For one of the latest episodes of Checked In With Splash, our hostess with the mostest, Camille White-Stern, sat down with entrepreneur, investor, and events industry expert Marco Giberti.Camille talked with Marco about his experiences in event management and entrepreneurship over the years. Additionally, Camille asked for Marco’s thoughts on where the $565 billion events industry is headed in the future. Marco offered lots of advice ‘gems’ in his chat with Camille, so if you’d rather go straight to the source, we’d highly recommend listening to the full podcast episode here.
Marco has over 25 years of experience across media, technology, and live events. He’s a leading investor and entrepreneur and has also authored two books – The Face of Digital, Inside the Original Social Networks and Reinventing Live, The Always-On Future of Events.
With all of his industry expertise and experience over the years, there are two things that Marco was glad he realized fairly early on in his career: “Number one - I was not a corporate guy. I was always dreaming with my own ideas and ventures. And number 2 - I realized how powerful events were as a marketing tool.”
Identifying his own strengths and passions early on helped Marco achieve success. While he says he was “very lucky” to be able to take multiple companies “from zero to exit,” we podcast listeners and event managers know that there was a lot of hard work that went along with that “luck” that Marco talked about!
As Camille cited from one of his previous talks, Marco has called technology – in particular events technology – a “tool, not a solution.”
What does Marco think about the evolution of events technology? What should event managers be looking to do in order to best leverage technology in the events space?
“The most important message that I try to share all the time is number 1 - common sense. Tech should be a tool that helps you to bring added value to your community by connecting buyers and sellers …The event connection is going to happen face-to-face, but tech could and should be an enabler and something that adds value before, during, and after that connection.”
It’s not about choosing between one path or the other - for example, in-person or virtual. In Marco’s mind, it’s all about leveraging all the tools in your toolbox in order to optimize human connection. He shared a time he really had an ‘ah-ha moment’ about this concept:
“Mark Benioff, Salesforce CEO, said something when they relaunched the Salesforce event, Dreamforce. He said, ‘Now, we're no longer thinking about having one physical office. Now we have a physical office and a digital office.’ And, as a classic event organizer, I thought, ‘Wow, That's a very powerful message.’ If I'm an organizer, I need to think about how I will have my physical event and I will have my digital event, and both should help each other.”
So, what’s next? If event managers know their own strengths, use common sense, and leverage technology to foster human connection… does that mean they’re automatically destined for greatness?
Not necessarily. Marco explains further:
“I keep saying it's very important to ‘unlearn and learn again’... That phrase is very relevant for any industry right now because if I think that I understand events just because I've been around for three decades, I think that would be wrong. I need to have that beginner’s mindset, be humble, and unlearn and learn again.”
Customer expectations are constantly changing, so as event organizers, we need to always be ready to adapt and try something new. For example, Marco talked about how he’s excited for the possibilities around augmented reality (AR) technology. And, as Camille pointed out, we should begin to think about embracing not just hybrid events but holistic hybrid event programming, so that event managers can not only optimize the attendee experience but their event ROI.
Powerful stuff!
Well, friends…. We’ve touched on some bits of Camille and Marco’s conversation, but again (not to sound like a broken record), we’d highly recommend listening to the full audio version of the podcast whenever you get the chance. You won’t want to miss all of these great insights!
Also, if you’re really up for an events industry deep dive, you can catch Marco’s Business of Events master class here.
