Don't miss Mark Cooper's IMEX America session, "It's no longer your parents' meeting," Wednesday, Oct. 18.

“It is no longer your parents’ meeting,” Mark Cooper, CEO of IACC said at a press event on Wednesday at WEC23. This comment was based on IACC’s newly released “Meeting Room of the Future Barometer,” which features 275 meeting planner respondents from five countries. Cooper presented the findings alongside two IACC board members: Global President-elect Nancy Lindemer, director of sales and marketing for the Rizzo Center, Vice President Susan Liston, senior vice president growth for Aramark.

“But the more things change, the more they stay the same.” Cooper said. “That’s a really powerful statement in this research, because creating the meetings experience, creating a memory has been important for some time now—It’s just how we do that. And we have to do things a lot more smartly, a lot more imaginatively to create that experience. It’s not that it’s old hat, it’s just that we have to work harder to create what’s always been important in live meetings. Maybe just magnify it a bit more.”

Cooper said IACC findings indicate planners are looking for open spaces, specifically being outdoors.

“That is a legacy of the pandemic,” he said. “Some of us always enjoyed the outdoors before, but many of us know really crave it in relation to meetings. That [message] came out loud and clear.”

Cooper said planners are also looking for creative spaces to be able to create the memories.

“Creating a memory is all about stimulating as many senses as you can,” he said. “Culinary taste, visual, acoustic, connections—meetings fulfill all of those.”

Other key findings include the importance of creating an in-person event that would be really hard to deliver online and building relationships (not focusing on team building that simply forces people together).

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