The Driving Trends

Over the past few years, three major themes have been driving change across brand experiences:

1. As Millennials have become the dominant workplace demographic, we’ve begun redesigning events to meet their expectations.
2. As leading global events — such as C2 Montreal and Dreamforce — have reimagined their experiences, we’ve entered a “festivalization” era for brand experiences.
3. As the landscape of event technology providers has grown 70% in the last few years, we’ve ushered in new tools for marketers, event professionals, and attendees.

The Emerging Experiential Technologies

These three themes have, in turn, pushed marketers into the forefront of emerging experiential technology.

Looking back, we see that each recent year has been dominated by a few major technologies:

• In 2016, virtual reality and augmented reality drove attendee delight and provided new mechanisms for learning and development.
• In 2017, marketing and events professionals experimented with AI-powered networking, brainwear, and attendee heat maps.
• In 2018, we are seeing interesting experiments happening in the fields of facial recognition, blockchain, live augmented reality, and robotics.

Looking out to 2019, my teams at Cramer, a global event and experiential marketing agency, and I are predicting that there will be two big technologies coming next to marketing: gaze-based interfaces and generative AI.