This week I’m in conversation with Adam Barber, MD of Tamariondo Group and we’re talking about how Adam’s business has built up a community in a specialist subject area and what we could learn from this “non events” guy in terms of delivering to an audience and looking at how they have built a community and commercialized the business but kept editorial integrity at it’s heart. 

Some of you may have heard of Adam before, not just because he’s created a very successful business, but because I first interviewed Adam on the first Event Tech Live Podcast back in November 2020 where we were talking about how his business pivoted from physical to virtual. A great listen, you can tune into here: 

 In this session, we talk about, lots of things actually… but mainly: 

• Integrity of and investment in editorial content; ringfencing content from commercial influence and bias
• Specialization within a massive sector; how they are focused on delivering to what their audience needs
• Commercialisation; audience and commercial opportunities are interlinked
• Community; you know how your community interacts better than anyone else – deliver what they want and need – the customer is king.
• The way users interact with content has fundamentally changed – attention is split. 

We also cover event tech in our chat, “the ever changing Rubix cube” One size doesn’t fit all and we talk about how to find the right partner. 

Let us know what you think. Reach us on Twitter @wavesconnects or email [email protected] 

To connect with my guest, you can search him on Linkedin Adam Barber or via his business www.tamarindogroup.com

I’m trying out some new technology, so if you do like what you’ve heard, please head over to wavesconnects.com/review and try out VideoAsk and tell us what you think.

On this episode we’re in conversation with Andy Hickinbotham from Human Built, an event and exhibition experiential agency that has risen up through this pandemic. If you don’t already, you should follow them on social (links below) as not only have they got a great brand style and identity, but they’re sharing many useful tips or ideas that you could think about with your own events or businesses especially for when we return to live. 

Andy is part of the Human Built team which is tied together by the things they love and I could argue we all love about our events industry…bringing people together face to face. 

In this episode, we are going to be talking about what event design looks like when we come back to f2f as well as new ideas that we should be exploring for commercialization of events. 

We talk about:

• Design – what does design look like when we get back to face to face
• The five senses – are they going to be disrupted when we return? 
• Experience – how do we make our events accessible to every participant no matter their ability
• Sustainability from social, economical and ecological point of view
• People’s psychology has changed over the last 12 months – how do we adapt? 
• Commercialization – thinking beyond a three day event to a 6 or 12 month show as well as opportunities for shared costs

We also talk briefly about our people of the events industry... what's next for them!

We hope you enjoy the episode.
To connect with Andy or Human Built, follow the links below:7
Andy on LinkedIn

Andy on Twitter

Human Built on Linkedin

 Human Built on Twitter

Human Built on Facebook

Trends? Predictions? Or Just an honest conversation?  This is a bit of a longer episode than normal...

Trends? Predictions? Or Just an honest conversation? 

Every year for probably the last 10 years I’ve written some sort of trends blog or article about what I thought might happen over the year ahead. However accurate mine and others trends may have been, no-one predicted the year we’d have in 2020! 

I couldn’t think of two more awesome #eventprofs to have an open and honest conversation about the year ahead with, so I introduce you to Jo-Anne Kelleway, CEO of the Info Salons Group, part of the Freemans Family and Stephanie Selesnick, president of International Trade Information an international exhibition consultant and writer for our industry. 

You can find out a little more about my guests at www.wavesconnects.com/guests 

I first met both of these ladies at IAEE ExpoExpo New Orleans a decade ago and have enjoyed meeting each other face to face annually (and more often than that tbh!) at various events around the world. So, not getting my normal Jo and Steph fix in 2020, what better way to start 2021 with a pre-dawn podcast recording with them both. 

For me, it was 6am, pitch black outside and a balmy -3 degrees and I had a strong coffee on the brew. Jo joined us from outside of Sydney enjoying a nice glass of wine in the afternoon sun and Steph joined us from the city of Las Vegas where the blinking lights had resided to not light up her apartment for a brief moment 😉  

I hope you enjoy listening to our conversation and please do let us know your thoughts or feelings on anything discussed. You can tag us @wavesconnects on social media or hashtag #wavesconnects and we’ll pick it up. 

We covered a lot of topics, below is just some of them:

• Complacency – lets not be complacent and fall back into old models – the world is changing. Everyone is trying at the moment and people are trying new things – a time for evolution is now.
• Quality of the entire event ecosystem – content, connections and experiences
• Re-look at the entire event business model – all event stakeholders to get together to get out of this situation and build a future. How do we come out of this financially and that the money trickles out through the whole ecosystem. 
• Community – will we see real personal specialism in sectors, truly engaged in the markets and help to spearhead the change in the business model.
• Our future generation – our next gen of “kids” coming through, they’re not going to sit through a 30 minute lecture… how do we really engage them?  
• Bring back the fun! – It is SHOWbusiness after all. 
• Seamless tech connections and seamless experiences – “log in once” 

We also cover things like how having free WIFI is like having toilets. Yes, we talk about toilets on this episode. 

Goodbye see you next year signs - let's get rid of them.

In the session I mentioned the Discord platform – I got that wrong and mean to say Kahoot – it was 6am after all. 

Jo-Anne is the CEO for the Infosalons Group, part of the Freeman family. To find out more about Jo and what she’s up to please visit www.infosalonsgroup.com 

Stephanie is president of International Trade Information and you can find out more at www.internationaltradeinformation.com or connect with her on most social platforms @stephselesnick

We’d love to hear your thoughts. Do you agree with what we discussed? Disagree? Tweet @wavesconnects and let us know. 

My guest this week is Helen Harlow, director at Benchmark Collective where we are talking about a fresh approach to sales in a hybrid event world. 

Helen has over 18 years of experience within the events industry working within event management, logistics and brand ambassador roles, but her passion lies in global exhibition sales and rebooking. Following a professional career as a singer and dancer in musicals like ‘Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’ and ‘Singing in the Rain’ she hung up the tap shoes and immersed herself fully in global exhibitions. 

Benchmark Collective are the rebook masters of the exhibitions industry. They are experts in exhibition sales, sales training, rebook strategy and delivery, onsite support, lead generation, sales personnel and sales culture, working with clients such as 

From west end musicals to sales, it’s a serious pirouette from the traditional sales channel for a professional, but sales people are always on show, so there is a link. Sales is a performance; a show is a performance. Helen’s top tip when performing? “Be yourself. Be genuine. Be real. People want to feel like when they’re at an event it’s a showcase or an extravaganza.. that’s what we do, so lets give them a performance.” 

Before I dive into the episode overview, I need to address the weird noises you hear on this one… it’s Helen’s beautiful pooch, an eight month old puppy named Ozzie that decided to join us on the call chewing his reindeer chew toy in the background. This is life in lockdown after all. 

We hear a little bit from Helen about how they as a business have survived the last year and kept the positive message alive between colleagues and peers to help get through a difficult time in our industry. Staying connected and keep listening. “Being a bit more active in what we love, people will remember that.” 

Topics covered in this episode:

-        Relook at sales thinking – where do you start if you’ve been “off” over the pandemic? 

-        Pressure on the sales resource – collaboration amongst teams is key

-        Smarketing – what does it even mean? 

-        Listening to what customers actually want

-        Online sales – from understanding platforms and optoins available and providing even greater levels of transparency when selling. 

We hope you enjoy the episode. 

To learn more about Benchmark Collective please visit www.benchmarkcollective.com 

To connect with Helen, connect on Linkedin here https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenharlow/ 

I’m your host Matt Coyne and today we’re in conversation with Tim Manning, executive producer from Jack Morton Worldwide and lecturer at Instituto Marangoni discussing the future of brand strategy post covid and what we can learn from the corporate space to evolve our industry. 

I first met Tim at Event Tech Live and the Facetime Exhibitor Masterclasses a few years ago when we were in conversation about the similarities and maybe also disparities between events and the retail space, so I’m really looking forward to chatting about what else we could learn to engage our audiences of the future in my conversation with Tim.

To give you a little bit of a background on Tim, he delivers magic moments through customer journeys, experiences and storytelling drawn from years of experience delivering to clients including the United Nations, Formula one and five star hotels to name but a few. Listen to the podcast to learn a little more about Tim. 

We discuss

• A fresh perspective on how we curate and create great experiences for delegates and brands
• How we’ve all been schooled over the last 12 months…and that’s a good thing! We need to continue to learn to evolve. Few of us know the perfect formulae for success in virtual or hybrid, so we need to continue to learn. 
• Understanding and bringing psychology into events to really understand consumer behavior
• Where are we going next? How to answer the question of on demand versus live
• How do you really get to the bottom of a client brief – how do you really understand their strategy? 

Finally we asked Tim what we (people) can do to help us look at what’s next. 

“Ask yourself what you stand for. Be specific. Does that rock my world and do I have passion for it? If so, dive into it and remind you where your true north is. With everything you do, is it helping you move to where you want to go?”

There were a number of references mentioned in this episode, so please do see various links below. 

Miro.com            https://miro.com/ 

Mural.co              https://www.mural.co/ 

Intrado https://www.intrado.com/en

ON24 https://www.on24.com/

Withoutfail Podcast        https://gimletmedia.com/shows/without-fail 

User Journeys:

-        Uxpressia https://uxpressia.com/ 

-        Lucid chart https://www.lucidchart.com/

 Thaler and Sunstein, Nudge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_(book)

Cialdini, Influence https://www.influenceatwork.com/principles-of-persuasion/

Daniel Kahnemen on Sam Harris Waking Up podcast https://samharris.org/podcasts/150-map-misunderstanding/

Daniel Ariely, unpredictably irrational on You Tube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfcro5iM5vw

Jack Morton https://www.jackmorton.com/services/

On having a common place<https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mdXR1cmVza2lsbHNwb2RjYXN0LmxpYnN5bi5jb20vcnNz/episode/OTQzYWRlYjM5NWQ2YTRjZGQ1MGQ1MjU4MWVhZmY2ZGY

“Don’t become a wanderin

In this week’s episode we are talking about event organizer teams. What do they look like and how can oragnisers prepare for their return, but we also look at what skills, across departments, you could learn to help you thrive in the future. 

We are in conversation with CTO of Easyfairs, Stephan Forseilles. Stephan migrated from the telecom industry to exhibitions 15 years ago and has a passion for all things digital. He is currently Head of Technology and Digital Transformation (CTO) but is also active across many industry initiatives including UFI’s Digital Innovation Working Group and The Exhibitions Think Tank.  He is passionate about helping the industry to get in better shape and to be more customer orientated for the future. 

In our conversation, you may be surprised to hear, given my guests specialty, we’re not focusing on tech teams but all parts of organizations that should be working together to drive customer experience. We were previously a very transactional led industry, however now, we should be looking at how we enthuse, engage, educate and inspire experiences of the future. 

We talk about:

• Being more agile and what that really means
• Being open to change and more so, have the willingness to change
• Being ready to learn

We then dive into a number of departments across an organisers business:

Product Management –learn the skills of taking risk but being data driven and not to assume anything. 

Tech Teams – retraining how to be more agile and that it’s ok to not be live with the final product. Build, launch, test, refine. 

Finance – not one you typically see on panels or podcasts, but these teams need to work in partnership with teams and to work with a level of uncertainty when budgeting, that they’ve never had to work with before. 

Marketing – have to truly understand the industry they are serving if they’re to really connect with audiences year round. It’s not just about attracting visitors to three days of a show anymore. 

Sales –There is a greater catalogue of products available to sell, so really understanding the opportunities available in a hybrid world will set sales teams apart in 2021. 

Management – Already versed in how to bring people together, management teams will need to support greater cross team collaboration to drive success of the future. No more silos, breaking down barriers, making things happen. 

Let us know what you think? Is your team changing for the hybrid year? 

This week, we also launch something special. Wanting to share the success of people or businesses that have launched something through this pandemic or supported the industry through this time. We’re excited to share the news from avid listener Noel Reeves and Rocket-Exhibitions. Check them out at www.rocket-exhibitions.com 

For reference, the book that Stephan mentioned in this episode is called the Phoenix Project and available here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Phoenix-Project-Devops-Helping-Business/dp/1942788290/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=phoenix+project&qid=1605005120&quartzVehicle=774-1178&replacementKeywords=project&sr=8-1 

In this episode, we are in conversation with Jasper Squier, Managing Director at Intergalactic about how we can better improve the experience between virtual and physical events as we prepare for what’s next in events. 

Our conversation covers:

• What corporate event organisers looking at today to create better brand engagement.
• Using augmented reality to connect in connection with live speaker presentations to connect brands and products.
• How we can make sponsorship more compelling than just a logo on a page.
• Are we unlocking new “digital” budgets from customers? 
• Analysing the entire user experience map that brings together the digital, physical and everything in-between. 
• How we learn to integrate our CSR initiatives across platforms and how this can be reward participation at events. With CSR front of mind for many companies that wish to support communities through business. This can bring a new level of gamification into events that means something. 

As we piece all of these experiences together, we really need to truly understand the behavior from online to be able to marry up a rich experience to your customers in the off line world as well. Getting the virtual and physical to walk down the aisle in happy matrimony is the eutopia we’re all looking for right now, I hope this conversation provokes thought for what else you could be doing when looking at what’s next for events.  

If you’ve liked what you’ve heard on this or any of our other episodes, please head over to apple podcasts and give us a 5 star rating and tell us why you love the Waves Connects Podcast so much! 

To find out more about Jasper’s business, please visit the following links. 

https://intergalactic.com/ 

https://event-xr.intergalactic.com/ 

 We would not have been able to create this episode if it wasn’t for our partners Expoplatform. We hear from their client, Susan Merola from Reed Exhibitions on how the #eventtech platform has helped them through this pandemic. Please do check out their awesome technology and how it could help you in the future at www.expoplatform.com 

Welcome back to the Waves Connects Podcast. 

We’re excited to release episode one of season two with my first guest, Parry Malm, CEO of Phrasee, in conversation about why transferable skills matter. We are talking about skills that make people in our industry so unique and what gives us a competitive advantage compared to other industries especially when looking at other employment opportunities at the moment. 

Parry is CEO and founder of Phrasee, the most advanced AI-Powered Copywriting technology on the planet.

Phrasee empowers global brands with AI-powered copywriting. Parry has over 15 years’ experience working with countless brands to optimise marketing results and has worked across the events industry from organiser to tech supplier. A leading expert on digital marketing, Parry combines this expertise with an extensive background in computer science, statistics, and commercialising artificial intelligence. With countless awards and accolades to his name and business, I couldn’t think of a better person to be have a conversation with about transferable skills. 

For this episode, I wanted to talk to eventprofs that are currently looking for either their next position and how their unique events industry skills could be applied to give them an advantage for what’s next. I talk to Parry about the unique skills that make #eventprofs awesome.

Working to a deadline – we know (physical) event dates are immovable. If you say your event is hosted on the 28th, you know the event must go ahead on the 28th. This attention to deadlines is an attribute you could bring to your next challenge with proof of many events under your belt, as to why you’re unique for the position you seek. 

Dealing with the unexpected – not just having to deal with overflowing toilets but when the audio goes in your main conference session for example, you resemble a bit of a duck in water. Calm and collected on the surface, but paddling like a bat out of hell upstream as you coordinate your teams and partners to fix the situation. 

Budgets – Eventprofs notoriously scrutinize the budgets they have available to spend and what the return then may be. Your work with your teams can back up their decision with reason and justification. Who doesn’t want to employ someone accountable like that? 

Crossing the chasm – Eventprofs are great at spotting opportunities such as growing new show sectors, so take yourself out of the constraints of an event for a second and think about how valuable your commercialization of ideas could be. It could well be applied to the next greatest product to hit our events industry!  

Showmanship – You’re great at putting on a show. You’re great at making companies shine. Maybe you could apply your skills to a new business ready to be elevated to the top of their space? 

Whatever you’re applying for, think about your skills learned over years of experience in our events industry and how you can apply them to other companies or startups and help them reap the rewards of success with a qualified events professional in their team. 

To learn more about my guest, Parry Malm, please search for parry on Linkedin or Twitter or check out their website www.phrasee.co 

That’s not all… 

I am also super excited to announce our first partner of the podcast. Expoplatform. We hear from their client, Susan Merola from Reed Exhibitions, on how the #eventtech platform has helped them through this pandemic. Please do check out their awesome technology and how it could help you in the future at www.expoplatform.com 

I’m really excited to share our final guest of Season 1 of the Waves Connects Podcast. 

I had the pleasure of having an open conversation

with Ashley Roberts, General Manager of Omanexpo. I wanted to speak to an experienced organiser such as Ash to talk about our people or rather, his employees. 

Ashley is a seasoned senior event professional, with over 20 years experience in the industry, so he has learnt a thing or two about what works (and what doesn't!) with his teams.

As it's our last episode of the season, it builds a perfect stepping stone onto Season 2 for the podcast - helping listeners think about what's next. 

During his career Ashley has spent time based in the UK, United Arab Emirates and currently Oman. He has launched and grown many events across the Middle East, Africa, Europe, South Asia and the Subcontinent of Asia and so has lots of experience we wanted to share for your listening pleasure.

His current role as General Manager at Omanexpo sees him heading up an ambitious and fast growing events company that operate in the Middle East.

Our conversation covered a few topics in reality, but they are useful areas for employees and organisers to think about as everyone starts to think about the future of events. 

Key take aways from this episode 

• Be a good listener – you don’t have all the ideas, take the time to listen to your employees and give them a format that’s accessible for everyone. Not every employee will stick their hand up in a townhall.
• Be open – as the our cultures shift from working from home and splitting office and home work life balance, talk to your employees about what you expect of them or what their outcome needs to be each week. Give them micro goals if you need to, but listen to them to understand what works for them too. 
• Be agile – In Ashley’s view, events haven’t taken digitisation far enough. Movement is being sped up because of the pandemic but we have the opportunity to really drive change for our industry and whilst it’s not a pleasant situation to be in at the moment, we will come out of this pandemic stronger. 

In summary? 

Engage with employees in any way we can. You will foster a workplace of creativity, idea sharing and ultimately, greater employee engagement. 

We hope you enjoy the episode. 

We interupt our regular broadcast with an important announcement...

We’re having a mini break from our main theme of podcasts this week as there’s an event coming up that I think you all need to attend. Ok, don’t get too excited, it’s not face to face but, it’s the next best thing…

Event Tech Live 2020

I LOVE this event and have done since year one, so no, this is not a paid for or sponsored podcast, but I wanted to dig a bit deeper to see what is going on with the new format and give you time to add it into your diaries so I’ve asked an old guest back to the show, Adam Parry from Event Tech Live. 

We talk to Adam about the format of the event this year and for exhibition organisers, Waves Connects has secured a handful of premium access VIP, gold plated, all singing, all dancing passes to the event. You can access the entire event with out one...but...this is just so much better which includes the Event Tech Report 2020 produced in partnership with Explori. 

There's a catch, you have to listen to the podcast to see how you can get your hands on one of the Waves Connects platinum codes for ETL! You didn’t think I was going to give it away that easy did you?! (Just to reiterate, the code is for exhibition/event organisers only). 

So if you want to find out what’s happening at ETL this year and how you can get involved, listen in. 

We’ll be back next week with our regular episodes and our guest Ashely Roberts from Oman Expo. 

To find out more about the event and to register head to ETL2020