3 Trends That Will Disrupt the Meetings and Events Industry in 2017

The primary shift in the meetings and events industry in 2017 is going to revolve around delivering business events that engage attendees in more multidisciplinary ways. For the last five years, the industry has been focused on two trends impacting meeting design strategy above all else: the rise of event technology and the emergence of the Millennial generation. There was growing consensus in 2016, however, that it's time for the meetings industry to move beyond its preoccupation with those themes. Today, event tech is inherent in every element of the meeting experience pre-to-post. The concept of "hybrid meetings," combining live and virtual experiences, is meaningless in 2017 — just like the phrase "new media" that disappeared only a few years ago — because digitization has completely reshaped every industry. "Event technology is not a force driving change anymore," asserts Julius Solaris, founder of Event Manager Blog. "It is an established pillar of every event. Those that don’t embrace it will be out of business soon, and frankly, we won’t miss them. Event tech is not a new thing anymore, we are past that." Meanwhile, everyone is exhausted talking about Millennials because the line differentiating generational psychographics, especially with regard to event technology, has blurred to such a large degree that it's meaningless, too. Shawnna Kerns, 26, marketing & communications manager for the Convention Industry Council, emphasized during a Skift-moderated panel last year that Millennials are sick of being pigeonholed as Millennials because it reinforces stereotypes that hamper career growth and individual expression. "So they’re fighting back and saying, 'Look, we’re not all like that. We’re not all the same person. We don’t all like the same things,” she said. McKenzie Kaufeld Counts, a Millennial-age manager of the Making it Happen events company in Orlando, added, “Just because I’m young doesn’t mean I know how to fix your remote control.” With those two themes now blending into the mainstream, the big trends this year are going to revolve around making people give a damn about whatever it is someone is selling. The exponential growth of new live events and the media noise surrounding them year-over-year are pulling increasingly fractured audience attention in ever widening arcs of apathy. Therefore, 2017 is about the why of meetings. Delegates are