations would otherwise not have access to.”

The Attendee Experience

Whether they're conscious of it or not, attendees, sponsors, exhibitors, speakers, and other stakeholders put up with a lot of inconveniences when they attended events in the past, inconveniences they were trained not to accept elsewhere. After all, if your local café allows you to order ahead on an app to avoid waiting in a short line to pay for your coffee, why should you spend hours in line to get a good seat at the conference keynote?

“There is an expectation for a consumer-grade experience, and events have been anything but in the past,” explains Nicola Kastner, vice president and global head of event strategy at SAP. “We are sophisticated digital consumers in our personal lives, but we check those expectations at the door when we go to an event; we're okay with a less than seamless experience. Standing in line to register, standing in line to check into the hotel, trying to figure out how to build your calendar, and then making sure your mobile app is working—it's overwhelming.”

Nicola suggests that enhanced customer experiences tied to countless everyday products and services have raised the bar on consumer expectations. Previously, when it came to events, these inconveniences were excused as part of the trade-off. Attendees generally believed that events were worth the time, money, and headaches that came with them.

According to Nicola, after more than a year of attending events virtually—thus avoiding those inconveniences—many attendees will begin to question that tradeoff and demand a more personalized, efficient, and convenient experience in the future.

“What we're realizing is that the stagnation, the consistency, and the staleness that was ongoing prior to the pandemic, that can't reemerge,” adds Devin Cleary. “If companies choose that route in terms of the safety play, they are not going to be around much longer; their consumers are going to choose competitors to invest their time in, because they are trying to meet them halfway, where their customers are, in the format, style, and duration they prefer.”

As we discussed in Part 1, the industry has long been immune to the forces of disruption that have upended countless other businesses in the past 10 or 20 years because the model works naturally; if you put buyers and sellers in a room together, business outcomes will flow.

According to entrepreneur and events industry veteran Marco Giberti, “Even if you don't do a fantastic data job pre- and post-event, if you facilitate those connections face-to-face, most likely your community will say it was a great investment of [their] time and money; they'll come back next year because the human connection face-to-face is such a powerful thing that it adds tremendous speed into the deal nurturing and closing in comparison to other tools. That's why the industry was, in some way, reasonably isolated from digital transformation and digital disruption—because the model works.”

Business-to-business (B2B) events have always been about relationship building—and that won't change any time soon. But with the rise of virtual and hybrid events, and the data they yield, we are seeing new ways to expedite that process and increase the value each attendee extracts from their participation.

Just as attendees stand to benefit from this evolution of data spurred by hybrid event strategies, so do event experience leaders and the organizations they are a part of.

As Marco puts it, “If in the past your strategy was 10,000 people in Vegas once a year, in the future it's going to be 2,000 people in Vegas once a year, 500 people in three cities, and 10 virtual events. And because of that combination of data knowledge and activation, your job and your budget and your return on investment will be significantly better than in the past. That's the potential big change that we're going to see in the future because of the crash course we just had during COVID, moving everything virtual.”

In fact, many event organizers are already seeing the benefits of increased data accessibility and utilization. Take, for example, the events team at the AI technology and enablement firm DataRobot, which used real-time analytics to streamline its virtual attendee experience and leveraged its event platform's Salesforce integration to make decisions about future events. The company was able to use insights like who stayed for the shortest or longest amount of time to determine which attendees would be best primed for event follow-up as potential customers and which sessions were most relevant to their audience.

Through the process of digital transformation, events are becoming more cost-effective, more effective in achieving stated outcomes, more integrated with digital marketing efforts, more demonstrably valuable to organizations that host events, and better positioned to offer a better, more personalized experience for attendees. Moving forward, CMOs and marketers will expect to be able to measure the return on events (ROE) at an even more granular level. Attendees will expect a personalized experience that maximizes the time and resources they dedicate to events. Sponsors will demand better insights into their audiences to target their messaging more effectively.

Fortunately, as we saw with the events team at DataRobot, we as an industry already have a head start. Unlike Warby Parker or Harry's or even Netflix, we are approaching the starting line of this digital transformation journey with a trove of data, a network of engaged users, and buy-in from decision-makers. All we need now are event organizers who understand the fundamentals of how to collect, store, and utilize that data effectively.