2016 has been a year of transformation for meetings
technologies. As the industry works to quantify the value of live events, the
pursuit of "dark data"—the record of attendee activities and
interactions that happen onsite—has intensified. Coburn's meetings app company
has been leading that chase.
The company launched its Live Engagement Marketing platform
in May. The platform feeds live event data from the DoubleDutch app into
Marketo to target leads and existing customers with automated, personalized
messaging. Etouches followed DoubleDutch, introducing a live data metrics tool
in July. Coburn told BTN in May that its bigger rival Cvent had trouble
delivering such data because its social feed and activity feature was hidden in
a utility menu on Cvent's mobile app. Within a month, Cvent's social feed had
moved to the app's launch page.
The outspoken startup executive openly questioned the
prospects of the Vista Equity/Cvent merger when it was announced in April,
saying that the ultimate play had to be the merger of Lanyon and Cvent. His
predictions proved correct. Coburn also predicted Cvent would face innovation
paralysis after such a merger. That second prediction remains to be seen, but
Coburn has positioned DoubleDutch to pounce at any hint of weakness in terms of
live event data capture.
Meanwhile, Vista had a surprise for DoubleDutch. It bought
Marketo after a June merger announcement, putting Coburn's closest Live
Engagement Marketing partner in the same portfolio pipeline as Cvent. Still,
meetings industry technology expert Corbin Ball saw the move as the highest
compliment to DoubleDutch's vision to move live event data out of the dark and
into an end-to-end ecosystem.
Coburn admits the Marketo acquisition put a crimp in
DoubleDutch's differentiation and that Cvent could benefit from tighter integrations
moving forward. But DoubleDutch is on to the next-generation platform. "The
longer term goal is to execute those campaigns from within our system and more
in real time" by working on a messaging platform rather than through email
campaigns, Coburn said. "We think Marketo is the wrong system, that email
is the wrong system; no one is looking at their email during an event."