March saw the launch of Scott Brinkler’s excellent and now widely anticipated “Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic”, detailing the now gargantuan plethora of MarTech companies that have emerged to better equip marketers in today’s very digital world.
First, as an aficionado of both logo design and enormous lists, I was excited to see the latest graphic. Secondly, as a marketer myself, I was honoured to have Glisser join 3,873 other brands and take its place in the MarTech universe.
But thirdly, as an active and passionate member of the EventTech community, I was exceptionally proud to see the tremendous growth of the Events, Meetings and Webinars ‘constellation’ over the past year.
Looking back over 2015
In presenting on the role and emergence of EventTech throughout 2015, one of the slides I regularly used was Scott’s previous supergraphic. Now small in comparison to the new arrival, it nevertheless illustrated the point that marketing technology was exploding in popularity, yet event technology remained hugely underrepresented.
My point was this: In 2015 in the supergraphic contained 1,876 companies yet only numbered 61 in the Events & Webinars category (no ‘Meetings’ back then). So just 3.25% of the companies were dedicated to what is commonly the largest line item in most B2B marketing budgets – given by various sources as between 20% and 25% of the overall budget. Even accounting for the lower prominence of events, hospitality, conferences and meetings in B2C budgets, it still felt like we were behind the curve.
Where are we in 2016?
It would have been great to run the numbers this year and see some progress on this, but unfortunately data doesn’t always paint the picture you’d like. There are now 116 companies listed in Events, Meetings and Webinars, meaning we now represent 2.99% (let’s say 3%) of the universe: a drop off a quarter of a percent.
But I don’t think we need to be disheartened. First, this is a universe expanding at an increasing pace, so the EventTech constellation is running to keep up, not just with new entrants into all the other areas of MarTech, but also completely new categories that are emerging and adding to the overall numbers.
Secondly, if you dive into the data it’s clear that there is a significant in-category shift away from webinar technology, towards what we’d recognise as ‘EventTech’. Take two years ago, for example, where there are just 29 companies listed in ‘Events & Webinars’ (3.06% of 947 companies). Of these, I’d argue just four are recognisable as true EventTech. Jump forward to 2016 and I’d say roughly 90% are solutions for live, in-person events rather than webinar technology.
This is a massive shift – EventTech has taken over the category and now dominates. This is technology researched, sourced and selected by event planners and marketers, rather than IT or telecoms teams buying a conference call service.
For this, the entire events industry should be proud. We’re creating an environment where people want to create EventTech companies to solve problems or enhance audience experiences. We’re helping to generate funding for these companies, to allow them to survive and potentially thrive. And we’re taking a few risks and using these technologies, testing them, feeding back to their creators to drive continued improvement and refinement, and learning to integrate them into a workable ‘stack’.
Where do we go from here?
I still think my 2015 argument stands. Given events, meetings, conferences and hospitality represent such a large part of the marketing budget, it’s a surprise there’s not more technology addressing this space.
I think there’s at least the same quantity again of EventTech companies that didn’t make the cut, but then I imagine this is the case for every category on Scott’s list so the relative size of each group is probably accurate.
However, if I were to give Scott some feedback I think we might be underrepresented when it comes to technologies used to efficiently book group hotels and travel – high cost items that are a big contributor to events sitting at the top of the B2B marketing budget. These are just as valuable to event planners as the technology used when we’ve actually got the delegates in the room.
But ignoring this, I think the key message for the events and EventTech industries is that we’re very much part of a larger ecosystem. We tend to get hyper-focused on our niche – and events can get all consuming at times – but what we’re actually trying to build is a powerful and critical part of an enormous sales and marketing landscape that touches hundreds of millions, if not billions of people.
Technologists have to build with this universe in mind, learning from it and connecting with it. Similarly, event planners should understand their role in the bigger picture, and that their selection of technology is not a decision they have to take alone, but alongside their marketing colleagues to achieve the overall department and business objectives.
The technology is increasingly available – now is the time to select and implement it strategically – to make EventTech the brightest constellation in the MarTech sky.
