Activate Your Audience!
Welcome to Activate Your Audience podcast! Here, you'll find a range of episodes discussing all aspects of brand activation and audience engagement, from the latest industry trends to expert insights and best practices.We will delve into topics such as events and experiential marketing, business tips and tricks, and creating experiences, all with the goal of helping you achieve your goals and drive customer engagement.Tune in to learn from the experts and get inspiration for your own brand activation strategies. Subscribe to stay up-to-date on new episodes and join the conversation on @BeImperial on Instagram. Let's activate you, your brand, and your audience together! Learn more about how IBA can support your even'ts team at your brand activations https://iba.imperialbrandingagency.com/i3ba
Activate Your Audience!
Dax Callner - Elevating Event Strategy with Measurable Impact and Human Connection
Get ready to elevate your strategy with insights from Dax Callner, a veteran strategist who has worked with the likes of Amazon, Meta, Samsung, and Salesforce. In this episode, Dax takes us through his remarkable career trajectory, sharing his expertise on making strategic insights accessible and the evolving landscape of event measurement. Learn how multi-channel marketing plans are integrated and the advancements, alongside challenges, in quantifying ROI for events.
Discover what it takes to craft compelling event strategies and Requests for Proposals (RFPs) that stand out. Dax emphasizes the essential components of creating impactful events, including the power of human connection and delivering high-quality content that adds real value to your audience. We'll also touch on the importance of sustainability, diversity, equity, and inclusion in event planning, and Dax offers practical advice on what makes an excellent RFP—clarity, context, and attention to detail.
Strengthen your client and agency relationships with Dax's tips on effective briefing and strategic partnerships. Learn why fostering trust and transparency in client communications is vital and how an ideal brief can unleash creative freedom. We also delve into the work of the Experiential Marketing Measurement Coalition (EMFC) and its mission to enhance data measurement standards within the event marketing industry. Don't miss out on Dax's valuable advice and drop a message on his LinkedIn to let him know your thoughts on this episode.
Want to produce brand activations you are proud of? Learn more about our I3BA package, a THREE IN ONE DYNAMIC Brand Activation SUPPORT service for experiential teams, agencies, and brands.
Subscribe to stay up-to-date on new episodes and join the conversation on Instagram, @beimperial let’s activate your audience!
Subscribe to the podcast for more great episodes!
Share and comment below to let us know what you think.
Need help and support activating your audience? Check us out here
Learn more about IBA
If you are part of an events team, brand, or agency seeking support to leverage your experiential projects, email us at hello@imperialbrandingagency.com
Connect on LinkedIn
See our work
Hi, thank you so much for joining us. Just a quick call out on this episode we unfortunately did have a sound quality issue, so I just wanted to call that out, but also most the video's content being something that I think will really resonate for you guys, and if you are able to just sort of withstand the humming noise and the audio for this specific content piece, for this specific video, I think you will be rewarded in the context that is in it. So just wanted to let you know this isn't the standard, unfortunately. We tried to uh re-record, re-edit and just couldn't work it. We couldn't make it work on this. So, um, please do tune in, check out the full episode.
Speaker 1:Uh, I think you still get the gems and the jewels and do pardon us, please on the audio quality and issue and hopefully you'll stick around, give us any feedback as far as the specific context of the video, which, again, I think is amazing. There's some gems here to take away. So tune in and then, yeah, stay tuned for our next episode with our next guest. Again, more to our standard quality audio, unlike this one, but still the context here. I just didn't want it to be lost in the distraction and maybe issue that is the sound and just also, you know, express that there is value hidden on the other side of that audio issue. So hopefully you stick around and, yeah, let me know your thoughts, as always, reach out if we can support in any way, all right.
Speaker 1:So today we are thrilled to have Dax Kalner with us. With over 25 years of experience in strategy and planning, dax has helped iconic brands like Amazon, meta, samsung, salesforce and many more create and execute impactful and measurable marketing campaigns across all channels, with a particular focus on events and experience. Dax is also the founder and board president of the Experiential Marketing Measurement Coalition, emmc, a nonprofit dedicated to the advancing standards and practices for measuring the effectiveness of events and activations. Welcome to the Activate your Audience podcast, dax.
Speaker 2:Good to be here, yeah, so let's kick it right off.
Speaker 1:Would you mind telling us sort of a brief overview of your career journey, how you ended up where you are now and perhaps some key lessons along the way?
Speaker 2:Oh, I don't know if I can do that briefly, I will try. I started my journey in California in 1999. I found a job at an agency because I happened to have some understanding of digital and in those days, digital was like gold. Anyone who knew anything about digital was grabbed by agency people and I started my job my first agency job as a digital producer at an agency called well, it was called Carabiner, but it soon became Jack Warren Worldwide, which is an event and experiential agency, and I did digital for the first few years.
Speaker 2:In fact, I moved from digital as a digital producer into digital strategy and soon, like after maybe two years, I realized I'm not an event marketing company.
Speaker 2:I should learn events, and so then I kind of began my own journey of becoming a more general strategist, marketing strategist, event marketing strategist, and then moved through the ranks of Jack Wharton until I ended up in New York and then left Jack Wharton while I was laid off from Jack Wharton in 2008 after the economic crisis and I went through a succession of other agencies where I had strategy leadership positions and I built strategy up at all these different companies, including Momentum Sparks. I even did traditional advertising at Publicis for a while and I learned a lot through all of this. In fact, going to advertising was fascinating and then coming back to events, because I learned a lot about a different way of approaching creative problems and used those learnings to. Of course, my dog's going crazy. This always happens as soon as a podcast begins. I used those learnings to inform the creative process then for events and how to approach events more strategically and also how to think about events through the lens of a multi-channel marketing plan.
Speaker 2:Very very interesting, and I also learned how to build strategy practices, and measurement was always a big part of my story as well. I remember Jeff Horton trying to figure out measurement and I had never even heard of marketing measurement, let alone trying to figure it out for events and we worked really hard on this problem and didn't do a very good job of it. Actually, it turned out to be not too complicated for event people to adopt, and that was a big light bulb moment for me also, which is how to make things that are strategic very digestible for the audience, and so since then, I'm always trying to get to clarity. How can we be super, super clear?
Speaker 2:I find that some strategists or strategic practices it's almost like they're trying to show the client how smart they are rather than actually being helpful, and I want to actually be helpful rather than show off how smart or intelligent I think I might be. Anyway, so in 2018, I was heading strategy for GES events and I decided for family reasons, to move to the UK, where I am right now, and then last strategy practice at an agency called Smile here for five years and just recently went freelance and started to build my own consulting practice for events and other marketing strategies.
Speaker 1:I love that, yeah, there's a, as you mentioned, a component of strategy that comes down to actually getting results as most things right, Like we want to move the needle on things. But I also heard that in your journey you were early on and you were thinking at it from a frame that is now, maybe with technology a little bit easier, somewhat of the norm, but still a state of flux of like, how do we quantify ROI? And from, I think, maybe, a cultural perspective? The story have you seen it? The same on your end is people you know, corporations, agencies already understand the value of events and there are easier ways to measure metrics, not completely fine tuned, but in terms of results. What is the landscape now that helps provide some of those results that you've seen recently for measuring success and impact on events?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So a few thoughts First of all. Yes, I think you're right. Yes, I think you're right. There's an intuitive understanding that events are powerful, but there's a lack of quantified data to actually give that evidence. And there's also varying points of view across different clients, different heads of marketing, like I've worked with CMOs who are saying I don't know why we invest in events digital so much cheaper, let's just go to digital, where I see other heads of marketing who are like I really understand events and think they're critical to our marketing mix.
Speaker 2:I think, of course, as an event with an event background, I'm a believer in events. However, how do you prove value? The second thing I'll say is I don't use the phrase ROI. Here is why, when it comes to events, if you look at ROI as a measurement purist, roi is how much money did we spend? That's the I for investment, and the R is how much money did we get back? That's the return.
Speaker 2:And actually, if you think about an event first of all, all events are not about selling more, so you can't use that as a broad brush for everything. But the real challenge is what happened with the eventual purchase and if somebody is making a purchase a year later, trying to attribute that to an event is disastrous and in fact there are many touch points that contribute to a sale. So I try to not use ROI because I think it's misused a lot and it's not an incredible metric for our industry. However, obviously I'm a big believer in measurement Otherwise I wouldn't be heading up the EMOC. So what do I use? I have a pretty straightforward framework when it comes to looking at event measurement. Obviously, you need clear goals and objectives and you need to establish those objectives as measurable objectives. So when you set the goal, you say like here's our goal and here's how we measure it, and that's really important. But there are some typical, standard, fundamental goals that just about every event has to take care of one is what perception shift are we trying to elicit?
Speaker 2:We want people to think something differently as a result of the event. Often it's about the brand. We want to drive brand affinity around certain attributes and we can establish what those changes are from a brand perception standpoint. What are we trying to make people think about this brand? That's true of just about any event, even internal events. You want people to feel great about the company they work for. That's number one. Number two is the behavioral change.
Speaker 2:Almost every event we want to elicit some kind of a behavior. We want people to do something different. If it's a customer event, that could be driving more sales. If it's not a customer event or a different kind of event, you may have a different behavioral result. But you can still say we want the event to motivate a change in behavior and you can evaluate whether people are likely to do those behaviors. This is that tricky thing about attribution. So when I do the measurement of behavioral change, it's actually the anticipated behavioral change. It's not the actual behavioral change, because it's difficult for the event person to track long-term behaviors. What do people actually do? But we can ask them what do you intend to do as?
Speaker 1:a result.
Speaker 2:So that's the second one. The third is attendee value for time spent. Key metric like did people get value out of the experience? I'm a huge believer that events need to deliver value to an audience. We need to ask them and measure did they get value out of it? Value, of course, is different based on every person, but nobody wants to waste their freaking time at your event. They want to get value of some kind out of it. And then the fourth one and the last one, in my typical framework, is what I'm calling a social impact metrics.
Speaker 2:These are the things that many of us marketing people and brand people care about. That are important to evaluate, like event sustainability, like event diversity, equity and inclusion accessibility. These are those social values that aren't necessarily connected to a business result but are still important to society and the world around us, and I think it's important for us to measure those. So that we can hold ourselves accountable for delivering events that are as sustainable as possible and deliver a great experience to everyone, regardless of their background.
Speaker 1:That's huge. Yeah, that's man. Those are gems right there. I think what I heard at a maybe fundamental level is first, is the problem of quantity and quality Right, like ROI, as you mentioned, is tricky. And back to the reason why clients and execs they want that clean, neat, easy to read. Digital that is like we put X amount in, we got X amount out, there's easier attribution. Digital that is like we put X amount in, we got X amount out, there's easier attribution.
Speaker 1:But when it comes to events, the qualitative right instead of so much quantitative, or I should say the quantitative instead of the what is it?
Speaker 1:Qualitative instead of the quantitative is what we're actually aiming at right, and we're dealing with humans. So you also seem to start breaking down the human element paired with these components of the business element. And so, through all of that, a trend that I picked up and tell me if I'm on the right track is sort of controlling the controllables. Right, there are things of, as you mentioned, what you measure, what you're sort of anticipating. There are things that you as a producer, as the agency, as the brand, can have some sort of control over and then you're building value, like any good business like any good product, something that is going to return a Not so much ROI in the one-to-one ratio but in the I love that question of like did I waste my time Value to the audience, but also value to the fundamental goal of it, which you can put in place to control the controllables and then sort of let go and trust the value that you've created to be either, you know, accepted or not by the audience.
Speaker 2:Well, you know, control is a difficult one because, in the event, world control is elusive because you can't control the audience. Impossible is elusive because you can't control the audience. Impossible, you can't necessarily. Let's say, you're in a b2b if I control what happens on stage, you can impact it, you can try to control it, but it's still a live environment and therefore the reality of control is not really possible. What I often say when I talk about strategy work is when I define for people what is strategy and why is it important, I will say strategy is about influencing a more positive outcome and so if you do proper strategy work, you set things up in the right way, you use research and insight to inform your plans. You should be up in the right way. You use research and insight to inform your plans.
Speaker 2:You should be increasing the odds of success because you're taking a smarter approach towards your plan, rather than just a blank page and say, okay, we need to create an event and it has to be great. That's not strategic, that's just totally subjective. It has to be great Like that's not strategic, that's just totally subjective. And so what I try to do in my work is help clients with their projects, increase the odds that they will deliver successful business impact to them, and I hope that my work does that.
Speaker 1:But I have to also admit I totally don't have control over whether it does. I can only set things up and hope for the best sort of setting the foundation right. It's like what are our goals? What are we trying to shift in terms of perspective or at least impact? How do you recommend, or what best practices do you recommend, for businesses that are looking to engage and activate and provide value and meaning in these experiential projects?
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, I'm going to challenge you again on the term engage, because I don't know what engage means and I don't know how to measure it. So I will rarely say we're trying to drive engagement because I don't know how to measure engagement. No idea, I can't tell if someone feels engaged. However, I still am a big believer in events and, yes, I have some best practices that I apply to almost every event project I'm working on. Some of these are going to sound so obvious, but they are still important to keep top of mind. First of all, events are about human beings coming together, and so treating an event like a live advertisement is not an effective event strategy. It's not a live advertisement. It is a chance for people to come together and have a conversation relevant to the brand the products, the community, whatever it might be.
Speaker 2:And that is critical and why events are effective accelerators of business impact. Because when you get people together, things happen more quickly, more resonant, more deeply than if they're online, reading an email or watching a video, and so I am a big believer in that. Human connection is the critical element In the B2B and maybe even B2C space. The focus on content has got to be stepped up in our business. We are competing against a renaissance of content through social media, through streaming video.
Speaker 2:I mean the quality of content in our world and the consumption of content is elevated At events. We have got to deliver better content. I'm focusing a lot of my energy on what happens on that stage to make sure it's amazing, using audience insight to understand what's of value to the audience. Every client brief I get talks about what does the client want to say? What does the client want to show? What is the client result? Rarely do they say what's the value to the audience, what do they get from joining this experience? And if we turn our attention to delivering audience value, it goes back to that metric. Was it a good use of their time, from their perspective, doing that evidence gathering up front to understand what do these people care about, what's going to turn them on and what's going to deliver?
Speaker 2:value to them should be a part of every planning strategy. Value to them should be a part of every planning strategy Because if you deliver that value, typically you get value back from them. If they felt they had a great high value experience, they're more likely to buy.
Speaker 2:They're more likely to believe they're more likely to do the actions you want them to take. So those are three major things I'm thinking about, and then, finally, I talked about measuring social impact. We have got to be focusing on sustainability. We've got to be focusing on events that are diverse, equitable and inclusive for all invited attendees. It's a must, and so it is entering into every client conversation I am having, even if it isn't in the brief. I'm always asking how can we make this more accessible? How can we make this be more inclusive to all audiences that we're bringing in? I think those are also critically important these days.
Speaker 1:I love that and with that, you mentioned recently on LinkedIn this perfect request for proposal right. What makes an excellent, well-written RFP for you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm working on this great pitch man. I can't say who it is, but I'm delivering it next week. Their RFP was one of the best I have ever read. What made it so good? I'm going to start with one element that sounds really stupid in a way, but it had been well written. There weren't typos, there weren't mistakes. That stuff, to me, is very distracting and it says something about the person who wrote it and the time that they've invested, that they didn't take time to proofread it and make sure it was well constructed. Please, it makes a difference. Focus on the writing. Give it the time.
Speaker 2:The second thing that I thought was great about it was it didn't just say here's the events we're putting on and what we want you to do as the agency. It gave us the context what's happening in the business, what's going on in our business, the rationale for why this event is important. That's always the first question I ask people Like why is this event important to your business? They told us right there. It showed up. It talked about the audience and the different segments of audiences and what they care about. It told us what their business strategy was and what they were trying to accomplish from a competitive standpoint. Those underlying data points gives us such great context to then think about creative problem solving when it came to the actual events, and so I just thought it was a fantastic brief. It gave us clarity on what success looked like, all the stuff that I would hope for and questions I would normally ask or respond to in that brief. Of course, I had other questions always, but the big ones were covered.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and even to the component of.
Speaker 1:You know, if we're talking ideal briefs, specifically, as you talked about, just the value of events and almost our responsibility, it sounds like, if you inverse that, what we hear oftentimes with clients or even with agencies sometimes, is they are giving their two cents, specifically from their lens, and also sort of devoid of what is it all for, in, in, in more of just like we know we need to do events, let's do events.
Speaker 1:So there was, it seems like, from this example and what is required? Just a clear or a clarity on the what is it for, as we talked about earlier, but also just that human element, like they are knowing that they're going to interact with humans, with people. They're respectful of these people and not just of the audience that's there and of guests and other stakeholders, but of their efforts and of their time, as well as the attention to detail, those little things that we know in the event world, like we, paying attention to the little things sometimes can make all the difference, can prevent fires. As you mentioned, there's always some troubleshooting going on, so that sort of attention to detail is a almost a precursor at times, or at least like it sets the tone for how much of that is to be expected in those little or major decisions and actions that will actually add value to the audience. There's also something you said.
Speaker 2:That struck another thought about this brief that was so great, which is I have found in working in agencies that one of the first things people ask a client is what do you want? What do you want this to be? What do you want this to look like? What do you want this? And this brief was careful not to tell us the answer. They told us what the problem is. Here's our communications challenge, here's our audience, here's our competitive environment and they asked the agency to come back with a point of view on how to solve that challenge.
Speaker 2:That is my favorite kind of briefing, because I want the flexibility to put in my thinking, to bring my experience to bear, to do my own evidence gathering and to come back with a creative solution based on that, not based on what the client has said they wanted, because want is subjective. My job is to help the client be successful at solving their business or communications challenge. So if you present me with a challenge and give me some useful information, I'm off to the races. Like I'm now thinking creatively about how do I take this on. That's a much more interesting and strategic request versus can you build us a stand this size, use our brand. This is what we need in the stand and tell us how much it's going to cost. That's not that interesting a brief to me. I don't know what the challenge is that you're trying to solve. I just know you need an expo stand, but it's not that fun as a strategist, it's not that fun. Yeah.
Speaker 1:No, and you call out something else. There too, that also points to just good leadership and good use of, again, both sides of the talent. If I'm hiring you as a strategist, as somebody who's going to produce something sides of the talent If I'm hiring you as a strategist, as somebody who's going to produce something, let me let you take the reins. But at the same time, if I'm communicating something, let me give you the details. And usually in those sort of relationships or in sort of that one-to-one or internal communication that could be one-to-many as well, there is a proper respect again for the mastery of each person, each person's role and usually clear deliverables. That prevents the scope creeping, that prevents the ambiguity that makes this not only lacking value for the end consumer or audience or guests or humans, but for people's energy and bandwidth involved. So these things being in place lets you run, lets you use your mastery, lets them trust you and vice versa. You're gathering information from them. Who has that? And that communication will obviously bleed into sort of the end experience or hopefully Right.
Speaker 2:I mean trust is the key word. So when I have a conversation with a client, like in a discovery call, for example, and they are fully transparent with me.
Speaker 2:They really are trusting me and I will treasure that trust and I will make good on it, and rather than a client who is cagey or says why are you asking? I don't understand. You know I can't tell you that I need to be a trusted advisor and I need to be let in in order to give my best work. And if you're withholding information that I'm asking for, then that makes it much more difficult and much less fun.
Speaker 2:If I'm honest, Another thing that sometimes happens in the pitching process I've noticed is often, if a procurement team is running the pitching process, they do this thing where they're like every question has to go to and every response has to go to everyone who's pitching. And I think there's a challenge with that, which is how does the client know who's asking the good questions? Because the people who are asking the good questions are the people that I think they would want to work with, because those are the people asking the deep questions that get to the heart of their business challenge. And if you're putting it out all Q&A to everyone, you're missing that crucial component of a relationship-building exercise, the getting to know you, which is a two-way human dialogue between people on the agency side and people on the brand side. And so I would love to remove that type of exercise and allow the Q&A to happen directly and just with those individual response teams, so that they can get to know them through that process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that's a good point. And just out of curiosity, obviously, putting their lens on, if they're a giant corporation, if they're just sort of running through SOPs, that is their way of working with vendors, working through procurement, how would they sort of operate at an economy of scale, or at least with the numbers? What would be either our responsibility as producers or agencies or strategists to sort of have that conversation? Do you see a way yet to make it? Obviously, it's the norm oftentimes, but how do you present that other option to them? Because it sounds like it would not be economically or even just viable for them in the sense of just efficiency. Right, and that's what oftentimes they're looking at.
Speaker 2:Well it's not an efficient model, because to do it right requires you to identify people that you want to work with. So, if I put myself in the shoes of the brand person, you're not just buying a supplier who's going to give you AV equipment at the lowest possible cost. There's plenty of those people around and you could go out as a procurement exercise and find the lowest cost provider of technology for your event. Totally understand that and that's something that you can, I guess, bring through a procurement process, although even those suppliers have a service level that you need to expect so that they get the stuff there, that it works, that it's supported, all that kind of thing. But from an agency standpoint, where there's creative strategy, strategic thinking involved, you are actually building a relationship with a team that you want to work with and therefore you need to put in the time to get to know them.
Speaker 2:This isn't Tinder, this isn't swipe left or right based on three or four different things to determine who you're going to go out with. It is a much more of an investment required to get to people that you really feel comfortable working with and are a good strategic partner to you. Now, how do you do that at scale? I do think there's an initial phase, when you're looking at potential partners, to whittle that down to a short list, and so find a way to get from a list of 10 to a list of two or three and then, invest the time with those two or three so you really get to know them.
Speaker 2:I like most agency people, if I hear that there are seven or eight agencies pitching for a piece of business, I just don't feel like there's enough of an investment on the client side to having done that first, whittling down to people that are really a good fit. You can tell by looking at websites and social media or maybe asking around or talking to a few people who the ones are that should be on your short list and then again invest the time with that short list, and that's how you scale it.
Speaker 2:It's still not. It still requires time, but it's less than if you did it with 10 different agencies.
Speaker 1:That's a great point. I love that thought exercise and sort of way of thinking from their lens too. Right, because again, these are human beings and they have reasons why they operate in a certain way. The corporation is a system made up of human beings. They have reasons for it. So I really appreciate that take. And now sort of shifting a little bit towards your role as the board and president of the EMMC measurement marketing, measurement coalition, you've mentioned some of like the key principles right that you look at for just a good event the social components, everything else that is not ROI but more like impact driven and sort of these best practices. But how do you go about sort of advocating for some of these components? What have been your sort of even strategic ways of working to spread that good news of just proper?
Speaker 2:measurement. Yeah Well, just to give a little bit of background. So the EMFC, which is at eventmeasurementorg, is the Experiential Marketing Measurement Coalition, is a not-for-profit industry association explicitly focused on better and more measurement across our industry. The reason it exists is there was, when it was founded maybe six years ago, there was a gap in our industry of a group specifically focused on data and measurement. There were pockets of measurement expertise, but no single group focused on this, and so I got together with a bunch of other people across the industry who love measurement of data and believe that event marketers need credible data to defend their budgets, because events tend to be scrutinized very heavily, because they tend to be expensive, so protect their budgets as well as increase their impact over time. So those are the two main reasons we want to help people with tools.
Speaker 2:So that when a CMO comes in or new CFO comes in and says why are we spending all this money on events. They have some evidence to support why the investment is worthwhile. And then also to identify things that aren't working or could be better and implement changes over time so that their metrics get better and better over time. So that's the mission of the MMC, which is to spread that gospel and educate people and provide tools connected to how best to?
Speaker 2:measure and how to deliver credible data to the industry. It's a group of it's not huge, it's less than 100 people, but it's people who are very, very passionate about this topic and we regularly promote content and thought leadership and we're building some tools that I think the industry will get a lot of value out of in the coming years to further codify and get measurement out there in a bigger way. We just believe that if you measure and do it well, you're going, we're going to grow the industry.
Speaker 1:So we it's an we're all in it, unpaid, we're all doing it because we think it's the right thing for the industry and it's been really fun and successful so far there being this sort of adaption, a quicker adaption, because eventually it's going to be necessary right to apply all these components, as you mentioned, especially social components, from just the human lever and from the business lever, all of the other ones. But what have been some of your maybe forecasting or lay of the land as it stands now? What do you see experiential and the industry sort of changing into maintaining? How do you sort of look ahead and forecast any things that we can as agencies, as brands, as you know, event individuals, professionals, how do we look at the future of what you think is the events world and even the lay of the land now sort of under the surface?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's impossible to predict, and so I don't want to make any longer-term predictions, because who knows what's going to happen? We're in a world that is changing so rapidly. We have artificial intelligence coming in. We don't know what the impact of AI is going to be on the industry. No freaking idea. It's sort of like when the internet started there was no way we would have understood even as people were really excited about it how ubiquitous it would become and how much it would change society. So I can't make a long-term prediction. I just can't. There's no way. But short term I can try. So I've been talking a bit about diversity, equity and inclusion. I think events need to welcome audiences that have typically felt like they were not welcomed in, and so I would proactively try to get more audiences, or more diverse audiences, into events, and I mean neurodiversity, physical disability, racial and ethnic differences, all the full spectrum. I think there are. There are.
Speaker 2:There's an enormous population of people who will deliver great value to businesses and great value to the events world, who have felt like they're not welcomed in, and I think we have a responsibility to proactively seek those people out and get them into our events. Then we have to make sure that those events are accessible, or everything that they want to do at those events is accessible, and that we are delivering with resonance. So here's an example.
Speaker 2:I live in England and work on a lot of events in Europe. One of the things that I've noticed is that, even though the language of business is English, that there are people who are coming to events that are native French speakers or German speakers or Spanish speakers. They speak English, but if I want to deliver content as we talked about earlier, with deep resonance, then I need to think about how can I deliver it to them in their native language, and this is showing them that I really care about their experience and I want them to have an equitable experience with the native English speakers. That kind of thinking, I think, is where events need to go who's coming to this and how can we make sure that they have an equitable experience, even if it is a slightly different experience, based on the uniqueness of their backgrounds, and I think there's so much opportunity in that, from a technology standpoint, from a event impact standpoint, like we're missing.
Speaker 1:We're missing a huge, there's a huge gap here, and so that's that's one of the things that I, if I were putting on my short-term prediction pad, where I would focus a lot of my energy and am- actually, and I love that, and I think to sort of recap here, but before I sort of give my high level, that component is, as you mentioned earlier, not just the social responsibility of that of equity, but of even environmental right. We know events are one of the most wasteful, can be one of the most wasteful sort of projects, and it's always been a not always, but more recently it's been a top of mind thing of how do we work more eco-friendly, more friendly towards their environment. There's been a lot of awesome components and projects sort of producing these companies that have popped up providing solutions, but it's still this thing where it's like it sounds nice to say, but then once the rubber meets the road, whether it's with the dollars, the investment, the risk, it's a slow moving ship right, and so I'm hoping that with, again, the social equity, it's been a thing that's been in certain ways, part of the lexicon recently of just, hey, social equity, equity, sort of uh, changing and bringing and providing value. But what do you think might be, or do you know? Yet you know, obviously, as you mentioned, there's no way to predict it but what will be sort of the igniting factors that will really make this move quicker, as we know, with climate change, like we need to have scientists and smart people and just looking at the data, realize, realize that we don't have a lot of time. We need to get serious about taking care of our planet.
Speaker 1:We've seen things like Black Lives Matter here and all these components of just social and just economic injustices and ways of the justice system working that have sort of helped pivot that in the events world and in business. What else needs to happen right, so that there is some real investment from all stakeholders, from the dollar holders, from the players, to actually make the needle move instead of it just being a sort of lexicon use? You know word play.
Speaker 2:Totally so. The challenge is that let's just talk about environmental sustainability, because it's sort of a little hanging through. The challenge is that there is no proven correlation between a more sustainable event and better business results. That is the challenge. How do we overcome that challenge? There's only one way Event attendees need to demand more sustainable events. It has to come from the customer, it has to come from the audience. So we as an industry can keep talking to ourselves about this forever. We have to convince the people who are coming to our events to place importance on this and to make their voice heard and to make decisions about what events they go to partly based on the sustainability of those events. Just as some people make vacation or travel decisions and this is one of their criteria it should be a criterion for events, and so I think we have some work to do to PR that and get audiences engaged in this conversation about the event industry and sustainability, because without their demand, it's not going to change, at least not at the rate that it needs to.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good point. Voting with dollars, right, and voting with what moves the needle. It'll be a good strategic exercise, right, and if anybody can do it, it'll be you, because there's obviously the conflict of interest of that, right, like there's like, yeah, we're going to motivate them, but it's going to cost us more. So it'll be definitely this sort of catch 22 dance that in the end, we have to make. So, hopefully, the creative minds that we have and the growth that we hope to see, not just within our industry but within business and human kind in general, we'll make that happen. So I'm going to go through what stood out for me, sort of these high level takeaways, and then please fill in afterwards anything that I might miss.
Speaker 1:The first is strategy being a solution component, not an ego component. Right, like showing with strategy not just to showcase how smart your agency or you are, but to actually get a result. And sometimes that comes down to simplicity, which is difficult, but I love that as keeping strategy a solution-based metric instead of an ego metric. And then next, pivoting from ROI to anticipated change based on impact between qualitative and quantitative limitations, limitations or even just what people have been trained to look at, whether it's a client or teams. I like that idea of presenting the anticipated impact that you can have, knowing that there are things beyond our control, and then tying those metrics to really show what moves the needle, instead of immediate ROI, which will be hard for clients and, oftentimes, you know, execs, to really grab onto the next one.
Speaker 1:The next point that stood out is influencing a more positive outcome is the goal of strategy. I just think that's a clean, specific way to sort of explain it. Back to the first component, but just that quote I think is really powerful. Next is events as an effective accelerator of business impact because of the human connection. Again, you can't have that acceleration, you can't have that impact if you don't consider the human connection. And that also informs, as you mentioned all the components, that respecting people, respecting human beings, sort of has this beautiful reciprocity cycle that I think can really open up a lot of doors. And then finally, sort of what we finished off on is just the social responsibility is something that will resonate with individuals in a way that will provide not just a better experience and better value for them, but equitable experience and opportunity for all stakeholders. You have their input, you have the ability to serve more as a business, as an agency, and I think that sort of just underpins the value of this. Anything you want to add to that, anything I might've missed.
Speaker 2:Just on that last piece, which is I'm hoping, over time, with measurement, to prove the business case for events that are more diverse, equitable and inclusive. I believe that there's a business result, a positive business impact, in doing that investment, unlike sustainability. I don't think there is a business benefit until the audience is demanded. I actually think there's a more short-term business result, which is deliver deeper resonance to audiences that typically have felt like they're othered or marginalized from an event standpoint, and you will get better business results from that. I really believe that I just need to get some more measurement going to prove that case and that's my hope over the next year or two.
Speaker 1:I love that.
Speaker 2:Well, Jax, this has been fascinating.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. Where can people learn more about you? Follow your journey.
Speaker 2:LinkedIn is the best place to find me and I have my various links off from LinkedIn. So, dax Kullner, I don't know what my LinkedIn is. Linkedin slash, ian slash, dax Kullner, something like that. But just look me up.
Speaker 1:Yes, we'll link it below. And again, thank you so much for your awesome insight.