The Present and Future of Event Production Trends

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Following the ever-changing trends of the event production industry

This summer marks the 30th year event and entertainment production company Empire has been putting on live events across six continents.

Founded by J.B. Miller in New York City in 1993, the company has since produced events for corporations, associations and nonprofits, among others, such as The Webby Awards, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Goalkeepers, the New York Public Theater Gala, the TIME 100 Gala and The Tribeca Film Festival, among others.

With so much experience in the business of event entertainment and production, we checked in with Miller to glean some insight into how the industry has changed since he first began, what event production trends are taking shape and what the future of event production may look like.

“A lot changes every year in our industry,” Miller says. “Geographic priorities of where people will go, legislation that changes what companies are allowed to pay for meetings and events, budgets that go up and down, depending on how bullish people are on the economy and growth or in what kind of a recessionary mode they’re in.”

Present: Experience Participation

Since before the pandemic, and perhaps sped up because of it, attendee engagement has been something meeting professionals want more of. While participation from attendees isn’t necessarily a requirement of being more engaged, it can have a positive impact on the outcome of the event. This participatory format is one of the things Miller says he has seen become more requested in recent years.

“Meeting planners want people to be actively involved in, and in many cases, contributing to the creation of the content, or even co-creating the content or the experience,” he says. “I think smart meeting planners understand that when you set up an event—the date, the time, the place, the look, the field, the rooms, the brand—all you’re really doing is laying the groundwork for the potentiality of what happens when you put the human element into it.

“It’s the humans that come together, that have their human experience, that create that magical alchemy that translates into the goodwill, the feeling, the experience, the photography, the ‘I can’t believe this happened’ kind of thing. It’s both infrastructure and people. And when you put it together, that’s when you get the synthesis.”

Read More: Elevating Engagement

Asked about the reasons behind this shift, Miller had two to offer. The first: “People that are engaged in something or doing something are just more likely to learn or take things away from something than if they’re just sitting there passively,” he says, adding that this is due to a general learning of the industry. The second may slip under the radar a bit more easily, as humans fall prey to adherence to tradition and not asking questions about the value and ROI on experience, resulting in wasted time that could be spent elsewhere.

“People understand that a meeting represents a lot of investment,” Millers says, “not just on the client side of booking the venue—setting up the production or hiring the catering and staff and so on—but the time it takes out of an organization’s calendar [in place of] other profit-making activities, the time it takes for every attendee to drop everything and travel somewhere and give up a day or three days in a destination.”

This increased understanding of the value of people’s time and investment, he says, means planners are becoming more intentional about the outcome of events. “It’s not good enough to say, ‘Well, every year we do a sales meeting, so we’re just going to bring everybody together in the desert and have a good time for a couple of days, then we’re going to go away and be a better company for that.’”

Miller says more concrete pre-event questions are being asked. “People are now saying, ‘Well, what do we want to get out of this meeting? What are the actual outcomes we want? How would we state and quantify those objectives? Or the KPIs? What does success look like? Did we sell X percent more product? Did we get 50% more buy-in on a strategy? How do we express our objectives in a form of goals and metrics?’”

Future: Differentiation of Events and AI

What Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce have in common technologically, they also have in common in the world of events. They all host annual technology user conferences. All great and good, but there is one thing Miller says is lacking, and clients are requesting: differentiation. “All these technologies companies have everybody fly in, they all try to get some knowledge of their products and services, some use cases and how they can make things better, some production to new products and so on. But they basically all accomplish the same thing.” Miller says one thing Empire is being tasked with increasingly is answering the question, “How do you differentiate one from the other?”

“How do I really know that I’m at a Salesforce meeting versus a Microsoft meeting versus an Oracle meeting?” he asks. “How does the soul and character of the brand come through in the form of experience that builds a greater affinity for me, or provides an organizing principle or North star for me to think about that company?”

Read More: Adding AI to Your Next Meeting

“You have to establish a distinct character. If I’m at a Bravo event, I have to know I’m at a Bravo event. And everything has to extend from that, really make me feel like I’m part of that brand,” Miller says, adding that he believes in the future more companies and meeting conveners are going to put more thought and energy into how the persona of the brand comes through, focusing on how to use events to create a proprietary experience that could only be tied to its respective brand.

Miller also believes people are increasingly recognizing the power of tentpole events and cultural momets. “Things like the TIME 100, the Met Gala, the White House correspondents, the Cannes Film Festival, Fashion Week or any of these things, I think people are understanding that these are big, gravitational moments…I think there’s more and more utility to put your event alongside that, to integrate your event or convening on the shoulders of some other big tentpole event that’s happening.”

And lastly, Miller mentioned the increased use of AI and new technology, which he says requires no crystal ball to see. “We’re going to see a lot of AI working its way into events. Data analytics, ChatGPT, design through Midjourney and DALL-E and other types of generative AI visual programs.” He says he doesn’t believe it’s going to uproot and completely change the nature of things, but simply increase the speed, the quality, the field of vision of these kinds of events.

As for Empire, Miller says they’ve been using new AI technology in many creative ways. For example, in trying to figure out artists similar to Alicia Keys, Aretha Franklin and Diana Ross, artists an Empire client has had in the past, Miller used ChatGPT to quickly search for similar artists. “Here’s like 50 other names, most of which I would have thought of if I had the time to pull out a piece of paper and scratch my head. It was a very quick way to get there.”

Miller says Midjourney and DALL-E are where the company is seeing the most ROI. “We can say ‘Okay, it’s a rainbow-colored room for OutRight Action International’s gala and we want rainbow-colored centerpieces, something modern and slick.’ We give these values and then all of a sudden it’s generating three or four visions of events. Some of which are elements that we would have thought of ourselves.” For other visions the AI produced, Miller says the team were given a totally unique and different take. Although the plan isn’t to replicate exactly what DALL-E came up with, it provides a nugget of an idea.

“We’re bouncing our ideas off the technology, the technology is bouncing ideas back on us,” he says. “That’s what brainstorming is about, getting ideas going. A good idea interchanging with one idea, leading to another idea, jumping off to a third idea that you never would have had if you didn’t have those two parties. So those are ways that we’re actually using AI tools, to amplify the creative power of what we’re doing. But there’s so so much more.”