Event Success

CHAPTER 14The Rise of the Event Experience Manager

The events industry is rapidly transforming itself to focus on outcomes and experience. Aided by new ways of analyzing data, the events of 2020 and 2021 clarified the need for planners to focus on outcomes. And while events have long been about experiences, the evolution of the experience economy and its focus on customer success have sharpened the need for planners to concentrate on the experiences of their attendees, partners, and team members. To thrive in this emerging landscape will require new skills, new teams, and new names for the work that event planners carry out.

In the past, event planners was a term synonymous with event managers. As the titles imply, the job primarily focused on logistics, such as venue contracts, catering, travel, budgeting, and other practical concerns related to hosting a large gathering. Moving forward, event professionals will need to demonstrate these same skills along with a range of new capabilities. Instead of building a venue and a physical activation, their role will be to design experiences across the attendee journey—experiences that exist in both physical and virtual worlds.

As far back as 2016, Sherrif Karamat, the CEO of the Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA)—the world's largest network of event professionals—proposed a new title for event professionals, suggesting it was a better reflection of emerging requirements and expectations within the industry. The ...