Event Planners and Marketers Are Finally Seeing the Benefits of Collaboration


Skift Take

Event planners and marketers need to combine forces more aggressively to co-create large meetings and conferences, because the next generation of interdisciplinary event design and experiential marketing is far too complex for planners to navigate on their own anymore.

A surprising 91 percent of business event planners believe that it's valuable to work with the marketing department of the organization they're planning conferences for, according to a new study released this week by the Global Business Travel Association (GBTA). The purpose of the study — "Cross-Departmental Collaboration: When Event Planning Meets Marketing" — is to explore the challenges that event planners and marketers face when collaborating together to produce events. In February, GBTA interviewed 10 senior North American planners responsible for producing large-scale conferences. Those interviews then informed the direction of a supplemental online survey of another 157 planners with varying degrees of event design responsibilities. More companies and organizations these days are designing their conferences as consumer-facing, experiential brand marketing platforms, expanding beyond their traditional business event purposes such as networking, education, pro