Be sure to keep these trends in mind as you navigate your experiential programs through 2017.

Live Streaming Events for All

A live streaming event isn’t necessarily new, but a lot has changed over the last couple of years. Until recently, live streaming an event wasn’t so simple to do, it could be time-consuming, expensive and complicated. These issues tended to keep users away in some cases. The advent of social media live streaming tools like Facebook Live, Periscope and the recently announced Instagram Live has created a completely new, free, and easy way to live stream events. Maybe more importantly, this new development has given attendees the opportunity to create user-generated video content. So instead of the event having to create a program to live stream content, they now have the option of running contests or other promotions to motivate attendees to stream video for them. Live streaming is a great option for extending the reach of your event or enticing non-attendees to join your event in the coming years.

Reducing Bottlenecks at Large Multi-brand Events-At the Show Level

Large multi-brand events often suffer from the same issues, one of which being bottlenecks around individual brand activations that require sign-up or registration. Show owners and producers may start looking for new ways to improve the consumer experience. Examples of this could be auto or boat shows, festivals, state fairs etc. At these types of events, there could be dozens of brands activating, each trying to collect consumer information. It makes sense that event owners will start to seek out technology that will centralize registration, across all brands, to dramatically improve the consumer experience. Show owners know that repeat attendance is a major factor in a show’s continued success so taking the time to improve the consumer flow will become a major area to improve in 2017.

Refocusing on Tools That Deliver Scale and Reliability

The trend in experiential is always focused on shiny new objects and trying to bring the next cutting edge tech to consumer events. Virtual reality, augmented reality, beacons, and more have been dominating trends for years, and that isn’t going to change. In 2017 however, as we expect budgets to tighten, expect a renewed focus on single-platform technology solutions that scale to larger enterprise-level programs. This will be a major force in reducing costs and increasing reliability for large national or global experiential programs. If your brand runs large experiential programs it can get expensive trying to integrate many different technology providers, across different markets. A single provider that can easily integrate the desired shiny objects as-needed is a sure way to reduce overall technology costs while increasing data reliability.