Yes to events, but no to big budgets. That's the reading from this year's Corporate Event Marketplace Study. Some 84 percent of respondents tell Special Events they expect to stage the same number of events or even more in 2010 compared with 2009. And while 29 percent will have bigger budgets to work with, an equal number will be stuck with this year's budget allocation, and the rest will have even less money to work with.
And in what may be a rueful acknowledgement of the AIG effect, corporate planners no longer give as much weight to “press/media coverage” as a valuable tool for measuring an event's ROI as they once did. More than a third used it as a measuring tool in 2008, but that figure skidded to less than a quarter this year.
Note: Sums may not total 100% because figures have been rounded off.
