If you’re looking for a pop song to sum up the state of the event industry when it comes to global- ization, there are a few solid choices. “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine),” by R.E.M. sums up the perpetual state of change event leaders operate in. “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears nicely captures the ambition of brands looking to create relevance for their products and services in global markets. But perhaps the Cat Stevens song “Wild World” and its refrain, “Oh, baby, baby it’s a wild world” best captures the vibe right now.
Indeed, event marketers are once again at the forefront of a new era of “wild” economic volatility where they are the among the first to feel the impact of, well, everything.
“It feels like it’s the next pandemic, but it is different,” says Elizabeth Gilstrap, VP-Strategic Events, Salesforce. “That was a global pandemic, whereas, unfortunately, there’s discord across economies and that’s a totally different unknown that we didn’t have before. I think that’s why global events are so important to think about.”
Last month, Event Marketer, together with leading event marketing agency Opus Agency, gathered a group of seven event executives from some of the most prolific experiential b-to-b brands in the world to find out how they are managing this new reality—and complexity—across their event portfolios and teams. And how global expansion may simultaneously be one of the biggest challenges and opportunities right now.
Among the most common themes: events have gotten significantly more difficult to execute than they were just a few months ago, both domestically and internationally. And they will only get more expensive to produce in the months to come. And yet, the group unanimously agreed that there is still reason for optimism as interesting new markets begin to emerge and the challenges of the day force event marketers to do what they do best and innovate in the face of adversity.
“Innovation comes with risk, but if you don’t take risks, you’re not going to grow,” says Dan Preiss, VP-Experiential Marketing, Dell Technologies. “That’s the thing that I keep trying to remind myself through all this macroeconomic environment we are in right now: what that might look like. And that’s where I get excited because where we live in the world of events is innovation. We don’t do boring events.”
