Dax Callner has spent over 25 years building marketing programs for brands like P&G, American Express, Google, and Microsoft. But what earned him a seat on this show isn't the client list. It's that he looked at an industry spending billions of dollars every year and realized almost nobody in it could prove what their events actually produced. So he built the standard himself.

Dax is founder and board president of EMMA, the Experiential Marketing Measurement Association, and in this conversation we get into why measurement became his life's work, what changed when EMMA rebranded from its former name, and why he refuses to use the term ROI even though everyone else in the industry throws it around.

In this episode, we cover:

If you have ever finished an event, called it a success, and had no real way to prove it, this conversation is for you.

Connect with Dax Callner and EMMA:

Connect with Jenny:

I dropped an F-bomb on this podcast for the first time. That should tell you how strongly I feel about this one.

Last week I moderated two debate series at Event Konnector, and one conversation got more heated than anything else on the agenda: how far the events industry is willing to go to prove ROI. Facial recognition at check-in. Technology built to read attendee emotion in real time. All of it justified the same way, we have to prove this worked.

I break down what the data actually shows, why the companies that built this tech don't even trust it anymore, and where I land on measuring emotion the right way, without ever putting a camera on someone's face.

I still believe in proving your event's ROI more than almost anything. This episode is about the line between proving it and surveilling the people who showed up to find out.

Read the whole rant here: https://jennyhm.com/post/are-we-trying-to-measure-too-much-at-our-events

This week I'm joined by Liz Lathan, co-founder of Club Ichi, a social club for B2B event professionals with nearly 800 paid members in under two years. Liz spent 20 years in corporate event marketing at Dell and IBM before leaving to build Club Ichi with her co-founder Nicole, and she's here to break down ROE, Return on Emotion, and the five emotions her team found actually predict future business.

We talk about the origin story behind Club Ichi (yes, an unconference in a children's museum is involved), why she makes it her mission to teach every planner on her team the language of sales and marketing, and why "party planner" might be the most underrated title in the room. We also get into why event teams get stuck as order-takers instead of strategic partners, and how to speak differently to a CFO than a CMO when you're trying to prove what you built actually worked.

In this episode:

How Liz went from corporate events at Dell and IBM to co-founding Club Ichi The real story behind Club Ichi's name (and the unconference that started it all) Why Liz teaches her team the language of sales and marketing on purpose The five emotions that actually predict future business (Liz's HAM framework) How to pitch ROE differently to a CFO vs. a CMO Why NPS predicts past business, not future business A real example of ROE translating into RFPs, job offers, and partnerships

Connect with Liz Lathan & Club Ichi: Liz Lathan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lizlathan

Club Ichi: https://www.weareichi.com

The Community Factory: https://www.thecommunityfactory.com

Five people can watch the same event and walk away with five completely different verdicts, and not one of them is speaking the same language. In this episode, Jenny Howard Maxwell breaks down the moment that changed how she builds events for good: the six month project that got reduced to a tip jar and a slow valet, and the framework she built afterward so her work would never again rest on one person's mood. This is the story behind the Experiential Edge Blueprint, why proof beats applause, and how to finally get the CEO, the CFO, the CMO, the planner, and the sales team all reading from the same page.

Jenny has designed activations for Bentley, launched brand experiences most people never get invited to see, and worked with some of the biggest names in the industry. On paper, she had made it. But more times than she wants to admit, she would watch a room full of people feel something real, and still have the whole event judged as a failure because one person walked in with a bad mood and nothing had been agreed on in advance about what success actually meant. In this episode, Jenny gets honest about the beach trip, the closed startup, and the ten books that led her to build the framework that changed everything, not just her events, but her entire career.

You are never going to feel ready. Not for the certification, not for the career move, not for the conversation you've been avoiding. This week, one comment on a post that reached over 500,000 people asked Jenny the question everyone is afraid to ask out loud: "How do I know if I'm ready?" Her answer didn't come from a marketing playbook. It came from watching her 89-year-old grandfather, one of the founding fathers of Geographic Information Systems, live out the hardest lesson of all: nobody waits until they're ready. They just decide.

In this episode, Jenny connects that truth to two ideas at the center of her work: the language gap keeping talented event and experiential professionals stuck, and the five-pillar blueprint she built years ago to stop one broken microphone from defining an entire event's success.

If something in you has been asking "am I ready," this episode is your answer.

Most event professionals can tell you attendance numbers. Almost none of them can tell you what an event actually made people feel, and whether that feeling was designed on purpose or just left to chance. In this episode, Jenny shares what came out of an unplanned fifteen minute call with Liz Lathan of Club Ichi, and why that conversation led her straight to return on emotion, the measurable framework behind acceptance, activity, adventure, hope, and motivation. She breaks down the difference between leaders with high emotional intelligence and leaders without it, why that difference shows up in your culture events whether you track it or not, and how to start proving what your internal events actually produced instead of just hoping people had a good time.

Every experience produces an emotion whether you planned it or not. Eight years ago I planned a memorial service for a woman named Mindy who chose me for a job when nobody else in that room wanted me there. I did not know it then but every decision I made that day was the framework I would spend the next eight years building. The pink couch. The world map with pins from every city her guests traveled from. The champagne with her logo on it. The jazz lounge. None of it was decoration. All of it was intentional emotional design before I had a name for any of it. This episode is the origin story of the pink couch, a tribute to the woman who gave me everything, and the moment I realized that what I do as an experiential strategist has always been about one thing. Making people feel something so specific and so intentional that it changes what they do next. This one is personal. And it might be the most important episode I have recorded.

This one is personal.

Jenny spent a year planning a football-themed Mitzvah. Custom turf dance floor. Stenciled logo. A smoke-filled entrance moment that made her client cry. Every detail intentional, every element designed to land. And it did.

Then the caterer was late.

And just like that, everything Jenny built disappeared. Not physically — but emotionally. The tears at the door were gone. The dance floor stopped mattering. The client rewrote the story in real time, and Jenny was left holding the outcome of decisions that were never hers to make.

This is called the vacuum effect. When one thing goes wrong in a live experience, it pulls every positive emotion right out of the room. And the finger always points at you.

In this episode Jenny shares the raw truth of what happened, what she should have done differently, and the one conversation that would have protected her work before the first vendor was ever booked.

This is an expensive lesson. She is sharing it so you do not have to learn it the same way.

In this episode:

Get the workbook: amazon.com

Matthew Barney left the Coast Guard, bought a one way ticket to Seattle, signed a lease on an apartment he never saw, and built a career producing experiences for some of the biggest brands in the world including AWS, Delta, and Microsoft. He describes himself as a creative person who became operationally dangerous. The moment I read that I knew we had to talk.

In this conversation Matthew and I go deep on emotional design, why the gap between the event floor and the sales team is the most expensive gap in this industry, how he uses intentional gifting to create memories that last years, and what it actually takes to earn a seat at the table with C suite executives.

If you have ever wondered whether creativity or strategy matters more in experiential, this episode will change how you think about that question entirely.

The Proof Problem Masterclass is free and linked in the show notes. Watch it before you plan your next activation.