by Ronn Levine

"Having worked with media companies for many years, I know that everyone has many of the same issues when it comes to events," Robyn Duda of Robyn Duda Creative told me just before the holidays. They scramble to get everything done, tend to reach out to the same audiences and don't take enough risks.

A recent study titled The Decision to Attend for Conventions & Exhibitions said that we should entice people with ways to extend their stay. It's time for new thinking, the report says. "For decades, our industry has viewed attendees as people who 'come in and out' of the destination for meetings, conventions or exhibitions with success measured by final attendance, filling the block, and overall economic impact. But today, over 50% of attendees are likely to extend their stay."

At the recent ASAE 2018 Great Ideas Conference, Michael Cavanaugh, CEO of the American Animal Hospital Association, and his co-presenter Sarah Michel of Velvet Chainsaw Consulting, discussed the work they've been doing to reinvent AAHA's annual conference.

"A big part of our customer experience is about digital so we want to be able to use the power of the enterprise to innovate [there]," said Debra Walton, global managing director, customer proposition, financial & risk, Thomson Reuters, in a keynote talk at our BIMS event in Fort Lauderdale in November. (Watch it here.)

Customer experience is certainly not a new thing. Back in 1997, Steve Jobs said this to a large audience:

Listening to Robyn Duda for 45 minutes gets you charged up—and a little emotional. While her talk at SIIA's BIMS event in November focused on customer experience and events, it really spoke to a certain kindness and simplicity.

“My job is making sure the customer is at the heart of everything we’re doing across all our initiatives,” Robyn Duda, VP of brand strategy & experience design for event-giant UBM, told us Monday on Day 1 of SIIA’s Business Information & Media Summit (BIMS) here in warm and friendly Fort Lauderdale, where winds of change swirled outside and in. That means focusing on instant gratification, Duda said. “It’s the biggest disruptor we have in business now, especially in B2B.” After describing her own such coming-out party with House of Cards—“The next one starts automatically in 20 seconds! I watched every episode in a week.”—Duda said, “that’s the expectation of society now. ‘I want it now. I can do it now. I can watch it now. I can eat it now.’ That has been B2C but it has transformed to the B2B side too now.” In this cruise-ship driven locale, a few themes clearly floated to ...