Cvent Connect Europe 2023 is nearing its close, on the last day of the event Conference News sat down with two of the organisers to talk about the key learnings from the sessions.
The event, which took place on 7-9 November at the Hilton London Metropole, brought together event organisers, marketers and venues to discuss critical topics impacting the value chain over the next 12 months.
The topics
Speaking about the challenges facing the industry, Patrick Smith, chief marketing officer, Cvent, said: “It’s a really dynamic industry right now. There’s a lot of challenges to overcome. One of the big themes that we’ve seen is the digital transformation has fundamentally changed the events industry for the better.”
Felicia Asiedu, marketing director, Cvent Europe, focussed on the People vs Tech debate that took place. She said: “We heard that AI is probably further along than we think it is. We had a speaker called Ashley Ainsley who was saying that you’ve got to get with it, or you’re fall behind. You could see people reacting with surprise, because he was saying things like, if you’re not up to scratch, I get rid of you out of my organisation.”
The organisation
The event caters for such a wide breadth of the industry that content streams were designed to cater for numerous eventprof roles. Smith said: “We certainly have a hotelier and venue track and then one for event organisers and so forth. But a lot of times you see the hoteliers going to the sessions for planners because they want to understand their buyer and what’s on the mind of their buyer.”
Cvent Connect was also a hybrid event this year, with a satellite event taking place in Frankfurt combined with an online portal where attendees to access exclusive sessions and participate in conversation with speakers and attendees onsite.
Smith spoke about this balancing act between the two audiences, saying: “What we try to do is make sure that we are as respectful to that online audience as the in-person audience, I mean, seeing the screen when you’re in the general session, room in person is one thing, but we don’t want to have a camera in the back of the room and have people struggling to hear or see what’s going on. You really need a virtual producer and you need dynamic layouts.”
What’s next?
Looking to the future, AI and tech implementation were key topics on the show floor, but Asiedu lasered in on CSR, DEI and safeguarding as critical success metrics for the next 12 months.
She said: “Things like accessibility, diversity, and safeguarding are typically seen as harder topics. Tech is an easier topic to address as it’s very straightforward you buy the tech and utilise it over the next 12 months. I want that level of simplicity to go across these traditionally harder themes, because they’re not really hard, you just need to do the things that you say you’re going to do.”
