Mid-Year Trend Update: Micro Events, Intentional Design and More

Speaker A: Why aren't you investing in your events software like you would your other marketing channels? That's really the thesis of event led growth is if you're treating your events as a performance channel, you need to make that investment for the whole system to work.

Speaker B: Great events create great brands, but pulling off an event that engages, excites and connects audiences, well, that takes a village. And we're that village. My name is Alyssa.

Speaker C: I'm Rachel.

Speaker B: I'm Kelly.

Speaker D: And I'm Felicia.

Speaker B: And you're listening to Great Events, the podcast for all event enthusiasts, creators and innovators in the world of events and marketing.

Speaker D: Hi, I'm Felicia and welcome back to Great Events, the podcast for event professionals, marketers and hospitality experts who want to do better events. We are, uh, back with a brilliant episode today. A mid year trend check in because at the start of 2026 we always do our trends and we called nine trends out that are shaping the industry and now we're about six months in. We've got the data to prove it. But before we get into it, Rachel, I believe we have some news.

Speaker C: Oh my gosh. Yes we do. We are so excited about this. Um, joining us today and from this point forward, permanently, we have a new co host of Great Events. She is the brilliant Kelly Chang. Uh, Kelly is the CMO at Goldcast, now part of the Cvent family. And I'm very excited to have her on because she's, she brings so, so much perspective on marketing and video and brand and the intersection of technology and events. And she's just overall an awesome person. So I think everyone that listens to our podcast is going to learn a lot from her. Kelly, welcome.

Speaker A: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm um, looking forward to joining both of you as co hosts. Moving forward, um, a little bit about who I am. I have been a career long B2B marketer. I've always sat at the intersection of brand demand and revenue. I have led marketing teams across different stages of companies from high growth startups to now post acquisition integration. And I've spent my career building marketing at companies where the product is still being figured out and you have to create that demand before you can capture it. And so that's the game that I know how to play. And that common thread has always been, I've been obsessed with how marketers actually earn that attention and not just buy it. Events has always been one of my highest conviction marketing channels. Uh, not just because they're fun, but because they're the only format that you can actually control that entire experience. What made me say yes to joining, honestly, is this is the conversation that you guys have here every month that I already have in my head. And so it just feels like a very natural place to have this conversation out loud. So thank you for having me.

Speaker D: Oh, we're so glad to have you. And, um, what I always love and kind of what I love about what you just said is I love my job so much because I always feel like I'm marketing to my own self. You know, I'm in my head thinking, what would I like? And you're very similar and like, how would I like to see the data? And Rachel, you're absolutely, like, doing events for your own people and your own crew. I love that. So we're all in the same boat. We're in a good place. So today, let's get cracking. We are checking in on four of our, uh, 20, 26 trends. We're going to look at trust as a differentiator. We're going to look at the rise of the macro events. Contentious. And we'll tell you why. Event space is designed with intention and measurable outcomes. But before we get into those trends, let's set the scene, because the environment we're all operating in right now is shaping every single one of those trends. So let's try and look at some information, some data that's coming from the world. We're going to look at the planner sentiment from the CVENT North Star poll survey. And for North America, I'm going to tell you, turning cautious, as I'm not in North America, I just want a question. Apparently 52% less optimistic about what's happening generally in the macroeconomic environment. North Americans, what is going on over there?

Speaker C: I think cautious is a good word to use, but that's like me as a event, uh, designer, event strategist. We are just ears to ground at all times, making sure that we know kind of what's going on in our environments because it will impact your attendance, your safety at events and things like that. So, you know, I feel like the world we live in, both from a, uh, macro environment standpoint and political standpoint, in North America, we're just ears to ground and just making sure that things are okay, like, especially with rising costs. Mine is always focused on cost and safety. Like, I think that just keeping your ear to the ground there because if you can't afford your events or it's not safe to do them and like, you gotta be cautious around That I wouldn't say there's anything like right now on my list in North America that's deterring major things. In fact, I do think that most people are still hungry to go to events and they're still craving that human connection. It's more focused on, like, do international people want to travel here as a concern for right now, I'm still cautious, but optimistic, Absolutely.

Speaker D: I think we've got a similar situation in emea. Like, there's still economic issues in terms of inflation, rising costs of food, travel. Like, there's so much happening that I think people are. Well, I don't just think it says it in the report. People are just cautious as well. It's like it says that EMEA is softening and it's like we're at that point of wondering what's next. Everything's a bit slower, sourcing's a bit slower. Uh, making decisions is a bit slower. Uh, it's just taking more time to think about what are we going to do?

Speaker C: Yeah, one thing, one thing I'm doing is I'm leaning into the destinations pretty hard right now. You know, if we're going to a new destination or, you know, somewhere in North America or somewhere globally, like, leaning into talking to the destinations about what they're seeing. Now, they may be biased because they want you to come to their destination, but what I've found is most of them are pretty straightforward with what's going on and just preparing yourselves for any potential challenges, whether it's like a strike or labor changes that are happening within that region, or talking to your venue about increasing costs. And some of them will say, well, this is increasing, but what if you switched it for this? So just more openness and transparency between partners, I think, is key right now.

Speaker D: One of the things I've noticed, like openly noticed, we have Tube strikes in London, right. It's super annoying. I even posted about it on LinkedIn a while ago and I got so much traction. Everyone was like, yeah, I have noticed that this year, Tube strikes or not, people will turn up to events. It might not be your audience that you fully wanted. You might get like half the audience. But they're like, I made it. I took a bike and a boat and a bus and I gave because we're just done with it. And so in amongst all of that, Kelly, I was going to ask, do you see people then switching to say, actually, let's just have the webinar, or let's just do this virtually? Because actually, I can guarantee it. I don't have to think about wars and conflict. I can just have my thing, you know. Are you seeing any trends in that direction?

Speaker A: Yes. I mean if, uh, you think back to 2020, our world completely changed. Everybody had to take their in person events and move it virtual. Like you do see that behavior of people saying, okay, backup plan, let's just put it on virtual and get thousands of registrations. I think that when you go into that sort of pivot, you just have to be honest with yourself on, um, the impact down funnel. Sure you're going to get more volume, but are they going to be less engaged? And so what does that actually mean when it comes down to the funnel?

Speaker D: Absolutely. So saying all that, let's pivot into our. I hate that word. I'm never going to use it again. Let's turn our attention to our trends. Um, so one of the biggest trends that we called out at the beginning of the year and now it's just become commonplace is trust as a differentiator of a brand. When we were thinking about this, it was actually last year, there were a few things that impacted trust. I don't know if anyone saw it and I like to mention it without mentioning company names, but a large television organization in Europe took a president's words and turned them for their own needs to drive attention. And people were really unhappy with that. And that's what got me thinking, can we even trust them? That's like a stable institution, man. M like we supposed to be able to trust them. And since then. So we did some trust research. We've now got the report. It is available for download. And then I started looking at the Edelman research. They showed that 61% of people in the world hold some kind of grievance against organizations, governments. They're just not happy. But our Trust research, 97% of the audience said, yeah, trust is amazing. We were like, what's going on? I think it's a topic that everybody's very interested in because there is so much mistrust and distrust with AI. I also think that the reason why the marketers and event planners said it's great is because we are the torchbearers of our own trust. So we're like, yeah, I build this event and so therefore people should trust me. But Kelly, I'll start with you with the AI thing. Do you think AI is eroding trust? Like using so much AI at scale? Do you think it's having a negative impact on, um, trust?

Speaker A: It's a very interesting paradox. I think there's A very fine line to where AI is actually supporting the trust element. And then there's that line where you cross where it becomes AI slop and none of it is trustworthy. And once you break that trust, it's very difficult to win it back. So for brands that are trying to figure out how heavy to go AI forward, AI first, AI powered, there is that fine line with the human in terms of trusting something that is fully AI versus partly AI trust scales. And if you don't have trust, that also scales in a negative way. When I think about AI and scaling and trust and I think about events, I actually think this is actually a very critical time for marketers to take a bigger look at events and look at their investment in events. Because for every human being in today's world, living and breathing, we're consuming so much content. Some of that content is garbage because it is AI slop contributing to that distrust. But in human connections today, the one thing that you can still trust is that person that you're speaking to face to face, that person's hand you're shaking, that conversation, that panel, that thought leader that's on the stage. So in a world where there's so much AI that's eroding trust, events is actually the place where trust can be highlighted and scaled in this strange AI paradox landscape that we're living in.

Speaker C: I like to say that it's the biggest job security for, for me and my team ever, because especially in person events and our industry, like I just presented on this and, and everyone is so. I think they're distrustful because they don't understand it, you know what I mean? Like, not everybody gets everything about AI, so they're distressing of it. And then they'll watch a video on Instagram of like a shark flying and they're like, how is that real? And, um, I'm like, oh my God, you guys, come on, use your brains. But you're right, Kelly, like in person is going to be like the job security of this. I also think that this isn't a trend, but this is just a hot take. I think that events budgets are going to increase because people want more of that. Face to face relationship building or travel budgets are going to increase because people are going to be flying to meet with people in person. More virtual events are still an amazing way to connect. Like, think of the way gold casts and things like that help get information out there that's not going to go away. But I think the people that are watching those things need to trust that That's a real platform for them to trust and look at. But going to a venue and being with somebody that can't be replaced by technology right now. So great job security.

Speaker D: I agree with you. And whilst we were fielding all this research, it's been really interesting actually. The first six months I've been taking it on the road before we had all the data back as a uh, kind of what do you think? And some of the questions I would ask is like, okay, so you know, you're on your social media, you watch the shark flying, you get all happy and excited because you didn't realize sharks could fly. And then someone tells you you're an idiot.

Speaker C: Right?

Speaker D: And then people were like, yeah, I just feel so, like so dumb. I feel so cheated. Like all these really big feelings came out and I was like, man, in amongst that, you've then got people advertising to you like, buy my stuff, buy my stuff on Shark's. Fine, I'll buy my stuff. It's just overload. They're not doing anything wrong like that, uh, digital world is where a lot of people get their first view of a brand, but it's the solidification of going to the event, going to the can Lions go into the whatever event it is and, and meeting and shaking hands with the brand and taking even the water bottle. I going to tell you, I got a TikTok water bottle last year. It means the world to me because the digital brand became real.

Speaker A: I m was like, yes, the opportunity to go to in person events is a privilege. I don't think a lot of people would be able to say they are able to go to events every single month. And so I think that's where you can supplement digital because for any business you have to execute many different customer touch points in order to build that brand, build that trust. And if you can only have a few in person touch points, how do you supplement that and scale that with digital to make sure that there's that baseline level of trust for conversion?

Speaker C: Yeah, well, uh, personalization comes into that too. Because if you're just like spamming everybody, like that's not going to work either.

Speaker D: I feel like it's your event, Rachel. Like it's on your event list where you had personalized T shirts. Something was happening and it was like these personalized graffiti T shirts were happening.

Speaker C: Yeah, we've done Adobe, uh, and piwc. We did personalized shirts. The line I'm um, and maybe this is just me, like I don't understand. People see free items and they lose Their minds. But when it's personalized, they lose their minds even further. Like, uh, I'm telling you, there was at one point like 40 people in line for this activation. And I was like, shoot, we should have had four more artists doing this. We only had one or two people. It's just wild. I was like, I can't even stand in line for our own activation. It's so long.

Speaker D: But I think it's super cool. And I know it's not exactly about trust building, but it kind of is. It's like knowing you by name, taking the time to really get to talk to you. What do you want? You know, it makes a big difference to just like, here's a hat that I made for a thousand people and now you have one. You know, I think it's really cool. Okay, so second thing within trust, and then we'll move on to the next one, is the venue. So in our survey, the venue came up as the second most important trust factor, which I couldn't quite get my head around. I was like, how is your choice of venue as a planner building trust with your attendee? But apparently it is. It's really important. Rach, your take on that?

Speaker C: I got two things. So I was recently in India. I just wanted to go to, uh, a cocktail bar and it was like a Friday or Saturday. While I was there for work, I asked AI to give me some recommendations and source me 10 venues. The ones that it came back with, two of them were lunch spots. Three of them were permanently closed, and one had like transitioned into like, not the right place. So I think that that's probably where it's coming from is AI is only pulling from what it has known historically. It's not pulling like the latest and greatest openings or hotspots unless it's pulling from a list that exists already. I don't think I'd fully rely on it for venue sourcing. I think I can use it for some recommendations in the city. But like, go in like where you guys live right now and ask it to give you five family friendly restaurants. I guarantee you two to three of them will be like, kind of questionable. And like, they might be okay. But like one, I did that recently and it gave me the aquarium. And I'm like looking on the aquarium's website and like, I'm pretty sure they only have a food court. Not sure I'm going to have to do like a nice sit down dinner. So all that to say, yes, you can use it as like a productivity multiplier and like, get a template for venue sourcing through AI. But I would trust your local destinations or your venues that are reputable through a venue sourcing platform. Before, I would just go to AI and be like, source this for me. Because it's not right all the time.

Speaker D: Yeah, I hear you. And like, to wrap this trust segment up. Like when I was listening to you, Kelly, talk about AI, and I was thinking about the job to do, because I know the meetings and events team here at CVENT has just thought about that. Like, what is the job to do of AI? What is our readiness to accept it and what's the job to do? And I think what you're saying there, Rachel, is the job of standalone AI. Isn't venue sourcing a venue sourcing platform? Its job is to find you venues. Now, if there's AI built into venue sourcing in the platform, phenomenal. Because the job to do is to make my life easier sourcing. But to go out and give AI the full job is probably where we're getting the slot.

Speaker C: I think you can use it as a foundational thing, right, Felicia? If you're just like, hey, I need AI to pull me a bid comparison template and start, uh, to plug in these things, that's a great thing to use AI for, but I wouldn't trust it for suggestions on like, what neighborhoods to visit and where you're going, or, you know what I mean, like, uh, it's not there yet.

Speaker D: Absolutely. Okay, so let's get onto the second trend again, Questionable. Rachel, I'm waiting to hear what you say about this one. The rise of the micro event trend. Or we were doing that. Uh, dart.

Speaker C: Anyway, I think that this is not a trend. I'm just gonna say it. Listen, I think that the microscope on this being an important factor in your total event program is valid because we know that people crave community and connection in this digital world. So the microscope, totally fair. But we've been doing micro events for years. Maybe it's that executives are now paying attention to these micro events because they're like, oh, you mean I get into a room with 20 people and have executive level content and I have better conversations and we see ROI from that. Wow, this is amazing. I'm like, we've been doing this for years.

Speaker D: Years.

Speaker A: From my standpoint, I see that marketers are choosing between a sponsorship or an ancillary sidecar event. And so before, where they may have exhibited a trade show with a tiny little booth, they're using that investment to do a 20 person dinner instead. So I am seeing those kind of trade off decisions happening and moving towards more of that micro events area. So playing devil's advocate a little bit, I'm curious if you see that trend as well. Sure, micro events have always existed, but do you see that people are maybe moving more towards that versus that like logo, splash, sponsorship?

Speaker C: The game has changed but the players are the same. So like the tactic is the same but the uh, way that people are talking about it has changed. Right. Doing the fringe events at the trade show, reallocating your budget to more impactful fringe or micro or sidecar events, whatever you want to call it, they've all been happening. But I think like maybe the difference, Kelly, and I'll agree with you there, is just that they're opting to not do these big 40 by 40 spaces and opting to do more, taking their booth down a size and then doing these fringe events to create more impact. For sure. Yeah, that, that is fair.

Speaker A: Prior to Goldcast being acquired by Steven, you know we were a startup, very, very limited budget and resourcing. Could not sponsor Adobe for the last four years but instead we did these smaller events that cost less than the sponsorship. So I do think that there is an angle of marketers being more cautious with the spend of events and selecting formats that they're seeing more uh, ROI from.

Speaker C: That's a good note for event organizers too though. Like if you are putting on a trade show or something and you're out pricing your people, maybe there's some other offerings that you can put on your sponsorship prospectus that help with this because like depending on how big your trade show is, you do want some of the smaller players there. And so that's something that you think about. You have all these competing things, but just food, food for thought.

Speaker A: If there are listeners listening that are leaning into this trend of doing more micro events, I think that there are some stakeholder management that marketers should get ahead of and that's training your leadership team to think more in value versus volume because you're going to see the numbers change. You're going to see maybe in one month you get 2000 t shirt leads, but in this time this month you're going to get 35 C level VP level titles. So just making sure that you manage that change in the down funnel data and coach the leadership to understand what that means for them. Because to see attendance number shift from 2000 to 50 is going to cause some fire drills.

Speaker D: Oh yeah, I could not agree more with that statement. And we've been talking recently about engagement and how to really get the, you know, C suite to understand engagement data. Uh, I don't know that we've cracked it, but that deep level of engagement I will take any day over the swag I just mentioned that I love so much. That's kind of like a almost not empty touch point, but it's okay. Whereas that deep level of sit down dinner engagement, it's rich and nothing beats it to be honest. So even the invite in my inbox, especially coming up to like large events, people start saying, hey, I'm having a CMO dinner, I'm having a leadership only dinner. The invite alone piques my interest because there sounds like it's personal reaching out to me, inviting me to a dinner. And I almost feel torn, like I should probably go, but I don't have time. Whereas if it's just a huge event, it's not even on my radar, like I don't have time for that, you know. So let's get back to the data I was going to say. So in our 2026 Cvent event, uh, LED growth report, 55% of marketers said they now prioritize community building in event design. So that is where that trend. That's not a trend is coming from. I do think it is kind of what you were saying, Rachel and um, um, Kelly, marketers have cottoned onto this and the event execs and the execs have cottoned onto this. But actually your team has been doing it for years because you get the requests. So I think you've always seen I need a dinner, I need a lunch, I need a this, I needed that. Whereas people didn't realize that that's what they were doing. Maybe don't know why it's a trend today, but it is. All right, so number three, event space is designed with intention. Let me set this one up for you so you understand what we mean by that. Special event venue sourcing is up 30 percentage points since 2023 with 48% of people from the planner sourcing report saying they are now sourcing non hotel locations. And we've seen this on the rise, we've seen unique venues kind of rising, but it's starting to really peak. Like half of the sourcing in non hotel locations means people are thinking about their space as ah, part of their program, potentially not just somewhere as a logistical place to go. Thoughts?

Speaker C: I can start this one just because we're uh, doing a lot of this. I think there's a couple shifts happening. Let's talk just about one specific type of event. It's just like a community event or a social event. The trends have been that not as many people are drinking alcohol anymore. So making a happy hour the focal point of your event isn't trending for some people. So they need other ways to engage with each other. So people are building in more intentional formats. Whether that's like, uh, very specifically a designed agenda, peer to peer sharing, or it's an activity like going to F1 simulator or something where you have something else to do other than drink so that you can connect with people. So I think that's one of the things. And then it's just cool, right? There's just so many cool options coming out and it's gotten a little bit easier to source some of those options through different platforms I think is the other thing. Sometimes these venues are a little bit more flexible. You can go to a restaurant or um, you know, an activation space, uh, you can say, hey, I only have $5,000. What can you do with that? They don't have like labor unions in the hotels. They don't have food and beverage minimum. Now, not to say like, love our hotel peeps, right? I love working in hotels. They have their place and time for certain event types. But some people are moving their events to these other flexible spaces. But again, we've always designed events with intention. I think the intentions are just shifting slightly.

Speaker D: You're right. We have been designing with intention. I think it's trying to showcase the why, you know, why are we doing that and what does that look like in practice and what are we getting out of it? Which leads us really nicely actually to trend four of looking at those measurable outcomes. What are we doing this for? Why are we holding these things? Why did we look for the unique venue? And I think the terminology that helps us to think about these things is event led growth. It's very strategic, full on program, not event by event, but actually growing through events, through a strategic program. And I know Kelly, you've been working on this a lot recently and thinking about our event led growth strategy and how we're talking about that to marketers. So tell us a bit more.

Speaker A: Yeah, so, you know, it's very interesting because as I'm digging into the whole events landscape and the way that marketers are seeing the channel of events. Did you know that 34% of a marketing team's budget goes towards event? That's the single biggest line item on any marketing budget. Bigger than pr, social search ads. It's the biggest line Item for events. And what's also very interesting is that for all the smaller spend levels like ads, all that stuff, marketers spend so much software spend to be able to track the engagement and what people do on their website. But when someone goes to their event in person or goes to a dinner, they're not tracking their experience as they would for some of these lower invested channels. So it is a very interesting like when you lay it out like that, you're like, why aren't you investing in your events software like you would your other marketing channels? And that's really the thesis of event led growth is if you're treating your events as a performance channel, you need to make that investment for the whole system to work, not just the experience piece, but all the way down funnel. So the way that you track martech is the way that you need to track events. Event tech is martech. So event led growth is the idea that you're treating the events channel just like any other high performing channel that you would on the demand gen growth side of it. But on the events thesis, when we think about the challenge of spend for events, where that's the biggest problem, the events cost a lot of money, budgets are going away, I have to prove the ROI to the board. And so you can answer those questions if you treat events as that led growth channel.

Speaker D: Yeah. And um, the real challenge we saw this from our event led growth report this year is that 75% of the people that responded to that say they actually don't connect their Event platform to MarTech, which completely undermines the credibility of the events that have been run and the amount of money that's being spent.

Speaker A: So how can you expect to grow that channel if it's not connected to your business systems?

Speaker C: I think that that comes from like disconnected teams as well. Like if your mops and campaigns and your event team aren't not connected to each other. Because some people's events teams don't even sit in marketing. I think that one step is like getting alignment. What I've heard from other event profs is that they either don't have the buy in or they don't have the time to connect all the systems. Like even when I look at all the different technologies that touch events in some way, shape or form, within our whole martech stack there's like 40 technologies. So if you're a team of one or a team of two and you don't have an event tech person or you don't have a MOPS team that you can go to to help you with us or even demand gen. Like, it's really tough. I think that that's step one is to create some internal alignment on it because like you said, Kelly, if you're spending, like in our case, we're spending almost half of our marketing budget on events, but we're an events company, so we're a little different. But still 34% is a huge amount because think of all the channels that are out there. You know, there's 15, 20 channels in some cases depending on how big your marketing team and what you're doing. Like, if you're spending 34%, you should invest in that and get your CMO bought in. Now, the events team and the different teams that support that need to come together and say, okay, what systems are actually tracking this?

Speaker D: Yeah. And I know that your team, Rachel, I was in India earlier this year as well, and I watched your team put together the most amazing spreadsheets based on the data that was in all of the dashboards and connecting with our Sigma dashboard and looking at what's in C then and all this. And I feel like they've gone through this moment of connecting such good data points of understanding the entire journey of the events all the way from invite strategy down to close of business. And do you feel like your team, having had that education, is going to make them just generally better, uh, at their jobs and better integrated with marketing?

Speaker C: You know, I was actually just talking to our CEO about this because he was asking about India and I said, I feel like we've gotten so much more sophisticated in what we're actually doing and tracking. Yes, I've been at C Van a long time, but I feel like, because one thing we're doing at C Van is we're really honing in on quality over quantity, making sure our, uh, MQLs are aligning. What are hand raisers. It's a foundational year for us of benchmarking, like what is actually working now. We've benchmarked other things for years, but I feel like we were on two different playing fields. We were playing all these different games, but nothing was actually interconnected. And this year we have defined things and we've defined what our goals are from a demand perspective. We've really honed in and everyone's aligned. So we're able to then report back better because before we were kind of disparate. We have all these different regions, we have all these different tactics and everybody wants to report on different things. Now that everybody's aligned of these are the Five things that we're tracking and we're all speaking the same language. We are more sophisticated, we sound more sophisticated. And are there more things that we could do? Of course, there's always more you can do. But we're getting there and it's not pretty, it's not perfect. We're just making it happen and like if a number's off one or two things, we'll go back and fix it for the next time. But it's exciting.

Speaker D: Yeah, it really is to me. Even as a field marketer, I'm really close to my own events as well. But the partnerships that I'm able to build with the meetings and events team is just beyond. It's like it's a different level this year because we are all talking the same language, we all care about the same stuff and it's made such a difference. Now I'm having like more one to ones and they're like, what about the strategy of how we're going to invite people to this? I love the recommendations of like, don't go to that event again. Just don't go because it doesn't make any sense because you don't see any like conversion. You didn't get your engagement and I'm like, sure, we're not going to go. Even this week someone from the meetings events sent me an email saying, I think you should go to this anymore. Gave me absolute rationale and I'm like, great, I won't be going. So it's so much easier. You know, we've come to the end of our trends, we're in our lightning round now. So give me one piece of advice for a team that's overwhelmed by this whole measurement thing that we were just talking about. Kelly, go first. If people are like, oh my God, I'm a marketer of two and I don't know what I'm doing. I have to run all my events. What should they do?

Speaker A: So if you are overwhelmed by the measurement gap, I would say stop trying to measure everything. Let's just start small, let's try to prove one thing. Pick one event that you're doing, follow the pipeline for 90 days and then show leadership that clean story. Once you have that proof point that one event, end to end, story of start to finish, that's your meat and proof to be able to get that whole event led growth framework invested in saying, see how much 25k for this one event did for us. Can you imagine if we could track all of our events like this?

Speaker D: Love that. Ah, amazing. Rachel, Curveball for you. If you could dream and do a micro event for a small group in any kind of format or way, what are you taking these people to? And how cool is it if I'm

Speaker C: doing it for a company? Um, the experiential side of things is amazing. Like, even what you guys are doing for cans next week, there's so much around that. There's so much around south by Southwest that I would want to do. Like, taking people to an experiential trip is what I've seen done well, and that's really relationship building. If you can accept that kind of gift or experience. Going to the super bowl would be amazing. You know, doing like a whole World cup experience with somebody. But it has to be a small enough group. I wouldn't take more than like, 15, 20 max to an event like that. But it would have to be worth my time. Like, I think it would have to be specifically programmed out so it's not just like, I'm taking you to the game and then buy. Like, I think I would need something additional on that. Whether it's like a VIP experience or meeting with other peers. I think for me, and I think other marketers, too. Like, I want to know who's there, because I don't want to spend my time with people I don't like or don't have anything to do with each other. Like, I've gone to dinners where in the room, it's all verticals, all levels. And I'm like, I'm sorry, but lovely to meet you. But I don't have much in common. I don't take away much from those things. When I'm in a room with my peers. And it's very intentional about what we're talking about and the best practices we're sharing, that's where I see the most value. So that's, like, what I would want.

Speaker D: I like it. I got a lot out of that Super Bowl, World Cups. People that you, uh, actually want to talk to, I think's fair. And actually, I like where you've left us with that, because even I'm thinking about my small curated groups and I've been thinking about the experience, and, um, yes, I want a particular group of people, but you just mentioned something where it's like, if it's all verticals, that might just be a bit too much. Maybe we have to get a bit more specific so they've got things to talk about in common. I like that. Okay, Kelly, we're going to land with you. What is the best thing about joining the Great Events family.

Speaker A: Well, honestly, it's, uh, being able to say out loud the things that I'm thinking about all day long. Just having a safe space with smart marketing leaders and events leaders to riff and share my point of view with. Uh, that itself is exciting.

Speaker D: Oh, I feel so special.

Speaker C: Welcome to the madness.

Speaker A: I'm happy to be part of it.

Speaker D: Well, thank you so much, ladies. Thank you for revisiting our trends and just giving us an update on what's going on. And if there are any new trends, feel free to let me know. Like, I would like to put them into Cvent Connect Europe, because I know Cvent Connect Us is just around the corner. If you haven't signed up for that already, please do. And if you miss it for some reason, you can always go back in and sign up and watch all of the content online. Because, I mean, that's exactly what Goldcast does. Why would we not use our own technology to repurpose that content? So you're going to see a lot of it coming out as the year goes. But thank you so much for joining us. I hope you have a great morning, day, evening, night time, wherever you are in the world. Thank you very much.

Speaker B: Thanks for hanging out with us on great events. Uh, a podcast by Cvention. If you've been enjoying our podcast, make sure to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode and you

Speaker C: can help fellow event professionals and marketers. Just like you discover great events by leaving us a rating on Apple, Spotify or your preferred podcast platform, stay connected

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Speaker C: Got a great story or an event to share? We want to hear from you. Find us on LinkedIn, send us a DM or drop us a note at great eventsavent.com Big thanks to our amazing

Speaker D: listeners, our guest speakers, and the incredible team behind the scenes. Remember, every great event begins with great people.

Speaker B: And that's a wrap. Keep creating, keep innovating and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.