Seattle MarTech Startup Looks to Capitalize on Emerging Event Management Mega-Trend

Banzai, a leading SaaS platform for event marketing, announced the acquisition of High Attendance, a provider of virtual and hybrid event management software for the enterprise.

Banzai plans to integrate its flagship marketing automation platform Banzai Reach with High Attendance’s virtual and hybrid event management platform to give Banzai customers – including Adobe, Chef Software, Dell, Pure Storage, and other large enterprises throughout all industries – a seamless experience for growing and engaging their audiences.

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“Currently the event marketing landscape is a mess,” said Brian Goldfarb, CMO at Chef Software. “It’s littered with half-baked solutions that were not built with marketers’ unique needs and desires in mind. It is exciting to see Banzai continue to invest in building out their offerings to help create, promote, manage and produce events.”

High Attendance’s event platform supports both online virtual events and offline events, enabling customers to host and manage both virtual and hybrid events from a single unified platform.

“High Attendance was designed for organizations to integrate all their events across any event management system within the enterprise to provide a global view and to unify the attendee experience across virtual and in-person events,” said Christopher Justice, founder and former CEO of High Attendance. “We are incredibly excited to bring together tools that will enhance the success of event marketers to deliver unique and customizable experiences that drive brand awareness and lead generation.”

Justice will stay on in a new role as Vice President of Engineering at Banzai. In total, High Attendance adds 10 team members to Banzai’s rapidly growing headcount of more than 80 employees.

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“The last purely offline event has already occurred,” said Banzai CEO Joe Davy. “The future is hybrid events. Every company in the world is now reaching their audiences through hybrid offline, online, and on-demand audience experiences. This is a $600 billion mega-trend that has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and has quickly transformed the entire events industry. Banzai is leading this trend and supporting marketers as they make this shift.”

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According to a recent survey conducted by the Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA), 70 percent of event marketing professionals have moved their face-to-face events partially or fully to a virtual platform, and many don’t see that as a short-term fix during the pandemic but something that will continue alongside in-person events going forward. In fact, the coronavirus pandemic may have quashed the longstanding fear that virtual events will cannibalize future face-to-face events: Less than one-quarter said that is something they worry about; 62 percent said that is not a concern they share.

“The collective swing to hybrid events has moved swiftly and dramatically, and it’s being driven entirely by the pandemic,” said IAEE president and CEO David DuBois, CMP, CAE, FASAE, CTA. “It’s a new day in the world of event marketing and hybrid events and having a virtual component is now essential for any organization. We have known for some time that the future of events was changing and the pandemic forced all in the industry to take a hard and necessary look at how we engage our stakeholders to bring buyers and sellers together.”

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