Event Success. Alon Alroy

will also need to acquire an expanded range of capabilities. To close the Event Impact Gap™, event professionals will need to pivot their focus from the planning and coordinating of in-person events to designing experiences for a diverse, hybrid audience.

Aided by the increased availability of data and the enhanced tools at their disposal, event professionals will be better prepared to shift their focus toward outcomes and experiences. Thriving in this landscape will require new skills, new teams, and new approaches to event strategy. Event professionals will need a base level understanding of and comfort with data, sales and marketing, and digital content production. They will also need a range of soft skills like communication, collaboration, and creative problem solving.

      We will dive into the new skills, new roles, and new teams that will be required to close the Event Impact Gap™ in Part 4 with the help of industry leaders behind the event strategies of brands like GitHub, IBM, Money 20/20, and Cannes-Lions.

      Technology

      Closing the Event Impact Gap™ and delivering a successful hybrid event will also require adopting tools and technologies that can help bring your vision to life. In this new environment, flexibility is vital, both in enabling event teams to craft a truly unique experience for their audiences and in enabling those audiences to craft their preferred multichannel attendee experience.

      Up until recently, event teams had a small handful of vendors to choose from, but in the wake of the pandemic there are now a wide range of options, including some traditional incumbents, some newer start-ups, and even a few adjacent technology providers that have recently entered the events space.

Knowing whom to partner with in this more fragmented technology environment is no easy task, but it is a vital one because your virtual and hybrid events are only as powerful as the technology behind them. In Part 5 we dive into the technology landscape to help you determine which provider is best prepared to bring your vision to life, by exploring the history of event technology, how the landscape has changed in the wake of COVID-19, the questions to ask yourself before choosing an event technology partner, what features to consider, how to navigate the onboarding process, and what the future of event technology holds.

      All of these changes, however, are just the tip of the iceberg. After decades (perhaps even centuries) of being relatively closed off to innovation, the live events industry is going to evolve suddenly in the short term as it catches up to the rest of the digital world—and then it will keep evolving well into the future.

      It took a desperate situation, some quick thinking, and a whole lot of luck for us as a company to make that quick transition and meet the moment. Now every player in the live events industry is going to have to do the same. The old tried-and-true road map is now a relic of the past. We know we don't have all the answers, but fortunately we have developed close relationships with many thought leaders across the industry who can help show us the way. As we navigate this uncertain future, we intend to use these pages to share some of what we've learned, as well as the advice we've received from some of the brightest minds in the industry, in hopes that we can help be a guide for others as well.

PART II Data

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