Part 1: The Hottest Trends Shaping Events in 2025

Felicia Asiedu:

I say to "I don't want to do 300 events. I don't want them on my docket. I want to do 200, and I want to empower the people that are asking me for these tiny dinners to go and do it themselves. And yes, still track the budget." So budget management still needs to live centrally when it comes to events. And I think that's the one thing that you were just alluding to, but in terms of the execution of it, it's like, "Hey, you want to do a dinner, build a Splash page," or whatever it is you want to do or you see that essentials and just get it done. You do not need to filter every single thing due to meetings, events, team, but they need visibility. That's the thing. They need to know you're doing it, track it. But go. Feel free.

Alyssa Peltier:

Great events create great brands, but pulling off an event that engages, excites, and connects audiences, well, that takes a village and we're that village. My name is Alyssa.

Rachel Andrews:

I'm Rachel.

Felicia Asiedu:

and I'm Felicia.

Alyssa Peltier:

And you are listening to Great Events, the podcast for all event enthusiasts, creators, and innovators in the world of events and marketing.

Hello, everyone. What has been going on in this wide, wide world of events? My name is Alyssa and I am joined by fellow co-hosts, Rachel and Felicia, this week. And we'll be your joint hosts for this week's episode of Great Events.

Rachel Andrews:

Oh my God, it's so rare we're all together.

Felicia Asiedu:

I know. Hard to get us together, but it's a blue moon when it happens.

Alyssa Peltier:

Yeah, the blue moon and the new year, I guess that's what we're trying to do here. Okay, everyone. So in the interest of it being a new year, new us, new things, all the good stuff going on in 2025, we thought it'd be a really great chance for us to think about what's going to be trending. We're taking out our crystal balls, our magic eight balls, our whatever type of predictive device du jour you have, and we will be talking about some of the trends that we foresee in this brand new year that we're in. So I want to kick things off with something that's trendy but not so trendy. We're all aware of it now we, let's talk about AI. I think AI is very much top of mind for most meetings, events, event marketers, all professionals. Honestly, it transcends beyond this industry for sure. But let's talk about how AI is going to help enhance both the productivity for event professionals, but also partnership for event professionals. I think that's a big one. Felicia, should you have something on that?

Felicia Asiedu:

Absolutely. I think I've been talking about AI for ages as we all have, but I think because we're a tech company, people are always like, "Can you come to this stage and talk about AI?" I'm like, "Okay." So I had to learn super fast and we were still at that time about, I don't know, 16 months ago when people were like, "What is it? What are we doing? What is it? What are we doing?" I think the trend for '25 is the, okay, what's next? How do I really use this? How do I stop doing these repetitive tasks? How do I streamline this thing? How does my team get better because we now understand AI? And I think that's where we're going to shift.

And we always said, when I'd go to events and I'd talk about AI, I would always say, ask your partners what their AI tools are. So ask the seeder, what are you doing with AI so that you can then utilize that rather than having to figure it all out from scratch. So I think from the conversation we've been having, there's a lot more practicality in the AI now than just what is it?

Rachel Andrews:

I think a major goal for me and my team next year is to really understand, a lot of people say that it's saving time. I want to be able to quantify what that means because we are doing so much already with writing assistants and all the standardizing, even stuff on Zoom, the summary notes that Zoom takes has saved us so much time. Taking the summary notes and then literally making an action plan from that, that right there is saving us time, but how do I quantify that with the whole team? So between writing assistants and building websites through AI or sourcing in strategic or smarter ways through AI helping with your RFPs, I feel like there's a lot of, almost like I need to make a checklist of here are all the different work streams that we have. Here's what AI products have been implemented into them.

So we're already doing some of those things that are helping us with our time management, but then what's next? What can we be doing more of or learning from our other team members that help quantify? Because it's fine to say we're using AI for our events program, but I want to be able to say at the end of the year, we saved X amount of hours by doing these three things.

Alyssa Peltier:

Are you at a place, Rach, where you're thinking about SOPs around that. I hear you when you say a checklist, because I think last year and the year before as everyone's getting used to this, so we'll try it, play with it, see how it can improve. And I think there are some proven things at this point in terms of quantification and maximum impact that you're going to achieve by leveraging AI in the day-to-day.

Rachel Andrews:

I think SOPs are smart. So for example, for our event marketing team, they put their email into AI and they have their email or their descriptions written for their website, how much time did that save them from not having to put that in? And then obviously there's tweaks afterwards. We don't just use what AI spits out because it's not human. It's great, but it sounds like AI and it sounds very... But what did that save? And so then having those SOPs change from let's say an email draft for one vertical or one segment or one persona took an hour. Maybe now with AI because you're putting all the personas in and you're saying, generate this email for all these personas, maybe you've shaved off 30 minutes. I don't know what that is because you still need probably another 30 minutes to edit it based off what AI has done, but maybe it shaved your time in half. And so let's quantify that across all the emails we send and start to make benchmarks for ourselves across AI.

I think that's going to be just more documentation of how much time AI has saved the team because I think eventually, our execs are going to start asking us, "Well, do we need as much headcount?" I think that's a little far off. I don't want to scare the team.

Alyssa Peltier:

I was going to go on the inverse where you can say, "Hey, we're reducing all of this currently, but I need this headcount in order to invest in this space that requires more creativity or requires a human component." In which we used to have to have a headcount for writing emails, for example.

Rachel Andrews:

Yeah, I don't think it's going to take jobs. I think it's going to just make us able to do more.

Felicia Asiedu:

Our marketing operations team does this a lot with us. They're always bringing on, we use so much technology in Cvent, it's sometimes hard to look at our MarTech stack and make sense of it, but what I've really loved is that they've got an amazing GRID of exactly what you are talking about, I almost feel like we should just take that and roll it out to the rest of the business and be like, "Here's how you measure the impact of the tools that we have been using over the past X months or whatever." And I know that there are other large agencies that are doing very similar. Same with sustainability and accessibility. Just measurement will help you to make some good decisions. So yeah, I'm loving to hear that. I think I'd like to try it on a smaller scale just with something like Connect. For example, I know I got it to spit out run of shows. I was so happy with the run of shows that AI gave me. It was this person talks to two minutes, this person talks for three, this person... I was like, "Okay, great, I'm good."

Alyssa Peltier:

I think we're still in that collaborative space on this too, where like Felicia, you're giving that as an idea right now. Somebody may not have even thought to do a run of show, but I think it's this intersection of ideation and creating and coming up with new applications but also documentation. So going back into those SOPs, as soon as we get something good that works, quantify it and then I don't want to say processize that, but that's where we're at right now is make this the new normal, make this the new standard of operation for meetings and events.

All right, let's continue on in this scale conversation because there's a lot that we want to talk about in terms of scale. So I would say for the last three or four years, this notion of personalization has been huge in any marketing function, meetings and events being one of those applications. I think what's interesting about 2025 is we're taking that notion of personalization, but we're seeing how far-reaching we can make personalization. So personalization at scale is trend number two that we predict being quite buzzy in 2025.

Felicia Asiedu:

Yeah, it links so nicely to number one because like you said, it's been four or five years we've been talking about personalization, but what it's typically required is like Rachel, you said it, I want to do it by vertical. And then you might want to do it by account and suddenly you're doubling, tripling, quadrupling your time it's going to take you to get to that level of personalization. Whereas with AI, if that's working with you the way you want it to, actually your tools should be telling you who you should be personalizing things for in the first place so you're not wasting your efforts and then it should be helping you to do that.

So one of the biggest things at Cvent Connect and Connect Europe this year was when we started talking about all of the AI driven personalization like your Spotify Wrapped and all that kind of stuff. And it's like we can give you your daily wrapped at the end of your day at the event. That's personalization without we having to touch anything. I don't have to then do anything. It's just doing it for me.

Alyssa Peltier:

It's built in. The tech is the assist. Yeah.

Felicia Asiedu:

Super excited. So I know if we said to you, Rachel, "Actually, we'd like your whole team to personalize everyone's event experience at the end of the day and do a wrapped. Go." I think you'd just laugh at us.

Rachel Andrews:

I don't know if we'd laugh at you. I think there's ways we can probably do that, but I think AI is going to help with that too, right?

Felicia Asiedu:

Absolutely. But I was being a bit facetious, we have done it typically, and I'm sure you out there have done it typically by vertical. You pick a thing, right? You pick a, is it vertical, is it persona? Is it because you're a marketer or is it because you're a this? I think what I'm really harking on there is it's you. Actually, it's because it's you, it's Felicia, it's Rachel at the event, what was your experience like? I just don't know if anyone's ever [inaudible 00:10:28] that before.

Alyssa Peltier:

Yeah, I would say the definition of personalization is more accurate in 2025 than it was in those four or five years prior. We used to say personalization, but we were still grouping target lists. We were still grouping types of attendees together and a lot of that was manual intervention with this facade of personalization. We know you, we know you're like, like. So we'll do this birds of a feather type of a thing for an event or for a track or for a session. But Felicia, I love what you just called out. It is you, you did this at this event experience or you said this at this event experience and this is what this means. And to your point, I think the engine behind this is AI, that's what's making you possible because there is a uniqueness around that that didn't exist prior.

Rachel Andrews:

I think the attendee journey, pre-event, you obviously want to anticipate what the attendee journeys you want your customers to experience or you want your event attendees to experience. And then coming up with those agendas, tailoring the session suggestions, and then listening to your attendees. Obviously using their preferences and gaining insights on your attendees I think is important. And then with event tech post-event, you can actually look at their journey, which is very cool to be able to say, "Okay, you went to a meetup, you went to a tech tour, you attended a one-on-one, you also attended these three sessions on AI." Something like that. You can look deeper into the account and say, "All right, let's dig into from a non-Cvent lens, let's dig into what those experiences look like at the persona level, at the vertical level, and then at the account level."

You could go into many different, I think there's a lot that you're going to be able to look into when you're tracking as much as we are tracking that you can take and then use for the next year saying, "Okay, we had this many people attend this, this many people went on a similar journey, this vertical went this way." I think there's just a lot of great data you could dig into, to make those personalizations even more personal.

Alyssa Peltier:

What I think is really interesting is we have constructs around industries, verticals, types of things, we've made that framework, but what if we just said, "Here's all of the data, tell us something we don't know about it." And to try to extract what those themes, commonalities amongst groups that we didn't know were potential kindred spirits. I think that's really exciting. And so bringing out new connections based off how audiences interact with our event experiences is something that will change the landscape of events. Will bring different groups of individuals together for something that we'd never seen before.

Felicia Asiedu:

Exactly, and you know what really excites me and the marketer brain that we all love to like and share, it's the integrations because I'm taking this from event experiences and all of that to data actual integration. Imagine you are lucky enough to use 6sense. I know not everyone has it, but if you have 6sense and you have a little bit of Marketo and you have a bit of Cvent and a bit of Salesforce and you mix it all together.

Alyssa Peltier:

We're making cookies, we're making MarTech cookies over here.

Felicia Asiedu:

I'm hoping that these systems talk to each other in such a way and maybe it's available today, maybe it's going a little bit forward, but where the intense signals that 6sense would spit out are mixing with the event actual happenings that know Cvent would spit out and take a bit of the sales information and say, "This is when and how you should contact this person. This is what you should contact them about." I think even the attendees would appreciate that level of prepubesce because they would suddenly be like, "You got it."

Alyssa Peltier:

Thanks for knowing me. Thanks for knowing me. Okay, let's keep talking about scale because I think this is a good one and I think we're going to keep thinking of getting big but better in the big is going to be a big theme for 2025. So let's talk field marketing as an opportunity to drive business growth. And many of you heard the major announcements that Cvent released in, was it Q3 of 2024 where we acquired Splash, which is a major field marketer's technology in the meetings and events and marketing space. And so that's got Cvent really excited going into 2025 about the prospect of working with new users, new individuals who may not have known about Cvent and the power of event technology.

So I think there's a lot of opportunity in the field marketing space going into 2025 thinking about how to leverage Splash, how to leverage lead capture tools, how to leverage meeting tools, all of these types of technologies that a solutions provider like Cvent has, but thinking differently about how you deploy and empower your field. I think is a big one. Felicia, do you have something on that?

Felicia Asiedu:

I do, and I almost want to hear from Rachel first because when you look at your list of events globally, Rachel, a lot comes from sales and a lot comes from the field of like, "We'll do this and this and this and this and this." And often when I look at that list I'm like, "Boy, there's a lot of events on here." But do they need to all be on that list or could someone just go and do that thing? I wonder where do you sit with this? What's your thought?

Rachel Andrews:

Felicia was a part of this, but we just did, and I want to talk about this a little bit more in the trends, but we just did a full detailed analysis on our total event program because we're going through budget exercises and we're going through prioritization. You guys are increasing your budget by over 20%, what is actually needed and what's not?

And I think one of the biggest things that increase like trade shows increases every year just because of different audiences that we need to reach. There's new shows, there's new industry things that you can be a part of, but our hosted events went up by 22%, which was higher than I think trade shows went up by 15%. The others went up by 22% and it's because all the field marketing teams want more events and sales wants more events in the field because they want to take all this great data that we're giving them and use it at the account level and have more of these very thoughtful, curated, smaller events, whether it's a customer success group or a customer advisory board or a customer listening session.

There's just so many customer events that are coming out. A lot of that is in the areas or the regions that we've expanded more. Obviously we have more of a customer base, but in the regions where we have less customers, I should say, there's more prospect events and more events getting out there and talking about specific topics or specific products in those other international regions where we need to expand more. I see it as a, everything's coming at once, everybody wants to do different things, but I see it as a regional approach to what the goals are. And when we presented this to our executive leadership last week, I think it was... Yeah, it was last week, some of the questions were like, "Are we getting granular enough? That we don't have any verticalized specific events right now?"

And maybe that gets more verticalized in the content, but let's look at it from, we just broke it down into all of our personas, all of our verticals, all of our customer versus prospect events and did a deep dive analysis on what do we have and where do we need to shift money to do this to align with our growth goals?

Felicia Asiedu:

And I appreciated obviously being a part of it because I am probably one of those people that are out in the field that I'm understanding that I have different audiences or different audience needs. They need different types of events, they want to talk to each other. We're here facilitating those conversations and that's what we want to be doing. But that does put a pressure, which is why I asked you that question, Rachel, I was like, "How does that feel? That pressure that gets put onto the meetings and events team."

Rachel Andrews:

It feels like so much. It feels like there's a hundred things that we need to do. And so how do you prioritize the hundred things that you need to do? Do you say, "Okay, we can only do 50% of the 100." Do we combine some of those efforts into one event and have us even accelerate program where there's multiple goals of that event or do we keep the small event because this specific focus of this event is so important? And I think that's just working really closely with field marketing to align on those things. If you give sales, free rein to have as many events as they want, they would do a million events. Everyone wants to get in the field, everyone wants to talk to their customers. You have to give and take. And Felicia knows that, I feel like better than anyone just between what we want to do and what sales wants to do.

Alyssa Peltier:

I think that's an interesting piece of this too though, is how do you do budget planning with here's the centralized funding. This is where our... I don't want to say general meeting and event bucket, but here's those that are larger events even if they are smaller, more repeatable, but then here is what a sales organization is allowed to do on their own and those fall outside of the marketing budget. And how do we encourage the return to relationship behavior because it's really important. We see lots of research showcasing the power of live interactions, not only live events but live interactions. Our sales organization is very much going on the road, meeting with customers face-to-face in small meetings capacity.

And so I think there's a more work to be done on trying to figure out what is the best budget model to empower the field, whether that field is a centrally owned marketing team or whether it is a completely decentralized sales organization but still values those smaller, more intimate dinners or smaller seminars or smaller activations. It's an interesting and a good problem to have because scale is basically the issue is we want to do more events, we want to host more, we want more relationships, but how do we do those in a way that's financially conscious?

Felicia Asiedu:

It is, but I think it comes down to empowerment. I've spoken about this before, I've spoken to large organizations who say, "I don't want to do 300 events. I don't want them on my docket. I want to do 200 and I want to empower the people that are asking me for these tiny dinners to go and do it themselves." And yes, still track the budget. So budget management still needs to live centrally when it comes to events. And I think that's the one thing that you were just alluding to. But in terms of the execution of it's like, "Hey, you want to do a dinner? Build a Splash page," or whatever it is you want to do or you see that essentials and just get it done. You do not need to filter every single thing through the meetings events team, but they need visibility. That's the thing. They need to know you're doing it, track it, but go. Feel free.

Rachel Andrews:

I think we need to get better about that here. Just looking at our not flaws, but I don't love just booking dinners for the sales team and I think other people may have those pain points at their own companies. I always say this, I don't love feeling like a concierge service to book a dinner reservation, but on the flip side from the sales perspective, they don't know how to source private dining rooms. They don't know how to do contracts. They don't have a credit card that they can use. They could use their personal credit card, but for a corporate event, it's not great to put a couple thousand dollars on your own personal credit card.

So I feel like we need to, and other companies probably do this really well, but have more of an event in a box process where sales can opt to get sourcing support, contract support from the team, but then that's it. Everything else is enabled. There's a playbook, there's an onsite checklist for the salespeople going because there's no way my team can go to an additional 30 dinners a year. We can't. And that financially doesn't work either.

Alyssa Peltier:

I'm like, "The SOPs are today." Because I'm like, "Wow, wouldn't an SOP be great for that?" And this is funny because I hate SOPs. I'm the one to least follow them. So it means to flip this on its head, it just shows the maturity of Cvent as an organization and growing into a more enterprise level state because to your point, Rachel, yes, this does exist with the larger logos, the larger accounts that we work with. This is a common problem that they have because certainly a centralized meetings and events program can't manage the scale of small meetings or field marketing meetings because the resourcing is just too much. And there is also that feeling of not wanting to be a concierge, but not only that, you can't abuse your resourcing.

Rachel Andrews:

Yeah, I think if you put some rules in place for sales to just execute on their own, I think it would be ideal if you could have something like that. Because if I'm putting myself in sales shoes, they're like, "How hard is it? You send a dang email." It's oversimplifying and it's frustrating for marketers. They're like, "You just send a dang email and you book a reservation." That's what they think it is. And there's a lot more process that goes into segmenting the list and picking the right accounts appropriately, sourcing and contracting. They oversimplify sometimes, but I also think that they're not wrong.

Felicia Asiedu:

I think you have a unique challenge in North America. You have quite a big sales team. I think one of the things I'm really blessed with, we're all in a very small tight office. We can look at each other in the face and sort this out, and there's a marketer on my team she would use, okay, CSN is the best venue finding tool ever, but she would use ChatGPT. See how I put that disclaimer in there? She used ChatGPT to find unique venues, which happens to be our next trend because she needed something that was different. She was being asked by the sales team directly, "Hey, let's try something different." So she went to ChatGPT, found a unique venue for one of our networking events, and that took that pressure away from actually the meetings and events team because she was able to be like, "Here's five unique venues."

I'm not going to say they didn't source it properly down to the wire in the end, do the contract negotiation, but at least she could start that process because we are smaller. And I think that's why sometimes that field marketing team, they want to be more empowered. We can help. We sometimes tangle and muddy the waters, but we can help as well.

Alyssa Peltier:

Okay, let's talk about that next trend. We see unique venues and destinations still very much on the rise. Again, I feel like a lot of these are, we're dusting off old trends, but there's a slight modification for 2025. This insatiable appetite for uniqueness, I think is very closely aligned to the personalization of things and also field for that matter.

Rachel Andrews:

I was just going to say this is a trend I don't think necessarily has ever gone away. So two things. One, the demand for events like our events are well surpassed pre-COVID, so the demand is crazy for venues. So I've to get, or our team has had to get very scrappy with, "All right, let's use a unique venue for this one." But the second thing is the experiential element of events. People don't want to go to the same old, no offense, love our hotels, but the same old dusty hotel if they can go to an experience and weave that experience into the event.

Now if you have a standard, and I'm not saying you can't make hotels an experiential thing, you can definitely do that too. You can breathe that kind of life into the agendas. But I think that's the biggest thing is the draw to go to events has to be experiential. There has to be something that people can get their hands dirty on or say that they did that was new or take a selfie and say, "I did this cool experience." Versus just like a standard meeting that you go to. Not knocking standard meetings because that's the bread and butter of literally how we get business done in this world. But I would say that's probably why it's a combination of demand and the experiential element.

Felicia Asiedu:

And according to our planner sourcing report, it has jumped. In 2023, the trend was 17% of U.S. planners said, "Yeah, I'm looking to source more unique venues." It's gone up to like 49% North America and 45% in Europe. That's ridiculous. I don't think I've ever seen a jump so big. And I think everything you just said, Rachel, is exactly the reason why. There's attendee fatigue. Not every meeting is going to be in a unique venue, but the ones where you're, like you said, trying to drive that experience, it's built in. I don't have to think, in December we went to karaoke. It was called Bam Karaoke in Victoria, amazing experience. It's got multiple rooms so people could have different experiences in different rooms. Those that weren't interested in karaoke stayed in the main room. The ambiance is built in. One had flamingos in the room, one had sunflowers. I didn't have to bring a thing, I was just like, "Have at it." And it's just easier.

Rachel Andrews:

Oh my gosh. On a recent call with my team, we were talking about, I feel like this is now just a standard question we ask, but this is also just part of the unique venue trend is we ask what are the Instagrammable moments? And it's not new, but it's something that now is a standard practice in our events. Like, "All right, cool, they're going to this. What are they going to be sharing online? What are they going to be sharing on LinkedIn? What are the Instagrammable moments?" I feel like that's also part of it too, when you're looking at a unique experience for your event.

Alyssa Peltier:

I think that's so spot on. It's like the baseline criteria is does this have something that's share worthy? Is this cool enough? Does it pass the Instagram test? I think that's a perfect way to judge. One thing I did want to call out, we did have another acquisition last year that is quite aligned to this. Cvent acquired the company, Reposite. I believe that was in June of last year. That is helping planners, marketers, field teams source more unique venues. So I just wanted to put a feather in Cvent's cap, really aligned to these trends and how they're manifesting in our own business relationships and empowering planners, marketers, teams to really lean into these types of trends.

Felicia Asiedu:

I was going to say it's a great call out because one of the biggest reasons and the biggest drivers for sourcing beyond the Instagrammable moments is cost. Some of the unique venues, restaurants, and art galleries, they will just provide their spaces at a cheaper cost because they're not constantly using those spaces for our audiences, our attendees. And thinking about that acquisition you just said, some of these acquisitions is because we understand that people are trying to find different ways to do things and cost remains a big factor, actually, budgets. So I love that we're making it more accessible, I think for people to still use Cvent, still see your data the way you need it, but access services that may be more affordable and within the budget.

Alyssa Peltier:

So true. So true. Okay, last trend for this conversation. Sneak peek, this is going to be a two-part episode because there are many trends in 2025 that we want to talk about, but for today's episode, our 5th trend, data activation still being a challenge, which is just so disheartening to see because we all, we all... We work for an event technology company, so data is available, but activating it is where the challenge lies. And look, there's just so much data. We're drowning. We're drowning in data, but I think the opportunity is more about data prioritization in 2025. What is it that you need, what matters to you? And then really putting that to work consistently across every event that you do. That really is where I think we're headed in 2025. Data that matters, not all data all the time.

Rachel Andrews:

I think one way to get around that is to sit down with your stakeholders. So first start with your team and say, what matters for these events? What are the goals of the event that we're trying to accomplish? So if it's trying to get more prospects there, maybe it's you want to get, I don't know, this particular vertical in the room, I don't know. But I think you just go by type of data source that you could have from a dollar's perspective, from a satisfaction perspective, and then list out what do you actually want to know about your events and then prioritize those questions and then align with your stakeholders. Are those the same questions that they're going to be asking? I think that's where I've gotten the most frustrated because what I want to know sometimes isn't exactly what the executive leadership team wants to know. I want to know if our events are successful and sometimes they want to look at bookings and I think it's a healthy handshake between the two of expectations.

Alyssa Peltier:

Well, I can challenge you on that, Rachel. When you say, I need to know if an event was successful, and you wouldn't define it in bookings, right?

Rachel Andrews:

No, I would. I was giving a very random example, but I potentially wouldn't measure bookings for one type of event versus another. If it's a relationship event versus a... I know we're going to be talking about this in another trend, but if it's like a relationship versus an actual money-making event, I think that the goals could potentially be different. I'm not saying that there's still not a goal or still not data you want to track with every event, but I think if you align with your... Felicia and the marketing team and I, we've had a lot of conversations about MQLs, what are they, do they matter for certain events? So there's just a lot of things that I think you need to agree on with your stakeholders before you're like... Then you're not drowning as much, if that makes sense.

Alyssa Peltier:

Purpose-built events and everyone agrees on the purpose out the gate and that these would be the data points that would prove that purpose. I think that's really important.

Felicia Asiedu:

And here's a funny thing. So when we first started looking at this data activation, I was thinking of this in two boxes and we've just covered one of them, which is the activating your data to prove the value of your events to your higher-ups, so that's one. The second activation of data is normally for your attendees' sake so that you can be like, "Oh, I heard you. I got it. I'm activating this so we can change next time." But here's what's really funny, I'm looking at a lot of statistics. According to the iSpent market study that we did, 93% of corporate event planners said that satisfaction of attendees is that success metric. That sounds good, but I got thinking, how many people filled out that survey? So what, 17 people filled out the survey of a 100, they were kind of okay, but if you weren't, what are we doing? Is that really the success metric that you're going to base your entire event on?

So I'm not saying I'm giving you straight answers, but I do love the fact that at Cvent, we look at if you have the technology time spent in the session, or were they active in that session? Like we said before, did they ask the polls? Did they ask a question? Even if you can get some anecdotal things from your speakers, "Oh, I had lots of people come up to me at the end, stop and chat." Maybe it's just deeper than the survey at the end because, and that's why I'm looking background full circle to AI because AI will tell you the truth of how people actually engaged in your event rather than the 17 people that answered that survey.

Alyssa Peltier:

That's really true, Felicia, we didn't even talk about this on the AI part of the conversation, but looking at qualitative information and quantifying the qualitative is something that AI can help with, and it starts to allow you to activate data that you may not have been able to tap into previously because it wasn't a quantitative number. This is something that audience sentiment might tell us more about, not just how they perceive the event, but also intent to purchase. Is their sentiment high with your brand? How do they feel about your organization after having participated in something? And that could be a sentimental one, less so about how would you rank us on a scale of one to 10, right?

Rachel Andrews:

Yeah, so stodgy.

Alyssa Peltier:

Getting away from that and actually feeling like this is a relationship that we're curating and crafting with your organization I think is really important. Okay, well, with that, these are our five trends that we've started for 2025. I want to do a quick recap. So first one, AI connects the dots for productivity and partnership. Two, it's all about personalization at scale. Three, field marketing events are driving business growth. Four, unique venues and destinations are still on the rise. And five, data activation is still a challenge.

So with that, we're going to take a break and we will come back with more trends for you to digest with our next episode in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, we want to get you excited about the fact that all of these trends are going to be made available to you in a really great ebook that our marketing team is working on and should be available within a couple of weeks as well. So with that, have a great, great rest of the week. Bye.

Thanks for hanging out with us on great events, a podcast by Cvent. If you've been enjoying our podcast, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode.

Rachel Andrews:

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Felicia Asiedu:

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Alyssa Peltier:

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Felicia Asiedu:

Big thanks to our amazing listeners, our guest speakers, and the incredible team behind the scenes. Remember, every great event begins with great people.

Alyssa Peltier:

And that's a wrap. Keep creating, keep innovating, and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.