Con casi 20 años de experiencia en el sector MICE, Eric Mottard comparte con el blog de NH Meetings sus puntos de vista sobre la organización de eventos, la comunicación, la tecnología o las redes sociales.
Aug 20, 2019
It all started in 2000. I worked as a management consultant, developing projects for multinationals (gray suits and beautiful PowerPoints …). Then, the dotcom craze arrived, creating a moment of collective entrepreneurial fever. So, we launched one ourselves, three crazy people with the idea of setting up an Internet site. Everyone was doing it and we decided to focus ours on facilitating event planning. It was a market that we did not know well but Lynn (one of the three founders) knew it in depth. We developed a business plan, we searched for financing (which we never found…) but the project seemed so cool, that we launched the company with our savings and with ‘guerrilla’ mode on. The process was long, but we loved the sector and the freedom to launch ideas, taking advantage of the dynamism of small businesses. On 2001, we managed to get the site up and running and gradually it started to grow in audience and sales.
I love it because is a market full of people, human relationships and passion. Ephemeral teams are assembled to make complex tasks under pressure, investing many hours and requiring a lot of flexibility. This makes the sector a very tough one, but also it has its moments of highs and moments that create great shared memories. In fact, we wouldn’t say that it is a very comfortable sector, neither at the financial level nor regarding working conditions, but the enthusiasm is incredible.
Anyway, this teamwork and enthusiasm mustn’t distract us from the fact that “it’s business”. We have to maintain the obsession to provide tangible value to a customer who has a business problem. Maybe passion could also be risky, if we enjoy organizing creative aspects of the event too much. We should always keep the business dimension in mind.
We are in contact with lots of professionals of international events and we can say that the quality of MICE in Spain is acclaimed worldwide. We have two cities in the top4 of ICCA and this is not only thanks to the sun and gastronomy, we have very reliable companies, with a high-quality service, innovation, flexibility, incredible hotels and venues. Big agencies or foreign companies know that. Spain is, certainly, a country of events, even though we still lack large agencies that can perform R&D or more specialized competences. And we face the important problem of value: the fees and costs in general are too low and this makes it difficult to recruit more experts, to devote time to training and R&D. Raising the value should be a priority. We also need bigger companies, which often take care of huge events with larger groups.
We are already a relevant country in the industry, there’s no doubt about that. However, if we improve the two points mentioned in the previous question, we would be unstoppable!
We must improve the Marketing Intelligence of the target as the pillar of the event
The first is to focus on the audience rather than in our message. “I mean that …” is a wrong expression in a briefing, we have to think about what we are going to provide to the attendee, understanding what moves them, what they need, their problems, passions, event formats and the types of content that allow you to reach them and make the right impact. We must improve the Marketing Intelligence of the target as the event’s pillar.
The second is originality. We have all have attended a thousand events. It’s necessary to make the effort to define concepts and copies in order to create an experience that people have not lived before.
The third is consistency. Everything in an event communicates, from the venue to the speaker’s body language, from gastronomy to the decor. Offering an innovative and coherent experience everything communicates the message effectively is a complex task but essential: “why do we put this here, why do we communicate this message in this way” etc. These are the questions that you should always ask yourself. And we should also keep the assistant in mind, in his way of living the event, how is it relevant to him or her, rather than our message.
It’s complicated to forecast the future of a tool as volatile as social media. It is already well established as a very powerful speaker, and in some cases, almost the goal of the event. I guess that this communicative strength will continue to drive events that are designed more so for Instagram than for the experience itself, but it seems to me that the experience that the attendees live, the human contact and what happens in the venue will soon be taking some of the control back. We already see fewer conferences where people are asked to tweet during the sessions, the opposite of what was going on a few years ago. The Instagram era will not disappear, but it seems to me that “being here, now, with other people and living this moment fully” will make some come-back. Soon…or maybe I’m just getting older.
The market is in good shape and keeps growing despite uncertainties in the economy. The two main concerns for agencies are differentiating themselves from other agencies and being able to make relevant events for the attendees. Both ideas bring us to define the central theme of the study as “the search for relevance”. There are a thousand agencies and it is increasingly difficult to say to the client that, “I’m the one”. Agencies must define their unique knowledge, their innovation, and their added value beyond producing beautiful events. And the same at the event level: it is increasingly difficult to ‘get’ attendees in a world full of events. This makes it necessary to understand the target better than ever before and to conceive stand out experiences, and even more segmented than before.
Precisely, in terms of trends in events, we see a movement to make more events, smaller, more niche (and more relevant!). The next steps are very personalized events based on an intimate knowledge of the target. Data will give us this knowledge. Local experiences can add value to a lot to events and we see a return to the simple event based on pure human contact. More contact, simpler, more human, authentic experiences than a wow factor! or an event full of technology.
The process is rather slow. The bots have grown a bit but remain limited for use at really pioneering events. Idem for biometrics. There are some events with facial recognition or bracelets, but they are still just a few. They are technologies that have arrived and will remain, some already work quite well but the uptake takes time. The penetration curve of innovation begins with a very limited slope before climbing. As for new technologies, this year does not have really new technologies, it would only highlight a significant improvement in VR and AR technologies, more portable, and more reliable. Perhaps the event experience is what is really growing here. The 2018 Market Study pointed out that biometrics, voice recognition and chatbots would be technologies that would be developed in the sector.
I would highlight the need of integrating human sciences in our work. We need to incorporate psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists; we need to understand how the human being works much better and how to be relevant for him or her. We need to know how to answer essential questions about our audience: who it is, what it wants, how it receives our messages, what impacts upon it, how much attention it has, how it all relates. We still have very little information on these issues. I also think we need to measure more. Forget the financial ROI, but measure results, observe reactions, put more data throughout the organization process, from registration to post-event, to be able to personalize messages and experiences and ensure that they really serve after the event. This would be the second revolution we need in the MICE sector.
