Fifty Years in the Room: The Prelude to 44 Predictions for 2036
What every disruption taught me about the one we are living through now.
I came to the events industry through the back door of Washington society journalism. A month after I graduated from American University I launched Washington Dossier, a magazine that covered the soft power of the nation’s capital: the dinners, the embassy receptions, the charity galas, the private gatherings where the real decisions got made in rooms the official record never mentioned. I thought I was covering politics. I was covering events. The people moving the city were not the ones with the titles. They were the ones organizing the gatherings.
I ran Washington Dossier for fifteen years and sold it. I spent a few years in corporate communications at Macmillan and Primedia, where the CEOs who understood events used them to do what advertising could not: change how people felt about a company by putting them in a room together. They understood soft power before it had a name. Then, from 1991 to 1994, I was at Cone Communications doing what I called passion branding, using events as cause drivers. The Avon Breast Cancer Initiative. The Reebok Human Rights Awards. The gathering as the mechanism that connected a brand to a value the audience already held, in a room where the connection became real rather than merely stated.
By 2000 I understood what twenty-five years had been teaching me. The events industry was not a service sector. It was a power sector. And it deserved to be covered as one. That was the founding argument of BizBash.
What follows in this story is a prelude to 44 very rough predictions of what the world could be in 2036, fifty years of watching that argument tested by every disruption the industry absorbed, organized in the decade chunks that make the testing visible. Because the most important thing I can tell you about the next ten years is what the previous five decades taught me about how wrong everyone was, every decade, about what was coming. And how much faster wrong arrived each time.
Three men who argued the industry into being
The industry I walked into in 1975 already rested on three arguments, even if most people working in it could not have named one.
Jack Morton made the first in 1939, when he founded his production company in Washington and started booking Bob Hope and George Burns for corporate conventions, not to entertain the audience but to carry the company’s message through the entertainment.
He invented what he called corporate theater: the idea that a business gathering could be produced with the same intention as a play, that an executive’s message could be embedded in a show that made people feel something rather than simply receive information. When the show began, Jack Morton watched the audience, not the act. That was a new idea in 1939. It is still a new idea in most conference rooms in the world, which tells you how slowly the fundamental insights of this industry travel even when the tools change every decade.
Buck Freeman made the second argument earlier still. In 1927 he opened the first Freeman Decorating Company office in Des Moines, after discovering as a fraternity pledge that he had a gift for making the space of a gathering feel like something rather than merely look like something. Morton went on to invent the designed experience. Freeman went on to build the operational infrastructure that made the designed experience physically possible at scale. One was the creative argument. The other was the physical reality. The American events industry needed both, and got both from men who started by decorating and booking parties and never stopped believing that what happened in a room was worth taking seriously.
Earl Hargrove Sr. made the third argument from the same city I grew up in. He and his son founded their company in the suburbs of Washington at the end of the war and began producing events for the federal government, the associations, and eventually the most consequential recurring gathering in American civic life: the presidential inauguration. Hargrove has been involved in every inauguration since Truman took the oath in 1949. Nineteen consecutive transfers of American presidential power passed through the operational hands of one Washington family business. Earl Hargrove Jr. drove the parade float himself until he was nearly eighty. When someone asked why he kept going despite an arthritic limp, he said it would kill him not to go. That is not a contractor speaking. That is someone who understood from the beginning that the gathering he built was the moment a democracy makes itself visible to itself.
Morton built the corporate argument. Freeman built the operational argument. Hargrove built the civic argument. Between them, working in the same decades from the same American cities, they covered the full spectrum of what the gathering economy is actually for. I started in 1975 inheriting all three traditions without quite knowing it.
1975 to 1985: The room is everything
In 1975 producing an event invitation required two tools and a steady hand. The body text went to a typesetter who returned galleys two days later that you cut and pasted onto a layout board with rubber cement. The display type, the name of the event, the date in large letterforms, came from a box of Letraset.
Letraset was dry-transfer lettering that raised the design sense of a poster, an invitation and a newsletter. Each sheet was a page of pre-printed letters in a single typeface and size. You laid the sheet over your board, positioned the letter you wanted, and rubbed a pencil across the back of it. The letter transferred to the page. One letter at a time. You built the headline character by character, spacing by eye, praying you did not run out of the letter e before the title was finished. It was not glamorous. But it let an event producer make something look designed without sending every job to a studio, and in an era when the invitation communicated the quality of the event, that mattered.
The registration list lived in a three-ring binder, updated in pen when someone cancelled. The seating chart lived on graph paper, the eraser marks still visible under the new names. Everything was slow and everything was deliberate, and the deliberateness was not a burden. It was a discipline the tools enforced, and I did not know I would miss it until the tools stopped enforcing it.
The room was the only place the event existed. There was no recording, no livestream, no pre-event content package. You came to the room or you did not know what happened there. That was not a limitation. It was the whole point. The gathering was not one channel among many. It was the only channel, which meant everyone who built one understood, without being told, that the room was the product. Nothing else was available to dilute that clarity.
Then the IBM Selectric gave us the correction tape. You pressed a key and the mistake lifted off the page as if it had never happened. For the first time in the history of typing, an error had no consequence, and the discipline that the difficulty of correction had enforced began, almost imperceptibly, to relax. Every tool that reduces friction also reduces the discipline the friction was enforcing. The question this industry has never answered clearly enough is what to do with the attention the friction was protecting.
In 1975 nobody predicted that the hotel would spend the next decade turning the conference relationship into a financial instrument. The attrition clause did not exist. The food-and-beverage minimum did not exist. The contract every planner now signs and argues over for three weeks was not yet standard practice. A decade is long enough to invent an entirely new power structure and make it feel like it was always there.
1985 to 1995: The hotel takes over
The room block arrived as standard practice, and the attrition clause arrived with it: the penalty for not filling the rooms you had promised to fill, priced against revenue the hotel projected rather than revenue it lost. The food-and-beverage minimum arrived alongside both, bundled into a contract written by the hotel’s lawyer and reviewed by nobody on the planner’s side who understood what she was signing. These were not policies built around the planner’s interest or the attendee’s experience. They were financial instruments built around the hotel’s need to convert the conference business from a relationship into a guarantee. The industry accepted them because the hotels had the rooms, and nobody had yet built the data that would make the hotel’s projections challengeable.
The fax machine arrived and felt like a miracle, a document that traveled faster than a person. The conference call arrived and convinced everyone for about three years that the meeting was finished. The meeting was not finished. The conference call revealed, by failing to replace it, that the meeting was doing something the call could not do. We did not have a name for that something. We would not have one until 2020, when it was taken away entirely and the name became obvious to everyone who had spent decades unable to say it.
The ATM arrived in this decade too, and its lesson is the one I have carried the longest. Before the ATM, cash for an event required forethought: a bank visit before three on a weekday, a careful count of the petty cash float, a real problem if the band needed paying and the cash ran out at nine on a Saturday. The ATM solved that. It also did something else. The bank teller who had spent her day counting out twenties was freed to do what the machine could not: notice the customer whose deposit patterns had changed, make the judgment that required knowing a person rather than processing a transaction. Her job did not disappear when the ATM arrived. It clarified. The machine handled the cash. The human handled everything the cash transaction had been obscuring.
I have thought about the ATM many times in the fifty years since, because it is the cleanest demonstration of what happens when a tool removes a friction from a human profession. The friction always turns out to have been concealing something, and what it conceals is usually the thing that matters most. The Letraset concealed the discipline of composition. The correction tape concealed the cost of carelessness. The ATM concealed the value of the human relationship in banking. The event app, when it arrived thirty years later, would conceal for a decade the fact that the event had always been the relationship and never the information. Every tool clarifies by removing what it replaces. The question is always what you do with the clarity once you have it.
The industry was also building its professional identity in this decade, and one moment stands for the rest. In 1987 Joe Goldblatt and a small group of practitioners each pledged two hundred dollars to start what became the International Special Events Society. Goldblatt went on to create the field’s first credential, build the first master’s program in event management at George Washington University, the same campus where Jack Morton had booked fraternity dances fifty years earlier, and argue, before anyone else would, that event management was not just a profession worth practicing but a discipline worth studying. That was the argument the whole industry had been waiting for permission to make.
In 1985 nobody predicted the internet. Not in any form that would have read as a threat to the trade show floor. A decade is long enough for the primary justification of your business model to disappear without warning.
1995 to 2005: The internet arrives, and I build the record
The trade show floor was supposed to die. It did not quite die, but it was never the same. The shows that survived understood they had never been selling product visibility. They were selling the density of the right people in the same room at the same time, which the website could not replicate at any price. Comdex was the largest technology trade show in the world in the 1990s. It closed in 2003. The lesson it left was not that trade shows were finished. It was that the show which could not answer what the room made possible that the website did not was already finished, whether it knew it or not.
Then came September 11, 2001, and the gathering economy absorbed a disruption none of the others had produced: the discovery that a room full of people was not only a commercial proposition but a security one. Attendance and bookings collapsed through 2002 and into 2003. The longer effect was structural. Security became a line item. Credentialing became serious. The relationship between the organizer and local law enforcement became a professional requirement rather than an occasional courtesy. The work I did with Richard Aaron in those months, gathering the leaders of the industry at Gracie Mansion and asking them to return to New York, was partly about revenue and partly about something harder to name. It was about demonstrating that the gathering was still possible, that the room could still be built and filled and the people inside it kept safe. The answer to the disruption of the gathering was not the end of gathering. It was the gathering itself, done with more seriousness than before. A Broadway singer performed New York, New York in a room full of people who build gatherings for a living. I have never forgotten that room. I do not think anyone in it has.
I founded BizBash in 2000 with Richard Aaron, who became its president and brought what I could not provide alone: twenty years of production experience on the inside of the industry’s most sophisticated events. What we were trying to build, though I would not have said it this way at the time, was the first neutral scoreboard the industry had ever had. The trade press of the era was funded by the advertisers it covered, which produced coverage that announced things rather than evaluated them. BizBash covered the events industry the way a serious publication covers a serious subject, with standards accountable to the reader rather than the advertiser.
The person who made that real was Chad Kaydo, our editor in chief, who stayed for more than a decade. Chad came from journalism, not from events, and he brought the same standard he would have brought to fashion or politics. He treated the industry as a subject to be covered, not a vertical to be served, and he built the lists that made excellence legible for the first time: the Top 50 event designers, the Top 500 people in events. For the first time a third party with standards was saying, out loud, this is what good looks like. We also celebritized the vendor. The florist and the event designer had been anonymous service providers behind the client’s name. We named them as the creative intelligence they were, the way fashion magazines named designers. Instagram did the same thing on steroids fifteen years later, except the BizBash profile was an editorial judgment and the Instagram following is an audience metric with no accountability attached. That difference is one of the things the 2036 predictions are built to address.
The infrastructure caught up fast. Cvent, founded by Reggie Aggarwal arrived in 1999 and made the enterprise event manageable. Eventbrite founded by Jula and Kevin Hartz arrived in 2006 and made the small event possible, dropping the barrier to running an event to zero. Corbin Ball spent twenty-seven years standing in the gap between the engineers who wrote the software and the planners who still thought a spreadsheet answered every registration problem, translating the tools until the industry could use them. And the event stack began to multiply faster than any of them planned for, accumulating tools the way a conference accumulates sessions, on the theory that more was better, until the integration problem was bigger than any of the problems the tools had been built to solve.
In 1995 nobody predicted that a social network would restructure the economics of professional visibility, or that a registration company founded in a one-bedroom apartment would be worth billions. A decade is long enough for the infrastructure of an industry to be rebuilt by people who did not come from it.
2005 to 2015: Marketing discovers the room
The most important thing that happened to the room in this decade did not happen in a room. In January 2007 Steve Jobs walked onto a stage in San Francisco and introduced the iPhone, and within three years the thing he was holding sat in the pocket of nearly every person who would ever walk into one of these rooms. This was the disruption that made all the others in the decade possible. The internet had arrived in the 1990s and made information free. The iPhone made it ambient, carried, always on, alive in the attendee’s hand during every keynote she had paid to attend. The room had spent fifty years assuming it owned the attention of the people inside it. After 2007 it did not, and it would spend the rest of the decade competing, in every session, with the most refined attention-capture device ever built, held by the very people it was trying to reach. Everything else here, the money and the social network and the content strategy and the event app, presupposes that glass rectangle in the pocket.
It also changed the arithmetic of what a room was worth. You were no longer speaking only to the three hundred people in front of you. Through every phone held up in the room you were speaking to each of the hundreds of people those three hundred could reach, which meant you were producing the event for the friends of the people in the room as much as for the people in it. A gathering of three hundred became a broadcast to a hundred thousand, and the budget exploded to match the size of the real audience.
The money came from a different change: software sold by subscription. Before it, an enterprise software company had no ongoing relationship with its customers between purchase and renewal, and no reason to gather them. Subscription software created that community. When a hundred and fifty thousand companies all run the same living product at the same moment, the annual customer conference stops being a marketing event and becomes the physical manifestation of a subscription relationship. Dreamforce is not a trade show. It is the annual gathering of a community that exists in the product every other day of the year.
The economics moved the budget. When the marketing chief argues for Dreamforce, she is not asking for a discretionary event expense. She is asking to renew an investment measured in whether customers expand or contract their use of the product, and a conference that moves that number two points across a customer base that size is worth more than almost any other marketing dollar available. That argument pulled the event budget out of the communications department, handed it to marketing, and grew it by a factor nobody in the traditional meetings industry had anticipated, because nobody there had been tracking the metric that justified it.
A new kind of person controlled that budget. She had grown up on Facebook, understood that attention had moved, and walked into the room with a deck showing that the event was not just a gathering but a content production opportunity, that a room full of people with smartphones was a distribution network. She brought real insight about scarcity and social currency, about the invitation-only experience you could not buy your way into. She understood the brand had to be felt, not just seen, that the lighting and the furniture and the smell of the space were brand decisions. Jack Morton knew all of this in 1950. She rediscovered it in 2010, called it experiential, and charged accordingly.
She was not the first, and the branded environment she was rediscovering had a lineage older than any of it. George P. Johnson started as a Detroit flag and sail shop in 1914, drifted into dressing the Detroit Auto Show in the 1920s, and spent the next century turning the corporate pavilion into an art form: the spinning turntable under the new car in 1961, the Chrysler pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair, and eventually the production behind Dreamforce itself, the software conference this decade turned into a revenue engine. When the marketing chief called the room experiential in 2010, George P. Johnson had been building experiential since before Jack Morton booked his first band. The agency that produces the industry’s largest software gathering did not discover experiential marketing. It aged into being called that.
She also brought the attribution problem. Everything on social media was measurable, and she wanted the same dashboard for the room. The industry obliged with metrics that were defensible in a board presentation and revealed nothing about whether anything had changed for the person in the room. Attendance numbers. Social impressions. Net promoter scores collected forty-eight hours after the closing keynote, when the attendee was on a plane home answering with the same attention she gave to deleting promotional email. None of it measured whether anything happened to the person who showed up. All of it looked good on a slide.
The event app arrived in this decade and confirmed the ATM lesson exactly. It was supposed to enhance the experience by putting the schedule and the map and the networking tool at the attendee’s fingertips. What it actually did was put a portal to everywhere else in her hand and call it event infrastructure. The friction it removed was the friction of not knowing where things were, and that friction had been concealing something: finding your way, asking a stranger for directions, was itself a mechanism of encounter. The app optimized the wayfinding and reduced the serendipity. The ATM had told us this would happen. We were not paying attention.
By 2015 the room had never had more money and had never been more visually sophisticated. It had also never been less certain about what it was for.
Then came 2020
Not as one disruption in the sequence. As all of them at once, and faster than any of them.
Every change that would normally have taken a decade to work through the industry happened in eighteen months. The hybrid question the industry had deferred since the first conference call in the 1980s got answered at global scale in ninety days: yes, you can distribute the content digitally, and no, that is not the same thing as the event. The virtual production that would have taken a decade to professionalize went from novelty to standard because there was no alternative. The speaker who had never done a virtual presentation was doing one by April. The sponsor who had never activated digitally had a digital activation by June.
What the compression revealed was the difference between the industry’s technology and its actual product. The technology accelerated beyond anything a normal decade would have produced. The product became visible by its absence. You could produce a virtual event with broadcast lighting, simultaneous translation, and networking that matched attendees more precisely than any cocktail reception ever had, and people sat through it in their home offices for eighteen months. Then the rooms reopened, they walked back in, and they felt something they could not fully name but had been missing with a specificity that surprised them.
Not the content. The content had been fine on Zoom. What they felt was the room itself. The eye contact across a table that changes what you say next. The conversation that started because you were both at the coffee station and one of you said something unrehearsed. The moment in a hallway where someone said the thing that reorganized how you thought about your work, and you were not recording it and could not rewind it and had to hold it carefully all the way back to your seat, because it mattered and you knew it mattered, and the knowing was part of what made it matter.
Every disruption before this one had clarified the room by removing from it what did not require it. This one clarified it by removing it entirely and letting the industry see, in the eighteen months of its absence, exactly what had been there all along.
Which is exactly where we are now
Fifty years of disruption. The Letraset and the Selectric and the fax and the room block and the attrition clause and the ATM and the internet and Cvent and Eventbrite and the social media chief and the event app and the pandemic that compressed every decade into eighteen months. And now AI, arriving at a moment when every other variable is also in motion.
The GLP-1 drugs are changing how the people in the room relate to food. The loneliness epidemic is changing why they come. Remote work is changing where they are for the other three hundred and sixty-two days of the year. Climate accounting is changing the justification for flying them anywhere. The contract is failing under information asymmetries that real-time data has made indefensible. And private equity money is arriving in venue ownership and event technology at the same time, concentrating both in the hands of platforms that understand yield optimization better than they understand what makes a gathering worth attending. Every variable in motion. All the middles arriving at once. Again, and faster.
In the middle of it is the same question that was there when I sat down with a box of Letraset in 1975 and tried to convince three hundred people that a specific room on a specific night was worth being in. What does this room make possible that nothing else can?
Every decade taught me what the wrong answer looks like. The room that justified itself by its information lost the argument when the internet made information free. The room that justified itself by its production values lost the argument when Instagram made production values available to anyone with a smartphone and a willing florist. The room that justified itself by its speaker lineup lost the argument when podcasts made the same ideas available on demand before the attendee had boarded the plane. The room that justified itself by the dashboard the marketing chief wanted lost the argument when the dashboard measured everything except whether anything had changed for the person inside it. Fifty years of wrong answers, each one necessary, each one leaving the right answer slightly more visible than before. And each one arriving faster than the last.
Jack Morton watched the audience instead of the act. Buck Freeman built the infrastructure and never stopped believing that operational excellence was a form of respect for the people in the room. George P. Johnson turned a Detroit flag shop into the art of the branded environment and proved a company’s whole argument could stand inside an exhibit. Earl Hargrove drove the parade float because the gathering was democracy making itself visible and that was not something you missed. Joe Goldblatt pledged two hundred dollars because the work deserved a discipline. Chad Kaydo held a journalistic standard against the pressure to be merely promotional because the industry deserved coverage that told it the truth. All of them working on the same proposition Buck Freeman staked out in 1927 when he opened a decorating office in Des Moines and decided that the way a room feels is worth building deliberately.
The next piece in this series is the attempt to say what the right answer looks like, in the decade between now and 2036. Forty-four predictions about what changes, what dies, what gets rebuilt, and what turns out to have been the product all along.
Fifty years of the room surviving everything that was supposed to replace it, each disruption arriving faster than the last, each one leaving its irreplaceable value slightly clearer. I think we are finally close enough to the thing itself to say plainly what it is for.
The room remains. The question is whether the industry finally knows why.
The GatheringPoint Field Guide to 2036 publishes next week.
David Adler is the founder of GatheringPoint.news. He founded BizBash in 2000 and spent nineteen years building it into the largest media platform in the events industry. He has been in this room since 1975.
GatheringPoint covers the people who build the gatherings. Subscribe at GatheringPoint.news.