Market Trends

As our lives have become more digital, automated and screen-based, demand for high-quality live events and live experiences has grown.

Leading live events have become key moments and focal points in the year for the communities they serve, and can command a premium. Attending is more purposeful and planned out however, to make maximum use of time, travel and investment. Smart technology and apps are also must-haves to create a smooth experience

Major industries don’t stand still. Markets evolve and different specialist segments emerge and become more important over time.

Changes within the markets we work in can create opportunities: to expand or tailor what we offer or to serve a new sub-community, for example. But they also demand adaptability, agility and continuous product development, and this makes it critical to stay close to market trends and customer needs as they evolve.

Businesses want more and better information on their customers so they can engage them as successfully as possible. The first-party data our products capture is particularly valuable. Through our B2B events, media and intelligence brands, we – and our customers – interact directly with known and identifiable companies and professionals in dozens of different ways. New technology allows us to capture a greater range of data, and advances in AI mean that data can be analysed in deeper ways too and insights allow us to better personalise our products and make our marketing and sales activities more powerful too.

When businesses and professionals attend live events, the quality and distinctiveness of the experience matter more than ever.  

With expectations rising, and new ways to engage customers emerging, adding experiential features to events of all types can add value, increase satisfaction and strengthen brands. These include immersive hands-on experiences, greater personalisation in agendas, highly-exclusive content, formats that enable more targeted networking, and industry celebrations.  

Experience-led events, such as festivals, are becoming a distinct category of event as the industry matures and segments. 

Major live events bring large numbers of people to one location, stimulating trade and investment through business connections and through the time and money they spend directly and indirectly with local businesses.  

Governments around the world recognise that in this way, the Meetings, Incentives, Conferences and Events sector (MICE) can contribute to economic growth.  

A range of countries are proactively supporting – and sometimes incentivising – live events as a result, directing investment towards the infrastructure needed to host major events and deliver a great experience to visitors.  

The world is creating more research. This is partly driven by global growth in education: more students are entering higher education and studying at more advanced levels, and, in turn, becoming researchers.  

A range of governments believe research is a way to support innovation and growth in their countries, and so are funding the production of research more consistently.  

Everywhere in the world, generative AI is making it easier to research topics and create new content too, which further increases the supply of research. 

There is a consistent growth in demand for specialist knowledge that has been created by experts, verified and, as such, can be trusted and relied upon.  

This comes in part from the global increase in spending on research and development. Companies, institutions and universities want to stay competitive and make breakthroughs, and look for original, expert research that they can build on and apply to help them do so.  

The growth of large language models is also a factor. AI providers want their models to provide accurate outputs, and seek – and often prefer – verified content sources as a way of achieving that. 

Generative AI has made producing content easier than ever which in turn makes verifying content harder because of the increase in scale and because technology has made it easier to create false or unsubstantiated research. Research publishers need to undertake a wide range of detailed checks to ensure submissions are original, accurate and not misrepresented.  

This places more demands on every step of the publishing process and makes verification an even more valuable part of the publishing ecosystem. 

Large language models have rapidly become one of the main ways we all find information, and that includes students and researchers. AI agents have become one of the most widely used entry points to advanced learning and expert content. For those working in education, it has fast become a priority to help students use AI models well and appropriately.

For research publishers that are focused on maximising the impact their content makes, it is vital to make that content easy for these models to consume and accurately deliver to their users, along with the right sourcing and attribution

It continues to be the case that academic and expert research content is funded in a variety of ways.  

Broadly, funders – universities, corporates and institutions, or governments – either pay to make their research widely available to read through open access agreements or accessible through subscriptions to journal content.  

Open access or pay to publish remains a smaller part of the market but is seeing the highest growth. Preferred publishing models can vary by subject matter, country and funder. 

Research comes in an increasing range of formats, including code and video. And in a world where information is largely consumed digitally, all types of research must be tagged, indexed and converted into structured, enriched data if they are to be discovered and used by both humans and machines.  

For publishers this means investing in technology on a continuous basis, and acting fast to make the most of the opportunities that new technology and tools can offer.