LIVE From IMEX: What Attendees Really Want from Events! w/CEO IMEX Group Carina Bauer & Freeman SVP Ken Holsinger

Jay Schwedelson: Alright, we are here for a very special edition of Do This, not that podcast, we're live at imex. This is my first imex. So what is an imex? IMEX to me at least, is the world's largest event about all things, events, event planners, where you pick your destination. I mean like thousands and thousands of people.

Jay Schwedelson: It's wild. And who do I have here with me? I have two amazing people. I have the senior Vice President of research and other stuff. Uh, Ken Holsinger from Freeman. Freeman is. Like the company, if you've ever put up a booth or looked for research on anything related to events, anything related to exhibitions, anything, you know who Freeman is.

Jay Schwedelson: They are like the giant company. They're amazing. And then I have Corina Bauer. Corina Bauer is the CEO of Imex. It's all her fault. Everything at this event, all these thousands of people's of the most wild. 600,000 square feet of exhibit hall space here. It's all our fault. It's amazing. And we're gonna be talking about some new research.

Jay Schwedelson: And the reason I love events is the in-person events is that we think about AI taking over, we're all gonna be clipping robot toenails in-person events are gonna be the thing that win the day. That's gonna be the industry to be in. And we have the two most amazing people here to talk about it. So Ken Corina, welcome to the show.

Jay Schwedelson: Oh, thanks for having us.

Carina Bauer: Yeah. Thank you. Great to be here.

Jay Schwedelson: Amazing. All right, Queena, first I wanna ask you, did I get it right? Can you explain everybody? What, what is an imex?

Carina Bauer: Uh, you got it spot on. Because when people ask me for the elevator pitch, I say it's a mega event for event people. Okay. Um, but it's all focused on the business events industry.

Carina Bauer: So that's one sort of facet. It's not festivals, it's not consumer events. And really what we do is we bring the whole supply chain, um, of events globally together with all the people in the world that are. Planning events in different ways. So as you say, they might be looking for venues, they might be looking for tech, or they might want to learn how to really design an event for the best outcomes for their attendees.

Carina Bauer: So every spectrum of the industry, every segment of it, uh, right from across the globe is here in Las Vegas, and we also do it in Frankfurt in the spring.

Jay Schwedelson: I gotta tell you, I've been to a lot of events. I've never been to an event like this, so kudos to you. Thank you very much. Everyone's gotta put on their bucket list and it's pretty wild.

Jay Schwedelson: And so Ken, uh, I want you to talk for a minute about this trends report. 'cause what we're here to talk about is this trends report and, and what we are seeing in the event world and in-person events, all the things. So what is it? And then I wanna dig into what you're finding.

Ken Holsinger: Well, first, I love the, the perspective that you're bringing coming in from the marketing community into this space because it really is at the heart of the omnichannel.

Ken Holsinger: That needs to be advanced. You talked about AI and, and the proliferation of what's going on. We know from a number of, uh, of rounds of research with the Freeman Trends report that we do that. Number one, the audiences are getting younger, we're seeing an acceleration of retirement, and that's bringing us both opportunity and challenge in our industry is the, is the audiences shift, but also we know from a number of reports that the more time that, that the next generation spends online, the more they want and crave in person.

Ken Holsinger: So we're saying, okay. We've been building events for 40 years for boomers that they shifted over during the industrial era into the information age. We're in this what's next? And so we're in a very similar move for the way we've designed events for 40 years. How do we shift that? Let's get into the core objectives of why people come to events, and that conversation is, uh, carried out through a series of research reports we've done.

Ken Holsinger: Why do people come to events? They come to learn, network, have fun, and do business. We've broken that out 'cause our industry loves different acronyms into what we call excellence, Excel, and in C, experience learning, networking and commerce or. We launched in collaboration with imex, uh, the report this time on experiential, so we've been doing other reports.

Ken Holsinger: This one is what's the X? And we've come away from it with some interesting findings and, uh, getting the perspective from the IMEX audience. We calibrated against the planners that come to this event with thousands of event attendees to understand what are they getting, what aren't they getting? We found some surprising disconnects between what the audiences want, the attendees and what planners think they want.

Ken Holsinger: And it, it kind, so, so let me ask you, you say

Jay Schwedelson: experience, and here we are as big experience and I almost think that's a word. Like saying like community. Sure. Or being authentic. Like it's one of these, everyone says experience. So when we think about, you know, IMEX and you're putting this together. How do you really actually make something experiential and not just, oh, there's a coffee station.

Carina Bauer: Yeah, I think it's, you know, and this report shows it as well to a degree. You have to really think about what the objectives are of your event. So what are you trying to achieve and what are your attendees trying to achieve? And then try to build that into the experience. So having a coffee card or having a fun activity is great.

Carina Bauer: People might appreciate that very much, but that's not gonna further their objectives in what they've come to the event to do. And so for us personally, we like to look at experience in a number of ways. We do want to bring that wow moment and that fun experience, but we put more time and effort onto really thinking about how our attendees will do their.

Carina Bauer: Business better. How they will get to network with each other, how they'll find each other, because those are the things they've come for. So we tried to really focus on that element of the experience as well.

Jay Schwedelson: Is that what you saw in the research? 'cause what you said was that the research showed you it was something different than what you expected.

Jay Schwedelson: Yeah. It's a disconnect.

Ken Holsinger: So Corina is lining out exactly what we should be doing. Right, and we agree going into this, we had this conversation about what questions we wanna ask, et cetera. What the planners came back with is that they have been distracted by both the costs and these experiential wow factors that have kind of taken them a little bit off course to be frank.

Ken Holsinger: And it, it's interesting to come into these events 'cause you're almost coming in and stepping on toes. They seem to love it. They love the mirror. We're putting up what the attendees told us was that, for instance, what is experience? They basically lined out exactly what Karina said. They said it's, it's a lens through what I wanna learn, who I want to connect with and who I wanna do business with.

Ken Holsinger: The planners came back and said, it's the keynotes, it's the galas, it's the award ceremonies, it's the wow, it's the AV and all this other stuff. And I know they're not saying that. It, it's not one or the other. What we found throughout the report is that if we, the, the objectives are table stakes. If we can meet their objectives, the learning, networking, and commerce piece, we can then use this as the X factor we call it.

Ken Holsinger: 'cause we all know what that means. So apply something that gives it something to amplify. It's not a core objective, it's an amplifying, uh, factor. And that's what we came through and figured out. What do they remember? What do they take away? How do they measure based on that? And it's a mirror we can put up to planners that frankly will help them save money.

Ken Holsinger: Because if they get lost in the only the Wow, that's expensive. Yeah. And they step back and go, no, there's some core fundamentals. If your favorite team, uh, is struggling mind loss in Notre Dame last week, um, we're doing tackle drills, not special, special teams, uh, trick plays, right? Yes. We need the fundamentals, and I think it's a good reminder as we shift generations, as we shift into this, uh, round of moving really much more into the omnichannel with the face-to-face experience marketing.

Ken Holsinger: It's time to get to the fundamentals and it outlines that clearly.

Jay Schwedelson: So I'm curious, you mentioned fun separate from experience, right? Those are two different things, right? So is is inserting fun important to the planners? So the attendees, yeah. And is that different than just experiences, experience? Is that going to sessions?

Carina Bauer: I think it can be different or it can be one and the same, right? Yeah. I think one of the things in this sort of event planning community that's been a distraction over the past few years and in the trade show industry is this idea of personalizations. That's been a word that's been used because people have seen, you know, these.

Carina Bauer: Big community festivals like Coachella, burning Man, um, and, and how they really drive loyalty in a way that, uh, business events and trade shows can find it hard to do. And so maybe there's been a bit of distraction of, oh, we need to become a festival. Um. For us, um, a, a great journalist actually wrote a great line and he said, IMEX is a trade show that behaves like a festival.

Carina Bauer: And I think that goes to the heart of it. For us. We think about the, what the core of our business is and what's the reason that people are here and they, our attendees, and our exhibitors tell us the reason they are here. The, the first reason, um, and the top reason is to do business. And so for us, we have to make the experience of doing that as productive and easy as possible.

Carina Bauer: However, if they just came and did their business and left, it would be very transactional. It would be boring. It would, it wouldn't lead to the following. And the community, uh, and, and so we kind of see that as the call, like I can think of it. Concentric wings. And then we layer more and more experiences around it so that people come and they can do their business, but they can also meet with their peers and they can make new friends and they can be inspired and they can have fun and they can do all of those good things.

Carina Bauer: And that, I think, is what builds this sort of loyalty and retention. And, and a few years ago we kind of looked at everything and we said, well, we do an evaluation. We don't want people to say, I'm here because I have to be here. We want people to want to be here. Yeah, they probably have to be here too, but first and foremost, we want them to want to be here.

Carina Bauer: And so how do you create an experience that delivers that?

Jay Schwedelson: Yeah. I think it's super interesting because. I was invited to go and do one of these big festivals, be one of these festivals, and I was like, I'm, I didn't go. 'cause I'm like, I don't know what I'm really getting out of that. It looks great. Got a lot of bright lights, a lot of cool famous people.

Jay Schwedelson: I go, but what am I actually doing there? 'cause it was just a giant, you know, festival. At the end of the day, the ROI, I mean, people coming back and saying, this is what we got out of this. I think it's really important what you all are finding in your, your research that you have to start with the core of the fundamentals and you could layer in.

Jay Schwedelson: Kind of the fun stuff. So I'm curious though, about the size. A lot of people that are listening right now, they're like, well, I don't put on a 5,000 person event. Maybe I could put on a 50 person event, a 200 person event. Is your research, uh, finding that this applies to small events and what are you seeing as in terms of, as the events scale, how it applies differently?

Ken Holsinger: So it, it applies across all events. In fact, the sampling that we did talks to planners that claim from very small events, which could be by the way. More expensive than some of the very large events. There's some very pristine, uh, bespoke kinds of events that where you're dealing with VIPs that are small, but yeah, very, very high end at the core of it, uh, the scalability goes to and cuts across those objectives, right?

Ken Holsinger: Those line through. And the fascinating thing we have, one of the brand statements that we use at, at at Freeman, and it's used by many in the events industry, is we make moments that matter. Like we, we wanna, and we wanna make them memorable. So we said, let's go quantify that because that's a nice thing to say, but what is it?

Ken Holsinger: How do we quantify it? So we asked attendees, do you remember at the most recent event, you're at a peak moment? What was a memorable thing you took away? First of all, do you remember it? Then we asked them, uh, what made you remember it? And then third, because you remembered it, what would you do with it?

Ken Holsinger: And so this, it plays out this way. We asked the organizers the same thing on behalf of their attendees. The organizers said that 80%, 78% of their attendees had memorable moments. They're sure of it. What were they? We think they were galas and keynotes and all the, these big things, and we asked the attendees and only 40% said that they were having a memorable wow.

Ken Holsinger: Wow. That they can make, they can connect with normal event retention. For first time attendees in our industry, 30%, so we're already almost doubling retention. They told us that if they had a peak moment or a memorable moment, remember those 40% that connected with someone, a session that they went to that changed something, a vendor they connected to that they can now do business with, or a product that they discovered.

Ken Holsinger: 85% retention, that, that as a marketer, I wanna lower cac, lower my customer acquisition costs and extend LTV. We need to focus on retention in our industry and getting at those core pieces. It's a math problem because of the mass retirement of the, uh, boomers and now beginning to be Xers got help us. Um, that 30% retention is gonna be a math problem for many events.

Ken Holsinger: I mean, we deal with these all the time, and if they don't retain and grow that retention number. The event will retire out from under 'em. And so it's a wake up call to planners to get back to the fundamentals, get to these core moments. We can add the fun and the these extra moments on top of it, but we have some.

Ken Holsinger: Tackle drills that need to happen. Some basic fundamentals.

Jay Schwedelson: You know, you talk about, uh, coming into this industry and, and all of that. And I look around and there's so many careers here. A lot of people are listening to this right now and they're like, wow, you know what? I like events. Maybe I should pivot.

Jay Schwedelson: Maybe I should become an event professional. So Corina. Tell me, is it, is that a wonderful career? What does it mean to somebody to be like, I'm gonna leave this industry and go into the event world? Is this the future? Sell us on why you should be an event professional.

Carina Bauer: Yeah, I mean, I think, first of all, I would say there are so many transferable skills that event professionals.

Carina Bauer: Need. So I think that it is one of those industries where people can pivot from other careers into it. But of course, like any industry, you know, you need experience and, and there are, there are so many different skills, a as you say, for event professional. We think about my team, for example, we are a team of 80 people.

Carina Bauer: We put on these events, we have finance people. We have. Uh, data scientists, we have it people, we have relationship focused people. That's a big part of our team. This is a very relationship driven industry. So we have, um, account managers or relationship managers. We have marketeers, uh, digital marketers, um, as well as, um, relationship focused marketers and partner marketers.

Carina Bauer: Um, and we have graphic designers on our team and we have pr. So I think what this industry does, because. Because you are creating an ecosystem, essentially. So we are trying to, yes, we need the logistics people as well. I forgot the operations people. We were a big operations team as well, so that's very important.

Carina Bauer: But I think sometimes when people think about events, they're thinking about the operations, right? Only. Yeah, and that is kind of the hygiene factor. It's critical. And um, you know, in our ops team, we have a UX designer, so to make sure that we are looking at the flow of the event and the experience from the online world to the in-person world to online again.

Carina Bauer: So like, you know, there is so many different skills that are needed to make sure that it's not just a transactional. Process. Yes, you're putting on event. You need that to run well, but you also need to learn how to create a community. You need critical thinking skills. You need strategic skills to think about exactly what Ken was talking about.

Carina Bauer: What are our attendees objectives and how do we design this? Event in order to meet those objectives and how do we then constantly improve them as well?

Ken Holsinger: How exciting. Lemme give you the other side of it, which is the addictive part of what we do as well, because it, I, I think it's transferrable. We come in, et cetera, but we build cities in a matter of days.

Ken Holsinger: It comes down to the wire. If you were in this building yesterday, there's chaos. Yeah. Controlled chaos. It's, it's beautiful symphony. The dopamine levels are off the fricking charts because. We, the, the thing I love is that we wake up in the morning, it's like one of those commercials where I stayed at a Holiday Inn last night, and the we'll have pioneers from all different industries and we get to weave in and out of basically product launches.

Ken Holsinger: Uh, incredible research. I, when I'm recruiting somebody to work on my team, I'm like. I tell you what, one day we're gonna talk about curing cancer and the next day we're gonna go to the Super Bowl halftime show, and the next day we're gonna actually go to a product launch for a big tech company. And the day after that we're gonna go to a legal conference where they're certifying, you know, legal planners, whatever it is.

Ken Holsinger: Yes, the events industry in some ways. Interesting in your perspective. Some ways it's, it's, it's an industry and it's not because we actually are inside of every industry, right? Because we're a marketing channel, we're a face-to-face marketing channel alongside these other channels, amplifying brands, amplifying business objectives, and I think that there's an addictive, fun, uh, atmosphere of just being a part of that.

Ken Holsinger: Experience ourselves in what we do. Yeah. I love there. I,

Carina Bauer: I think, I think you've described that very well. I kind think about all the vertical sectors, you know? Yeah. Of different industries. And then events as being horizontal across all of them in the same way as you say, marketing is, or finances, or It is, you know, we.

Carina Bauer: Um, deliver the objectives of all of those vertical industries and they all have a different need, essentially, and we are there to make sure that they can do that. I love that. Um, and yeah, and I agree. You know, we are the ultimate face-to-face marketing channel. I mean, that, that is what events, false, trusted

Ken Holsinger: channel.

Ken Holsinger: It's where the next generation wants to go to validate. They know that, that, uh, they, they can be, uh, spoofed online if you've ever ordered, uh. A thing from TMU that comes in about, I don't know, a third, the size of what you thought it was. You know why events we, we come here and we validate, we talk to people face to face and lock it down.

Jay Schwedelson: Yeah. If I was starting my career today and I know what I wanna do, I would go into the event industry, I think. I don't wanna say it's AI proof, but it's pretty damn close to AI proof. All right. One last thing before we wrap up. All right. You all have been to more events than I could possibly imagine. I wanna know the best swag you've ever seen given out.

Jay Schwedelson: Ever or a piece of swag that like, you're, like, you still hold onto. Okay. What do you got? No, no. Korean. Okay.

Carina Bauer: So I'm a very simple, she's, I'm a very simple person. Okay. Um, this isn't the like most exciting pull it out, but I got this little, which is a fancy wallet, leather, uh, card case. EICC is the Edinburgh International Convention Center.

Jay Schwedelson: that for like 20 years?

Jay Schwedelson: That's all me. I know,

Carina Bauer: exactly. This just, this just shows it doesn't have to be super expensive. It just has to be youthful. Right? Jesus.

Ken Holsinger: So we talked about my sneaker game earlier, so you would expect mine is also leather and it's. The, the, the kicks, uh, I get to go into some events and I won't say wear 'cause it would expose some things, but I've gotten some pretty amazing, pretty rare sneakers Oh.

Ken Holsinger: From some event planners and I can't argue with that kind of a swag when you vow. When you get some unreleased Travis Scotts perhaps, that kind of thing. Let's be, it'll, you

Carina Bauer: know, you know that there are only 80 people in the world that have these IMEX sneakers. Right? I, I understand.

Ken Holsinger: Those are super rare.

Ken Holsinger: Where

Carina Bauer: is are super rare.

Ken Holsinger: I've been down at the Delta booth 'cause they don't have it as the swag, but Delta has a unique shoe that's only released to employees and I'm addicted and I'm like, you need, I'm, I'm a 360. Where's the swag? Bring these shoes. Yeah. The rare shoes. That's, that's that. Well, my favorite

Jay Schwedelson: is really old chocolate.

Jay Schwedelson: That makes you nauseous. That's been sitting in a bowl.

Ken Holsinger: Yeah. For

Jay Schwedelson: like 10 years. Yeah. Yeah. That's my

Ken Holsinger: go-to. Favorite swag. Yeah. Socks. We have themes like socks, some years, hot sauce, whatever. I mean,

Carina Bauer: yeah. And there are a lot of those companies here that do a very high end product. Um, so, yeah.

Jay Schwedelson: Amazing. Well then how does everybody get a hold of this research?

Jay Schwedelson: We're gonna put in the show notes. How do we, how do we get it? We're gonna put the URLs in there. All this. Stuff. Yeah.

Ken Holsinger: We, in collaboration with imex, we've posted it up. There's a, there's a link they can get, they can share it, use it, quote it, uh, all the things. And, uh, we give a lot of the details and the methodology of who we talked to, what we talked about.

Ken Holsinger: Yeah, it can go in there, dig into the research and, uh, use it to, to make their next marketing pitch for why, why their event needs to change or why they need to launch one.

Jay Schwedelson: Amazing. All right. In the show notes, you know, re his contact, the LinkedIn is gonna all be in there. I'm gonna follow IMAX and Freeman and the link to all the research.

Jay Schwedelson: Everybody, check it out. This has been incredible. Thank you both for doing this. I'll

Ken Holsinger: take appreciate it.