See the impressive growth in event technology with our mega-popular landscape, now updated for 2018.

Now Available:
Our 2019 edition of the Event Technology Landscape.

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Every week, all year, the teams at Cramer and Event Marketer identify and unpack emerging trends in experiential marketing. The obvious umbrella for the trends over this past year has been the ever-rising tidal wave of event technology.

Applying technologies like facial recognition, biometrical art, ultrasonic beacons, and augmented reality has revolutionized not only the attendee experience, but also how event marketers learn about our attendees and nurture the growth of communities.

Another year of digging through the new technologies in the event space has us uncovering the best of the best in event tech vendors. And every year, we at Cramer get really excited to present the culmination of these investigations: The Event Technology Landscape (2018)

The Event Technology Landscape supergraphic in the SlideShare above is free for you to download, explore, print and wallpaper your office with, and share with your friends, colleagues, and mom. But if you’ve read this far, you’re someone who’s going to want to get the most out of this landscape. For that…

Download 2018’s Event Technology Landscape and receive a high-resolution PDF, plus an Excel file that takes you through the 245 providers we’ve uncovered and categorized in this year’s supergraphic!

How Fast Is The Event Technology Industry Growing?

We took a trip down memory lane to look at the very first Event Technology Landscape we released, back in 2014, and the difference in top-tier event tech providers was stunning. What was impressive with 144 vendors nearly four years ago, has exploded to 245 vendors for 2018.

That’s 70.14% growth in just a few short years!

What’s New With The Event Technology Landscape?

For starters, the way we’ve categorized the vendors has changed. The buckets have evolved and expanded! Why? As event technology became more specialized and tackled specific event niche needs, the way we grouped these technologies together also had to adopt a more specialized focus.

2018’s Event Technology Landscape looks at the following five focus areas:

1. Venue & Spaces
2. Activation Technology
3. Event Planning
4. General Session & Breakouts
5. Audience Engagement

With the drive for events to become more personalized, from the general session to networking opportunities, the Audience Engagement bucket has grown the most. This has really just become the most important space for event marketers and so we have seen tons of new vendors serving this focus popping up.

The hottest thing right now is attendee intelligence, thus it’s the biggest category here. In the next year, we are sure to see many of these new companies acquired by some of the bigger players that have offerings across buckets. They need to have the latest tech to compete and acquiring these smaller, more specialized vendors will be part of the strategy to build end-to-end, soup to nuts, event tech solutions in the coming years.

We saw several examples of this over the past year, with Loopd (a wearable attendee CRM tool-maker) being bought by eTouches, and leading visitor-engagement tech provider Poken being acquired by GES. Given this being the trend, we predict that event chat bots will be bought up as fast as they are emerging.