Is the events industry going the way of Ticketmaster and Live Nation? Few choices and the potential for serious price gouging? Could be. Two events juggernauts are gobbling up smaller more niche events services, making their offerings more conducive to one-stop shopping (and one-stop fleecing.) 

Cvent acquired Splash last week. Splash came onto the scene to help market events. During the pandemic years, it did a yeoman’s job of creating programs to drive both sales and attendees. Splash distinguished itself by creating handsome landing pages and services with lots of analytics behind the pretty page. 

The acquisition should help Cvent add marketing oomph to its event repertoire. Earlier this year Cvent acquired Reposite, an AI sourcing program to help users make the process of finding event services and suppliers easy. 

Cvent’s sweet spot is corporate event management which offers features such as event planning, budgeting, and registration management. It’s earned a reputation for being a capable, if not sexy, event-planning solution, but with acquisitions like these, there’s a dose of sex appeal. 

One of Cvent’s rivals in the events management ecosystem is Informa. Unlike Cvent, which focuses on the power behind the scenes, Informa is more of a media company owning tradeshows and publications. It also had a big week, buying the Vidcon trade show that caters to the creator economy. 

Vidcon was the brainchild of brothers John and Hank Green, two YouTube progeny. The show deftly grew to become the preeminent conference for the emerging creator economy. It was acquired by Paramount (previously Time Warner) and is now part of Informa’s stable of conferences. Informa also produces ComicCon, another heavily fan-based conference, so the company is no stranger to the fandom game. 

While Informa's roster is formidable, it also has a pretty good stronghold on the events publishing side of the business, with media brands collectively called Connect Meetings, including BizBash, Trade Show News Network, Corporate Event News, and Exhibit News Now. 

Connect Meetings recently hosted a Las Vegas event called Connect Marketplace for media and marketing events professionals that received wide acclaim. Julius Solaris, someone who keeps a keen eye on events of all stripes, lauded Connect Marketplace for its lively registration area (food, drinks, and local color), high business where buyers had tables where suppliers could visit (a reverse twist on the usual theme), micro-events including orientation for newbies, wellness events like 5K runs and pickleball, and more. He put these ideas into a single video embedded in this post. Connect Marketplace proves that event planners need meetings that sizzle. 

Consolidations like these make decision-making easier for shoppers but also more limited. Expect more acquisitions, but lots of new opportunities to fill in the niches left behind. 

Alfred Poor, our esteemed technical editor, weighs in on Powerpoint and Keynote alternatives this week. 

When I was in college, there was a Fine Arts course that met at lunchtime that students nicknamed “Darkness at Noon” because the PowerPoint shows in the darkened room were the perfect remedy for insomnia. 

Bad slide shows have been putting people to sleep for ages. Sadly, too many online presentations continue to rely on slide decks that are unintentionally soporific. Fortunately, you have options.

For Charts and Graphs
Many presentations are used to convey numerical data. Spreadsheets may make it easy to work with numbers, but they are not so great at engaging an audience or conveying information. The standard bar charts and line graphs in programs like PowerPoint are a little better, but not much. You can go beyond the mundane with a service such as Datawrapper. Just paste your spreadsheet or CSV data onto the Datawrapper website and it will generate a chart, map, or table that you can customize to your heart’s content. And you can embed or download the result for free.

For Sophisticated Non-Linear Presentations
Prezi offers a different take on traditional linear slide shows, which often move along in a straight progression. Among its many features, Prezi’s presentation mode gives you a single large canvas to work with as you lay out your content. You can show visually how the different points relate to each other, creating a map of ideas. Then you can focus on specific areas to create a drill-down view. Zoom in and out to enlarge details, or to show the big picture. The result is a presentation that your audience can follow more easily, though you’ll need to learn to think about your presentation in a very micro/macro way.

For Engagement 
If you want to engage your audience, try adding a random selection. The Wheel of Names is a free website where you can load a list of items to create a virtual spinning wheel of chance. Click to spin and it will select one of the items in the list. The list could be the names of your participants, or it could be topics to address, or a list of prizes to award someone in the audience. It’s a great way to increase attention and spice up your presentations.

Imagine using The Wheel of Names to hop from topic to topic in a presentation or call on someone in the audience. Image credit: Wheel of Names

To find out more about these and other tools that can make your online events better, be sure to explore the VEG online database of tools for presentations.

Watermarking 
A few weeks back our VEG event dove into Deep Fakes and what to do about them. For those who want to know more, check out the Report on AI watermarking, multimedia authenticity, and deepfake detection. VEG played a small part in contributing to this workshop with our participation at the ITU AI for Good Summit. It’s not light reading, but it’s not a light subject either. 

The AI of Apple’s Eye
On Monday Apple launched a slew of Apple Intelligence products including new iPhones that have been designed to use AI tools. They’ll complete your messages, enhance your photos, and anticipate what you’ll think next. Consumers can expect to pay an AI premium for these new devices. Surprisingly for Apple, the markets were skeptical. For the full story, read the Washington Post. For us, the coolest announcement was that Apple AirPods will be able to work as clinical-grade hearing aids soon. But will they know whether you’d rather be listening to that podcast or your spouse is the question. Apple is not alone in testing our appetite for refreshing our aging devices with an AI-generation replacement.

Seen on the Web
We saw this pop-up offering tickets for a trade show that will remain unnamed. Two thoughts struck us. Don’t make your plea for attendance sound desperate and refrain from using the word “again.” It’s a dead giveaway for yes, we’ll do it again if this one doesn’t work.