CHAPTER 3After the Storm

COVID-19 marked a permanent shift in the events industry—one many felt was badly needed—and we are humbled and motivated by the opportunity to play a role in its evolution.

Ever since we founded Bizzabo, in the dawn of the age of mobile technology, just about every industry around us has gone through a significant transformation. When the company was founded, we were still phoning taxi dispatchers, renting movies from a store, buying (or burning) CDs, and doing most, if not all, of our shopping in person with cash.

Much about our world is dramatically different now, but until recently the events industry remained largely the same. Previously, the industry had no external pressure to evolve, facing no outside threats to its supremacy, with no reason to believe change was safer than the status quo. Unlike other industries, disruption would have likely never come in the form of a smaller, nimbler, well-funded start-up, and the industry could have continued on gently tiptoeing toward progress at a safe speed for the foreseeable future.

Instead, our disruptor came in the form of a global pandemic, and now events will be rushing toward the kind of innovations that will make the industry more resilient, more sustainable, and more impactful moving forward.

The Event Impact Gap™

Event professionals now have a mandate to create immersive, personalized hybrid experiences, combining their deep knowledge of in-person event strategy with the opportunities presented ...

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