The Meeting Professional

meet those needs better,” he explains.

For innovation to become a priority in companies that organize or host events, compensation models may have to change. In the for-profit event sector, Kim Rivielle suggests rewarding managers for innovation and setting aside funds and resources for implementing new ideas and shoring up failures rather than penalizing innovators. Tony Compton supports compensating corporate event marketers based on the number of “revenue opportunities” that are derived from the live events they produce.

Compton also believes that event hosts can be instrumental in making meetings more effective by taking specific steps to convert the attendees at corporate sales events into evangelists and loyalists. First, he suggests curating audiences by working closely with account managers “to get the right people into the room.” Next, he envisions working with attendees to not only help them understand the challenges, solutions, content and case studies at the event, but actually train them “to be fantastic storytellers and great communicators so they can tell the world about your product,” he says.

Shawn Pierce believes that data and metrics are integral to making events more effective and profitable. “It’s time to think about an event in its totality—measuring the KPIs for the attendee, providing him with a recap of where he went and what he did at the show so he can prove the value of attendance to his boss or telling exhibitors how they performed against their peers and what they can do to improve their performance and grow their brand experience,” he explains.

vendors to execute the event. “You have the technology that it takes to run the event day to day. You have the technology required to sell the event and you have contracts with the various big vendors, such as registration. It’s very fragmented and a model that is ripe for a little disruption,” Shawn Pierce explains.

Keys to Innovation

To combat what he refers to as “cookie cutter events in a zombie age,” Alexander Garay, managing director and CEO of NextView-Events in Orlando, recommends changing things up—the format, agenda, speakers, layout or “whatever it takes”—regularly. Crafting an event with “pizzazz” means thinking about it year round, looking at the culture of the company, building profiles of audience members and using data to understand attendee behaviors and preferences. “There should always be room for innovation. If the company is against innovation, that’s a red flag,” he says.

Greg Topalian advocates going against some commonly held assumptions in order to reach new audiences and appeal to the changing opinions of exhibitors. “It used to be that the trade buyer was worth millions [to exhibitors at a business-to-business trade show] but the consumer buyer was worth zero,” he says. Now, technology has empowered consumers and brands are putting a lot of money into getting their attention. Consequently, trade show organizers are reevaluating end-users and, in some cases, thinking about how to leverage the public at trade events.

Innovation requires asking the right ques-
tions, Topalian advises. “If we only ask [exhib-
itors and attendees] ‘How satisfied are you
with the show?’ instead of ‘ What do you really
want?’ we’ll never understand their chal-
lenges enough to solve their problems,” he
says. Topalian uses the analogy of the impact
that the ride-sharing service Uber unexpect-
edly had on the taxi industry to illustrate his
point. “If we [in events] are the taxi industry
and are still asking customers, ‘How satisfied
are you with the taxi ride?’ we’re not asking
about their transportation needs and we run
the risk of someone else coming along to
Innovation can also be outsourced. Swiss
company MCI has opened up a strategic
event management operation—primarily
targeting trade associations—in the U.S.
Under the direction of Shawn Pierce, the
firm will provide financial resources, manage
technology, mitigate the risk, mine event
data, determine the strategy and manage the
logistics of association events from a holistic
perspective using the infrastructure, expe-
rience and resources it brings from Europe.
“We are looking at the event management
model that is in place in the U.S. to see where
we can make a difference,” Pierce says.
Innovation in any industry requires lead-
ership, risk and an affinity for change. Greg
Topalian believes it also requires an accep-
tance of failure—a pill that has been hard to
swallow for event organizers. “Sometimes the
net of losses is less than the scale of acqui-
sition costs,” he explains. Whatever the for-
mula, it’s becoming obvious that an industry,
which in many ways hasn’t changed much in
decades, needs to engage in some self-ex-
amination or risk being upended by an Uber
and forced to swallow the bitter pill of obso-
lescence. ■

Michelle Bruno is a writer, blogger and technology journalist. She publishes Event Tech Brief, a weekly newsletter and website on event technology. You can reach her at michelle@brunogroup.com or on Twitter @michellebruno.