The 2018 Trends in Event Technology According to Basically Everyone
I read a lot of trends posts when it comes to the event industry. A lot of trends posts. As a result, I've always tried to stand out a little bit by doing something unusual. In the past, I've done anti-trends posts, including the "Top 5 things you won't have to think about this year", among others.
This year I decided to try something a little different. As I came across the various "Here's What You HAVE to Know About Event Technology in 2018!" posts, I cataloged them and pasted them into a text document. After I felt I had the majority of them, I ran it all through a word cloud generator, and whammo! The trends post of all the trends posts.
Here's where we landed:
"Experiential" sure seemed to be quite the buzzword in 2017, so no big shock that the number one word or phrase was "Experience", and was used almost 200 times across all articles. "Artificial Intelligence" and "Data" were right up there though, with "Marketing" being a bit of a surprise. In retrospect, though, it shouldn't have been, as "Event Marketing" has been on the tips of a lot of big brand's tongues these days.
I was a little surprised to see that "Augmented Reality" and "Virtual Reality" were lower in the list than I would have thought, just because they seemed to be mentioned in almost every article I read, but maybe the words just weren't used as frequently. "Chatbots" also seemed kind of low, given the buzz they seem to be generating.
Methodology: Before you ask, yes- I combined "AI" with Artificial Intelligence, "VR" with Virtual Reality, and "AR" with "Augmented Reality". When something looked like a partial phrase, I went back to my master text file and searched for the possible variations and did my best to combine them. I eliminated all words with less than 25 instances, as well as common words such as "if", "and", "the", etc. I also pulled a lot of super-obvious industry words like "attendee".
That's about it! Does it fit with your reading of all the 2018 trends articles? Any surprises?
