How Brands Are Adding Value for Event Planners — Meetings Innovation Report

Skift’s Meetings Innovation Report is a weekly newsletter defining the future of meetings and events by deciphering strategies that drive engagement and better business outcomes. Subscribe.

The Future of Meetings & Events

Unless you’re a super fitness nut, it’s always difficult to eat healthy at any conference because your normal schedule is out of whack, you’re a bit stressed, and many hotels and event venues stills serve high-fat, high-sugar food. And then around 3 p.m., your body crashes and focus wanes because you’ve been eating poorly all day.

Hilton Worldwide launched a new initiative today at 40 test hotels to deliver better buffets by pairing activities with them. I’m not sure if Hilton’s new Meet With Purpose food initiative will scale beyond the initial 40 hotels, but it’s a step in the right direction to help attendees be as productive in the afternoon as they are in the morning.

We also have a ton of other examples this week about how brands are adding value to their events for both planners and attendees. Montreal Tourism should be a benchmark for how destinations deliver meetings industry content, for example. Also check out the exponential jump this year in brands livestreaming their events.

I’m especially interested in the rise of “moment marketing,” so if anyone has specific examples they’d like to share, please email: [email protected].

— Greg Oates, Senior Editor

Social Quote of the Day

“Excellent coming together of #digital & #theatre – @The_Globe will be live streaming a play for 1st time ever: goo.gl/crz8MK”

— @MattHancockMP on Twitter

Tourism & Hospitality

Hilton Dishes Up New Experiential Food-Pairing Program For Conferences: A lot of hotel groups are providing healthy food options for their meeting groups, but plenty of attendees are still dozing off in the afternoon. So Hilton is pairing its meals with fitness and team-building experiences in an attempt to inject greater energy and focus into meeting sessions. Read more at Skift

A Feeding Frenzy?: As meeting and event planners field a growing number of special meal requests from attendees with food allergies and various lifestyle preferences, how are they accommodating everyone’s needs? Read more at Convene

Montreal Tourism Uses Red Bull Music Event to Show Off Venues: Why more convention bureaus don’t have dedicated meetings industry blogs is just weird. Montreal Tourism shows how convention bureaus can communicate their value proposition to planners with this post about Red Bull’s requirements for creative venue spaces. Read more at Montreal Tourism

Knowledge Hubs Add Value To a Destination: Cities from Glasgow to Seattle are getting better at leveraging members of their local communities to drive competitive advantage over other destinations in their pursuit of large conferences. Read more at Successful Meetings

Next Generation Event UX

Announcing South by South Lawn (SXSL): A White House Festival of Ideas, Art and Action: After headlining SXSW in Austin earlier this year to discuss the need for more advanced civic tech platforms, President Obama is bringing the show to his own backyard on October 3. Read more at SXSW

BizBash CEO David Adler: Why We Are Starting a Recognition Program to Celebrate the Art of Working Together: Our culture is full of celebrated individual achievers: the home-run hitter in baseball, the pop artist in music, the hot designer in fashion, the company founder. Yet throughout history, our biggest challenges have been solved by artful collaboration. Read more at BizBash

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, It will be Livestreamed: The Rio 2016 Olympics, U.S. political conventions, Bonnaroo, Wimbledon, Coachella, and other mega-events are aggressively livestreaming content to engage audiences on second screens. Or are they first screens now? Read more at Event Manager Blog

The Revolution Will Be Digitalized: A senior lecturer at The Wharton School, Jeremy Rifkin, talks about the shift from cheap manufacturing to the smart-tech economy. Rifkin will be a keynoter at PCMA’s upcoming Convening Leaders conference in Austin. Could 2017 be the year when the convention industry finally embraces tech fully? Read more at Convene

Learn To Love Networking: Research shows that those with a distaste for networking tend to perform worse than colleagues with a social mindset, but networking today has a much broader definition that what it used to in analog times. Read more at Harvard Business Review

Dinner In A Dumpster: Are Most Urban Pop-Ups As Silly As They Sound? In cities around the world, temporary “pop-up” restaurants, shops and cultural events are everywhere. Have we reached peak pop-up, or is there more to this phenomenon that event planners should consider? Read more at The Guardian

How Personalized Moment Marketing Found Scale In Rio: The rise of data driven marketing has allowed brands to take a scalpel-fine approach to reaching individual consumers with targeted messages based on the trending Olympic stories that interest them. Read more at Digiday

The 7 Most Interactive Sessions We’ve Seen at Innovative Events: From Google’s Demo Day to Dell’s #Social360 Unconference, these live events are taking audience engagement technology to the next level. Read more at Sli.do

Event Spotlight

Design Thinking, Business & Entrepreneurship at AIGA Design Conference: The symposium will focus on building brands authentically, the history of branding for startups since the 1980s, the rise of the creative class, and how “design and the self intersect.” Read more at AIGA

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The Skift Meetings Innovation Report is curated by Skift senior editor Greg Oates [[email protected]]. The newsletter is emailed every Wednesday.

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