Brad Gillespie has 20 years of event industry experience—most recently serving as the general manager of Cvent’s consulting arm. It was here, working with 100 of Cvent’s largest corporate customers, that Gillespie realized there’s a gap in the industry when it comes to research and advisory.
While “research and advisory as a business model has been out there for decades,” the “modern approach” to research and advisory—that includes data-driven decision making, crowdsourcing and the implementation of artificial intelligence, similar to how Forrester, Gartner and 451 Research operate, Gillespie noted—has yet to fully make its way to the METH (meetings, events, travel, hospitality) industries, Gillespie explained to Vendelux.
Enter: The METHOD Project, which officially launched its beta version on Nov. 14 to a group of early customers, who were hand-selected by Gillespie after filling out an application. As for who those clients are, Gillespie kept that information close to his chest.
The goal of METHOD is to serve the ecosystem of corporate meetings, events, travel and hospitality companies “by providing complete and connected information and data that is focused and objective; to support industry leaders with fresh insights and new tools to address key challenges; and to support teams with models and frameworks to enable consistent execution,” per the project’s website.
In more succinct terms, METHOD will also better align the objectives of events teams to that of members of the C-Suite. Currently, far too often event professionals are asked to prove the ROI of putting on or sponsoring an event, and they’re caught “flat footed,” Gillespie said, because their data is not consistent with what executives are interested in.
It’s why now was the best time to launch METHOD, Gillespie noted—because “leaders of events programs […] are struggling to get a seat at the proverbial table.” Some of those people even “lost their jobs during times where the pressure to demonstrate impact was the greatest when economic cycles created [the greatest] pressures on our industry,” Gillespie continued. “One thing that’s been a problem: Leaders are held accountable when they lack that data, and we saw too many very capable leaders, frankly, losing their jobs because they could not demonstrate impact.”
“Operations to human resources, sales to product [teams] have had better access to data more consistently, and there’s no reason that meeting and events leaders should not have the same expectation,” Gillespie concluded of his inspiration to launch METHOD.
As part of setting METHOD in motion, Gillespie said he’s making it a priority to find “a common way to look at KPIs across meetings and events programs, across travel programs [and] across hospitality relationships.” How? By “bringing some standards and a data model to the conversation so that industry participants—both companies and vendors—can start to look at the industry in a very similar way.”
“There’s many different ways that organizations will talk about and define performance and KPIs, and we think this is a big opportunity for research and advisory to add value to the industry,” Gillespie added. But what about event professionals who would argue that KPIs and ROI goals will forever differ based on an event’s objective? To that, Gillespie said: “The question behind your question is, ‘What is and what should be the audience for any particular meeting or event?’”
He continued: “While most event professionals get it generally correct, we think that there’s an opportunity to go much deeper in terms of defining and targeting the right audience.” For instance, an event professional is hosting a VIP dinner. The option is to invite customers, prospective customers or partners.
“While the event type—an executive dinner—is the same, the audience should determine the objective. And those objectives could be different, especially if we’re talking about new business focused efforts to attract and win new customers. That’s measured very differently than when we’re doing the same type of event for current customers,” Gillespie explained.
Where does METHOD come in? It will first provide primary research and analysis based off of industry data to empower event professionals to make decisions about their event. Then, it will provide eventspeople with models and frameworks to allow them to track all of their events with a level of consistency that will allow them to compare the payoff of an investment in an intimate, VIP dinner to an investment in a trade show or large-scale corporate event.
Similarly, organizations looking to purchase a sponsorship as part of their events program will be better at evaluating corporate events or trade shows, for instance. And with METHOD’s standardized frameworks, events will become “more apples to apples,” thus better communicating sponsorship value, per Gillespie.
The METHOD Project has yet to be released to the public—and Gillespie has yet to even determine what the monthly or annual price will be for the service, he dished to Vendelux. That figure is to be determined during the beta phase, Gillespie said, as he plans to utilize feedback from METHOD’s early users to calculate its price. It’s certainly a “unique approach” to launching a business, Gillespie admitted. “But one of my lessons from days of Sirius trying to monetize this model is I want to make the business something that is available to as many leaders and teams as possible, and I don’t want to do that for the sake of profit making,” he said, noting that he’s “not trying to indicate that revenues aren’t important.”
After all, METHOD is a bootstrapped effort funded entirely by Gillespie at the moment, who’s also the sole staffer on payroll. The Washington, DC-based Cvent alum has plans to expand the team come the new year, he told Vendelux, though there remains “no real plans to take on investment.”
First, Gillespie wants to implement AI into METHOD in a much greater way—what he believes to be the cornerstone of that “modern approach to research and advisory,” he said. “AI will let us scale much bigger and faster than the traditional way that researchers and analysts were deployed,” he added. “So, as we continue to build out the technology infrastructure, that’ll give us an opportunity to, at some point, take on investment.”
