Event Experience

David Adler (CEO of BizBash) shares the most unconventional fundraising story that you’ll ever hear, how to develop an event from an online brand, tips on securing sponsors and partners, event trends, and restaurant recs.

David founded Bizbash back in 2000 with the idea of creating the first marketplace for events and meeting professionals. Since then, BizBash has become a leading voice in the industry—boasting digital and print offerings, and producing the city-spanning BizBash Live event series.

Nicola Kastner (Global Head of Event Marketing Strategy at SAP) shares how she and the team transformed SAPPHIRE NOW—SAP’s annual flagship conference. Along the way we discussed ABM strategy, creating data-driven content journeys, what IKEA, Disney World and grocery shopping have to do with professional events, and why it pays to be an Excel nerd.

Working alongside the Head of Global events, Nicola is in charge of overseeing SAP’s event strategy. Before Nicola formally joined the team in 2016, she was assisting SAP in a consultative capacity for several years. All said and done, Nicola has accumulated over 20 years of events experience, working on both the agency and in-house side.

Devin Cleary (VP Experiential Marketing, PTC) shares lessons learned across his eclectic career, how to use data and personas to grow an event, how to retain and hire top talent, and why events need to try harder when it comes to diversity and inclusion.

By the time Devin joined PTC in 2016, he had already spearheaded the growth of HubSpot’s INBOUND event, overhauled the event program at the American Red Cross, and spent nearly 6 years orchestrating conferences and trade shows at his own events company.

Janna Erickson (Director of Events at Drift) discusses why you should consider hijacking events, the art of event marketing hand-to-hand combat, managing an events team from “startup” to “scale-up”, and parleying event expertise in discussions with key stakeholders.

Janna joined Drift in 2017 to help take the team’s event strategy to the next level. Prior to Drift, Janna accumulated over 8 years of event experience from working at brands like HubSpot, Kayak.com, and TomTom.

Vasil Azarov (Founder, Growth Marketing Conference) shares how to launch an event from scratch, how to collaborate with partners and sponsors, the best channels for driving growth, the emergence of the “event marketing” category, and wine.

Since founding GMC, Vasil has scaled it to over 106K members. He is also the CEO of Startup Socials—which is dedicated to providing resources for founders—and has worked with large brands like IBM and Delta Airlines and high growth startups like Autopilot and Zendesk.

Alyson Griffin, VP of Global Marketing at Intel, shares why events are a powerful medium for storytelling. Along the way, we discussed virtually dissected frogs, snot bots, whales, Star Wars, and how Alyson made went from being a pharmacist to a global marketing VP.

For the past three years, Alyson has been on a mission to spread awareness around Intel’s B2B Operations. Before working at Intel, Alyson spent 15 years at Hewlett-Packard which culminated in her role as Vice President of Americas Marketing.

Eleni Thomas (Director of Events and Meetings, KPMG) discusses the kind of processes needed for managing 2,500 events a year, the value of networking with other event planners, what it means to be a service-oriented events department, mitigating risk in a compliance-heavy industry, and owning mistakes.

Between Eleni's current role at KPMG and her 13 years of leading the events team at Weil, Gotshal & Manges, Eleni has spent much of her career spearheading events for professional services organizations.

Joey Hinson (Director of Operations, TechCrunch) discusses the challenges of scaling TC Disrupt, the value of qualitative feedback, why sometimes you're better off not feeding attendees, the future of event technology, and how events are helping to democratize the startup landscape.

Leading the operations behind Disrupt and TechCrunch’s events and advertising programs, Joey has been with TechCrunch for over seven years. During that time has seen first-hand how the organization’s event program has grown.

Andrea Rosen (Head of 99U, Adobe) shares the history of 99U and how it has evolved over the years. she discusses curating creativity, balancing experience and substance, and some of the best ways to organize to-dos.

Having lead the marketing team at a company that serves architects and press relations for a music festival, Andrea has a long career of working in marketing roles for creative audiences. She is passionate about curation and has an encyclopedic knowledge of trends, influencers, and events.

Steve Randazzo (President, Pro Motion) shares lessons learned from 30 years in events, advice for breaking through the marketing clutter, how to measure return on emotion from experiential, and how to charge your brand with authenticity and purpose.

Steve has worked with clients like The Walt Disney Company, Hewlett-Packard, Anheuser-Busch, Citgo, the NBA, and many other great organizations. He's also the author of Brand Experiences: Building Connections in a Digitally Cluttered World.