Greg Oates

St. Louis is fortunate to have one of the more advanced startup communities of any third tier city in America, and it's leveraging that aggressively through the Murmuration Festival to reposition itself as a forward thinking destination for meetings and events.

Event planners and brand marketers want to collaborate to design better event programming and experiential marketing content, but there are significant challenges for organizations to make that marriage work.

Guam presents an interesting option for Asia-Pacific conferences because it's a tropical island with mature tourism infrastructure and decent airlift, but there's a lot of work to do to show American meeting planners and attendees that the long flight is worth it. It's easy to say you want to be Hawaii, and another to actually be it.

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.

We like to think we've taken some of the best practices from the meetings and conventions space and applied them to our own event.

Demand for conference space in London is always high, but price considerations usually tend to dampen some of that excitement. With a 15 percent drop against the U.S. dollar though, suddenly post-Brexit London seems like a bargain, relatively speaking.

Talking about Millennial behavior in the workplace is like talking about "new media." It was once relevant and now it's not.

There is so much fatigue around the Millennial conversation in the meetings industry, and whether they want to attend live business events. Acknowledging that will help shift the industry conversation toward collective, multi-generational action around meeting strategy and business outcomes, versus who's good on Instagram.

The conference of the future integrates entertainment, inspiration, and immersive experiences into the event, as much as education, to engage the multidisciplinary mindset of creative professionals today.

Although Visit Orlando's new AI-powered travel app still has kinks, it shows the power of machine learning to provide more contextual and customized information to travelers — most of the time.