Event Industry News Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

Chrissie Beck, founder of sustainability consultancy for the live events industry, Worlds Better, joins host James Dickson in this episode of The Event Industry News Podcast.

Chrissie has worked in delivering events all over the world for 20 years and in her current role focusses on ensuring that sustainability targets are being met for agencies, event production companies and on delivery following observing how many companies were letting themselves down in their approach towards sustainability.

Last week saw the launch of the 'Delivering Sustainable Events' course. Developed by Worlds Better in partnership with the Event Academy, the course exclusively for experienced event managers will give professionals the knowledge and skills to deliver holistically sustainable events.

Topics covered include:

How sustainability should be viewed as a collaborative effort across the industry and not as a competition

The real reason why sustainability is important for the Event Industry

How small changes during event production can make a big difference

Click here for more information on the Delivering Sustainable Events training course

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Laura Shapiro is portfolio director for medical events at Closer Still Media (CSM) where she’s worked at for more than 12 years, during which the company has grown from 20 people to 700. 

This episode is about Laura’s frontline experience, how serving the sector has changed since 2011. She talks strength in diversity, creating Clinical Pharmacy Congress (CPC), Europe’s largest event of its kind, and the value in CSM’s carryover learnings from its tech shows. 

Answering host James Dickson’s questions, Laura goes on to discuss shaping content around the medical market’s rules and regulations, delegate bags, sustainability, programme grids/moving away from show guides and breaking the boundaries of Closer Still Media’s traditional geography.

Jack Shannon is CEO and co-founder at California-based experiential growth marketing platform Recess.

Launched in 2010, Recess is tech designed to marry brands with perfect match live events and venues efficiently – without all the searching/emailing and calling. Crucially, there are 100s of brands and agencies signed up, so Recess is a balanced equation.

Jack Shannon explains the switch he and his business partner made 11 years ago, from event organisers to facilitators, and the attendant value in truly understanding the challenge prior to rolling out Recess.

This episode goes on to look at the difference between ‘unfair advantage’ and seizing opportunities, the behemoth of the US collegiate system, the pandemic impact, creative thinking and, because Shannon thinks and talks quickly, much, much more….

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Pedro Góes is CEO at InEvent, an integrated end-to-end events platform which has customers in 67 countries and the likes of Facebook, Coca Cola, KPMG, Bosch, Santander among its users.

The July 2021 launch of subsidiary platform EventMarket is at the core of this episode, Góes detailing its capacity to hook clients up with proven local agencies around the world, giving InEvent a new level of global reach.

Host James Dickson asks about the impact, the spoils, of joining the Y Combinator seed accelerator program in 2019, just ahead of the Covid 19 crush, and how much it helped InEvent adapt and deliver through the pandemic.

Pedro Góes also highlights how consumer tech companies are waking up to the value in event tech and much more besides.

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Dodge Woodall and Craig Mathie, owner/founder and managing director respectively, design and deliver Bournemouth 7s, a sport and music festival that’s established itself as a sell-out fixture attracting 30,000 fans over a May weekend, typically, and 400 teams playing a variety of competitive/social sports.

In this episode, Woodall and Mathie discuss the impact of the government’s stop, start, stop again approach to live events – or most of them. They highlight the lack of understanding, the myriad flaws in Westminster’s approach to financial support for the sector, how Dodge Woodall has dug deep to keep the Bournemouth 7s team together, the value of relationships through the festival’s 14 years and much more besides.

Mike Seaman, CEO at Raccoon Events and chair of the AEO UK Organiser Group, wrote a passionate response to the Prime Minister extending restrictions through to July 19.

Published on www.raccoonevents.com – under the News tab – Seaman asks ‘Why are exhibitions being discriminated against?’

In this episode, referencing his post, Mike Seamon talks about the value of the sector, coping with moving shows, getting freelancers and the rest of the supply chain back to work, the built in ‘track and trace’ at live events, why big businesses/big personalities have stayed quiet and whole lot more.

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Christopher Bo Shields, co-founder of Totem, started out in theatre, as a lighting and sound technician, before going on to launch Lock On Productions at the turn of the century.

Lock On slowly became more of a media comms agency, ultimately developing tech solutions and Bo Shields co-founded Totem Hybrid in June 2020.

In this episode, Christopher Bo Shields talks about the past, his thoughts on the event industry model through the pandemic, changing strategy as the goalposts moved, the new values of virtual, data, capacity to test events online and accessibility over broadcast ‘quality’ before focusing on Totem’s own hybrid platform.

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Mike Wroe, the new non exec chairman at JL Lighting (JLL), was CFO at Just Eat from 2008 to 2016, a period which saw the business move from “a couple of million” in turnover to nearly half a billion.

Mike steered Just Eat into the FTSE 250 where it was the fastest growing company for a good while, leaving the business to seek new adventure in 2016 after that huge growth phase.

In this episode, Mike Wroe talks about meeting JLL founder/MD Jack Linaker and making the move into the events industry, opportunities in a changing world, the benefits of being ‘fiercely competitive’, digital acceptance and how hybrid might be the hardest step.

Mike also mentions the Brexit word…

Working out of Denver, Colorado, Tim Woodring is chief solutions officer at event management, production and creative agency, Unbridled.

Launched at the turn of the century, initially focused on event logistics, Unbridled acquired a travel agency in 2002, going on to add registration to the mix in 2004, creative services in 2007 and production 2008, since when the company has enjoyed a “wild ride” in growth.

Currently, Unbridled produces about 400 events a year, with a mix of services and industries, from 50 capacity to 10,000.

In this episode, Tim Woodring highlights the value in connecting employees with their employer and how working from home has changed the map in terms of what job people feel they can apply for.

Woodring also discusses Unbridled staff’s sprint to adopt/adapt to the virtual world in spring 2020, the metamorphosis from ‘webinar’ to virtual event, how professional sport has the ultimate hybrid show for years, Thomas Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and more besides.

Launched in March, the Experiential Marketing Measurement Coalition (EMMC) is out to standardise core metrics and assessment methodologies and promote them, alongside aggregating and sharing anonymous benchmarks.

In this episode, EMMC founders Dax Callner, strategy director at Smyle, Katie Streten, head of experiential strategy for VMLY&R Commerce and Matt Sincaglia, VP of strategy & analytics at RedPeg Marketing, talk about the inspiration they drew from the lack of certified approaches to measurement in “our space” and the subsequent thinking and planning behind the coalition.

They discuss measuring what matters, bypassing the competitive instinct to deliver telling detail for the whole membership, which includes the likes of Astound, DRP, Explori, George P Johnson, Impact and Velocity, presenting understandable core metrics and the ‘So What’ test.