New executive report shows market growth and ROI demands on the rise
With the 5th IMEX America set to take place in Las Vegas from October 13 to 15, the IMEX team is creating even stronger opportunities for buyers and exhibitors to develop business, network, and learn from experts and their peers.
One of the highlights of IMEX America for high level corporate executives is the Executive Meeting Forum (EMF). The two-day event on October 13 and 14 will bring together senior professionals in a peer-to-peer setting to share best practices, discuss issues and generate new ideas.
The discussions at the event also provide fascinating insights into the views of a cross-section of today’s industry executives. Last year’s Forum was especially revealing as the participants were from major organizations such as Microsoft, Coca Cola and Cisco Systems and almost two thirds had at least 10 years experience in the industry.
Among the many significant views that they collectively expressed were:
• Meetings Growth & ROI – there is shared optimism that the meetings market is back on track but also shared knowledge that the demand for more and more meetings ROI continues to grow too.
• SMM/SMMP – there is a keen interest in defining more “mature” models for Strategic Meetings Management (SMM) and Strategic Meetings Management Programs (SMMP), especially with smaller and distributed meetings. Creating more comprehensive policies and taking SMM more global in scale and practice is also of importance.
• Going Global – getting a stronger handle on managing resources, virtual teams, budgets and policies across borders is key.
• Performance Punishment – there is a strong awareness that successful planners should not be “rewarded” with lower budgets and less staff.
• Technology Buy-In – the need to build more internal support and budget for Business Intelligence and Data Mining technologies is shared by many.
Offering more creative and experiential hooks for sponsors was also discussed in–depth, as was the need to build more technically savvy, open and collaborative meetings designs to increase delegate engagement.
All the findings and insights are published in The IMEX America 2014 Executive Meeting Forum Summary Report, sponsored by Dubai Business Events, which is now available to download.
This year’s Forum is sure to generate more valuable discussion and knowledge sharing. Among the important topics and significant themes likely to be covered are:
• Sharing the unprecedented ways in which the value and benefits of meetings and events are now being held to account.
• Creating deeper attendee engagement.
• Capturing ROI and its power to build stakeholder support.
• Gaining insight into industry best practices around agency, hotel and vendor management, internal key metrics and SLAs.
• Exploring how meetings and events are impacted by new economic, political and financial realities.
Carina Bauer, CEO of the IMEX Group commented: “We are once again putting together a superb, comprehensive program of key issues for the 50 plus senior executives who take part each year in the Forum. It is always one of the highlights of our educational program as it enables us to provide these high level professionals with a unique and tailored tradeshow experience, access to valuable knowledge to take back to their organizations, and important networking time with their peers.”
To download a copy of the 2014 Executive Meeting Forum Summary Report and for more information on the 2015 Executive Meetings Forum visit: http://www.imexamerica.com/events/forums/executive-meeting-forum/.
