Event Success

CHAPTER 4The Age of Disruption

In the previous chapter, we outlined four challenges presented by the Event Impact Gap™—the gap between the event that event organizers want to achieve and what current tools, and knowledge with those tools, enable them to achieve.

One of these challenges is the ability to capture, connect, and leverage event leaders' most valuable customer and experience data. Key to understanding how the events industry can overcome this challenge is understanding how new technology and the data that they can surface have completely disrupted events as we know them.

Disruption is a word that gets tossed around so much in the tech industry that it's almost a joke to title a chapter about it. But the 21st century, at least up to this point, has truly been shaped by technological disruption. So much of our world has been changed so dramatically in such a short period of time that it's easy to forget how far we've come. Whatever friction you experience with a product or brand today could be solved by a start-up you've never heard of tomorrow; in 10 years, that same start-up could grow to dwarf the legacy incumbent.

We now live in an economy where just about every industry has to adapt or else risk obsolescence. The typical examples include taxis (Uber), hotels (Airbnb), music (Spotify, Apple Music), and video stores (Netflix, Apple TV, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video), but just about every industry is facing some kind of disruptive competitor—one that is using data ...