Since Vista Equity's high-profile acquisition of Cvent last
year, investors—both venture capital and private equity—have been keen to get in
on the action. They're not so interested in in helping businesses manage costs,
though it's a great hook to get into the enterprise. Rather, the honey pot for investors
is in harnessing participant data to track a meetings' impact on top-line revenue.
Will GDPR Be a Fly in the Ointment?
If engagement intelligence and marketing automation/customer
relationship management tools are the cure for live event strategy, how will the
European Union's looming General Data Protection Regulation to protect EU citizen's
data privacy factor in?
"Meetings and travel include very heavy traffic of PII data,"
GoldSpring senior consultant Kevin Iwamoto said, referring to personally identifiable
information. "The purpose of GDPR is to establish consistency for collection,
maintenance and purging of this data. Information on employees, clients or prospects
for meetings—it all has to adhere to the same level of scrutiny." And under
GDPR, that scrutiny is more restrictive than the former Safe Harbor rules and the
current Privacy Shield patch that the EU put in place after Safe Harbor was challenged
in court.
The impact for meeting participants could be just irksome inconveniences
like filling out online forms without autofill. However, Iwamoto suggested that
the impact for meetings engagement, personalization and data mining for marketing
and business conversion could be much more severe. "It conflicts big-time,"
said Iwamoto. "Think about the first marketing or sales touch all the way to
[becoming a client] and buying something. Look at all those touchpoints in the middle:
the data processing and the handover. I gotta believe that that's going to be impacted.
If a participant registers for the class but we process the registration with artificial
intelligence and predictive analytics and conclude the participant must be interested
in a related product or service, you have to wonder if that will be prohibited with
GDPR. My intention was to sign up for the class, not to be marketed to later for
something else.
The regulation goes into effect May 25, 2018.
"This is not something that can be solved in the event or marketing department.
It can't be addressed by IT. It has to be escalated to the most senior leadership,"
Iwamoto said. "Data is a gold mine and we've used it that way in the U.S.,
but for any company that employs EU citizens or has them as customers—so that's
nearly all companies—this has to be addressed."
On the heels of the Vista Equity-Cvent announcement last April,
Etouches scored $20 million in venture capital funds. The company, lost no time
in bolstering its tech stack with Orlando-based meetings sourcing platform Zentila
that June. This March, it scooped up Loopd, an onsite wearable and data analytics
tool. Still flush with funding, Etouches accepted a 60 percent buyout from private
equity firm HGGC in May. Notably, HGGC put Etouches in a marketing portfolio and,
even before the buyout closed, matched it with Selligent, a marketing automation
tool similar to Vista's Marketo.
"After Vista bought Cvent, meetings started to raise a lot
of eyebrows in the investment community," said Etouches chief technology officer
Shane Edmonds. "HGGC did their research, and they found out what those of us
who have been in the industry knew all along: that there is a lot of white space."
The white space, in short, is end-to-end meetings automation.
Traditional "Strategic" Meetings Tech
Such automation is the holy grail that technology stacks like
Cvent have chased for a long time, and Cvent remains the leader in the space, considerably
so now that it has merged with its nearest rival, Lanyon. Its hotel network numbers
nearly 250,000 for sourcing. Its attendee management technology has been in the
field since 2000. And the data reporting suite—which provides budget, contracting
history, savings against the first offer, price per attendee and many more drill-down
metrics for sourcing—provides a backbone for meetings management.
That's a comfy place for corporate travel managers who are increasingly
tasked with getting a grip on meetings spend. There have been different flavors
in the market, but like travel management technology, traditional "strategic"
meetings tech has largely focused on procurement, logistics, savings and record
keeping for the organization. It supports negotiations and contracts. It organizes
financial metrics for year-over-year comparisons.
What that backbone hasn't done—but what meetings technology companies
aspire to do now—is measure on-the-ground attendee experience and engagement and
then connect that data with registration details as well as sales and marketing
strategies. If you're a travel manager or a procurement-oriented strategic meetings
manager, this could be unfamiliar territory, but it's essential to understanding
the value of an individual meeting and to defining an organization's overall business
strategy for meetings.
Tracking Engagement
"Companies invest all of this money [on meetings] without
then knowing how people interact with the event. Attendees pick up their badges,
but what they do for the next three days is anyone's guess," said Cvent SVP
of global sales Brian Ludwig. "We have to understand who [participants] are
having conversations with, what sessions they go to, how long they are staying.
After that, you want to see what the impact is on the business, on the sales cycle,
on the pipeline."
But: To put it in travel management terms, there's no real equivalent
to "managing behavior" or requiring a "workflow" for live people
moving in a space. Rather, technology needs to follow the participant and encourage
interactions with people and content. Mobile meetings apps have played a big part
in that effort. They've replaced printed agendas, they allow organizers to mass-communicate
program changes to attendees and they enable interactions like audience surveying,
social sharing and proximity-based networking alerts. On their own, however, they
can't deliver a full picture of engagement, not least because a good portion of
attendees won't use them. Meetings Professionals International reported in 2015
that just 54 percent of attendees will download an event-specific app. That means
tracking and measuring engagement has to be a multipronged approach, with targeted
solutions that can flow right into the participant's natural path.
Cvent acquired Alliance Tech in late 2015, which put a collection
of onsite tech like smart badges and RFID-enabled floor mats into the Cvent solutions
basket, alongside its existing app and social wall. Etouches' acquisition of Loopd
is a move in this direction. The wearable is a low-profile, Bluetooth-enabled smart
badge that passively collects information and interactions as meeting attendees
move through the event. It also has its own storage, records sessions and can work
without the mobile event app, though it's more powerful when combined.
Don't Lecture Me About Engagement: Give Me an Easy Way to Book Meetings
Many companies just need an efficient way to book a handful of
hotel rooms and a meeting space without a six-week process for RFP, contract signing
and legal approval. They also want to track the meeting budget and keep a handle
on spend. Small meetings technologies sensed that pain in the market, and investors
are backing them, as well. Tony Wagner told BTN that CWT had tested about six small
meetings technologies so far. He says there's still work to do in the space, but
that it's gaining viability. He also hinted that CWT might leverage its new RoomIt
technology for small meetings. Here's a rundown of some other interesting options:
Bizly
Started as an instant booking app that targeted day meetings under 40 attendees. The company has since expanded and is
now the only enterprise offering with both hotels and restaurant private dining
rooms, with all original content. The company offers
instant booking at hundreds of venues as well as chat-based messaging for
custom orders, replacing the traditional RFP process. The chat platform
uses intelligent reminders to eliminate the need for complex contracts and
addendums. Users also leverage the chat platform to book sleeping room blocks directly with the
venue, which is a newer function not originally supported by Bizly. Enterprise features include automated budget-based approvals; the tool also allows companies to customize the venue ecosystem with preferred
venues and negotiated rates.
Groupize
A big selling point for Groupize is its integration with Concur.
It facilitates sleeping room bookings for fewer than 10 people via an overlay of
the Concur booking tool. This means group sleeping room bookings can be made directly
into the Travelport global distribution system and clients will see the bookings
in Concur reporting. For larger meetings that require hotel meeting space, an email-based,
simple RFP form is available online; then all responses route to the organizer's
inbox. The tool also stores the correspondence string. Preferred hotels in the GDS
are prioritized in the booking tool, and the RFP tool also notes corporate preferred suppliers.
Meetago
Launched in North and South America this summer but available
in Europe for seven years, Meetago uses parent company HRS's extensive network for
sourcing. It is a facilitated RFP tool for simple meetings of as many as 50 people.
The tool limits RFPs to four per meeting, and the solutions team behind the scenes
actively encourages responses. Preferred hotels can be loaded and prioritized in
the system. Meetago is updating the user interface.
MeetingPackage
The first small meetings tool on the market to integrate
directly with hotel sales and catering systems, MeetingPackage.com has three booking/RFP
workflows. The RFP inquiry allows organizers to define every line item and make
a request. The package option allows hotel partners to offer packages from which
meeting organizers request a booking. The third option is facilitated through a
recent integration with Oracle's Opera Sales and Catering software. MeetingPackage's
vision is to partner with multiple systems to give complete online access to hotel
sleeping and meeting rooms and catering, thus creating instant booking for meetings.
It's based in Finland and offers 250,000 meeting rooms around the world.
"Attendees can use it to interact with each other [via proximity
notifications]; they can show attendance, show booth time," said Etouches VP
of sourcing and hospitality solutions Mike Mason. "Organizers can see the hang
time of top customers: when they were there, how long, where. Organizers can begin
to see via heat mapping and other ways how they can impact the attendee at the event.
They can start to map out the perfect experience. It's all moving in this direction,
toward engagement and onsite tech. That's where event organizers are going to get
the real data that matters."
The Journey to Metrics
"Meetings give off intense volumes of data," said GoldSpring
senior consultant Kevin Iwamoto, who previously held senior roles at Lanyon and
Starcite. Combing through that data to get to meaningful metrics is a daunting task
that the industry is grappling with overall.
According to an Etouches survey published in July, 65 percent
of meeting organizers measure event ROI. Mason sounded skeptical. "[They may
look at] revenue to expense, but they have no idea how to pull the data out and
make decisions from it. They say they do it, but they separate the two: 'I have
the data for data's sake, but what do I do with it?' We know there's a gap."
Tony Wagner, VP Carlson Wagonlit Meeting & Events for the
Americas and South Pacific, said some companies are starting to bridge that
gap, but it doesn't happen overnight. "Our most successful accounts have been
on a multiyear journey," he said. "They started tactical and operational
with supplier normalization. Then they moved from operational to more data driven
and stakeholder engagement. Now, they are evaluating the model and turning it on
its head. They focus on attendee experience and integrating marketing automation
tools into their event data. Our most mature client is looking at totally redesigning
their model."
Cvent, too, has seen progress among certain customers and is
working with them on personalization and attendee experience goals. Cvent chief
technology officer David Quattrone told BTN that clients that are technology companies
are a group to watch: "We have a number of large tech companies doing cutting-edge
things, working with us as partners, pulling things in-house, investing internally
in some of these systems. They are thinking of it not just on internal impact on
pipeline but also to use the information to make the entire experience better for
attendees—bubbling up recommendations and even tracking the differences between
what participants said they were interested in and what they actually did during
the event."
Etouches launched an ROI tool last year to help clients go deeper
into their event data. It pulls data from across the technology stack—sourcing,
registration, mobile and onsite tech—to create metrics that align with different
types of stakeholders—procurement, marketing, finance. "It's our job to deliver
that intelligence," said Mason.
Linking that up to HGGC portfolio-mate Selligent must be the
next step on Etouches data journey, just as the Vista acquisitions of Cvent and
Marketo brought tighter integration between the two. So once the metrics are established,
the marketing and prospect nurturing can begin.
That means drilling down to the individual meeting participant,
sorting through the data exhaust, scoring the leads or associating them with certain
products. That could be a job for artificial intelligence, which Mason said Etouches
has in its vision, though he declined to go into specific plans.
Wagner sees a near future when business decisions that range
from venue selection to budget allocation hinge on how well a meeting or event drives
sales. "If it's that kind of business, the events that deliver will get the
preference. Even down to venue selection: If you think about it, you can start to
see the types of venues that get more engagement or business closure. Those are
the things we will start to assess."
Watch the Smaller Players
Even as major players in meetings technology consolidate and
acquire unique functionalities, smaller players push the envelope and disrupt the
two-player game between Cvent and the fast-growing Etouches. Meetings technology
consultant Corbin Ball said smaller players are worth watching, as they're the ones
that find the cracks in the pavement.
Event app provider DoubleDutch, which has benefited from $45
million in venture capital over its seven-year lifespan, launched Live Engagement
Marketing last year. The model is to track event metrics and integrate with marketing
automation to deliver follow-up marketing and content to event participants, but
the company has been quiet on details. Founder and CEO Lawrence Coburn told BTN
in December that the company is changing its strategy to partner with more players
along the end-to-end event cycle and to target more strategic enterprise contracts
rather than event-specific clients.
Ball said agile open-platform technologies are likely to take
this collaboration route. "Development of integration tools is coming out strong.
Event Tech Tribe started this year. It's a bunch of cloud-based companies that are
separate but designed to work well together."
Event Tech Tribe's five current members connect through multi-directional
application programming interfaces. Swoogo focuses on registration and a drag-and-drop
wizard for making event websites; Hubb manages event content; Glisser is a suite
of online, mobile attendee engagement features; TRC offers onsite attendee tracking
solutions; and InsightXM's event analytics tool will launch formally in October.
InsightXM, like Etouches and Cvent, is working toward producing strategic business
insights from event data. It will act as a centralized focal point for data from
all the Tribe solutions. According to InsightXM CEO Brent Pearson, it eventually
will integrate with marketing automation and CRM tools.
The up-and-coming competition isn't lost on the bigger players.
"There is a lot to do with CRM and the cloud, and there are a lot of things
to do with data and pushing information," said Quattrone. "We are looking
at the functionalities and individual tools and want to stay best in class [with
each of them and with] how they work together. Cvent has always had an entrepreneurial
culture with people who want to make sure that we are always improving the product
and innovating."
Ludwig echoed Quattrone: "We love it. We've seen lots of
companies come and go in this space. Sometimes the little guys are ahead and we
follow, and sometimes we are ahead." Cvent announced in June that it has made
its largest ever tech investment: in an event website wizard with drag-and-drop
design function and customization options. It is projected to hit the market in
full next year.
Quattrone said managing a large-platform technology is not an
impediment to innovation. "There are challenges with the bigger platform, but
we have not seen it slow us down. I have 800 engineers and 100 open [tech] positions.
We have a tech presence in Austin; Portland, [Ore.]; London. It's been helpful to
find talent in these other places."
Etouches, which now clearly wants a piece of the
end-to-end platform pie, is confident with its position, as well. "We have
the resources available to us to grow the way we want," Edmonds said about
the company's influx of capital. "We have our eyes set on a couple other strategic
acquisitions and some other tech investments that would have been more difficult
for us to tackle organically. We are experiencing a lot of growth. Our investors
are focused on the same goals as we are: to grow and dominate."