Skift Take
More hiring, more spend
What you think about hiring and managing speakers may not be relevant anymore: report says.
As my speaking schedule intensifies for the year, I find myself increasingly questioning the relationship between speakers and eventprofs.
Are speakers still relevant to modern conferences? How is the economy impacting speaker sourcing? Is social media having an impact on selection?
Thanks for the industry we can count on Jeff Hurt, Dave Lutz and Velvet Chainsaw to help us with answers. In fact they teamed up with Tagoras to bring us a report about the use of speakers in the meetings market.
Key Findings
Jeff and team conducted a research with more than 175 organisations with annual speaker budgets mostly in the region between $5,000 and $20,000. A qualified audience.
The findings are surely relevant whether you are a speaker, meeting professional or PCO:
– . Compared to 2011, professionals speakers are used more and organisations are spending more on hiring them.
– Expectations are rising. Events expect more engagement from speakers, specially when it gets to sponsor ROI and content marketing.
– Big names not so big. Hiring a big name is not important for 1/3 of respondents to attract more registrations.
Jeff also made a write up about the report and mentioned another interesting one for tech friendly eventprofs:
Two years ago, we expected that many more organizations would embrace live-streaming to help amplify their best conference content. It didn’t happen.
It looks like hybrid and live streaming is not delivering what many expected.
In Conclusion
The Speaker Report is definitely giving several pointers for event professionals working with speakers.
Rethinking our biases should be a daily practice for the savvy meeting professional. This report will help you gauging the reality of the ever changing relationship between speakers and eventprofs.
The report is free to download and no email is required. You can get it here.
