Last October, five members of the AH Meetings Team travelled to #IMEX16 as hosted buyers. Senior Meetings Manager, Beth Mauro shares her view from the other side of the registration counter.
In October of 2016 I attended my second IMEX, an annual trade show that brings thousands of meeting professionals together for a blitz of appointments, educational sessions and social events. Both times I was reminded why live meetings are necessary in a world where content is delivered to your phone 24/7.
You might be surprised to learn that meeting planners, even with all of their organizational skills and insider knowledge of destinations, have the same experiences as our own conference attendees. We have travel delays and miss appointments. We get lost finding session rooms. And (sometimes!) we leave our badge in the room. We chitchat with strangers at the lunch table, run out of business cards and make the same hard decisions about leaving behind printed materials that put our suitcase weight over 50lbs.
If there is one difference between how meeting professionals experience an event differently than our attendees, it’s how we hone in and evaluate details for application to our own meetings. We notice the details and:
- Look at how the shuttle buses are managed for examples of how we move people more quickly and conveniently in a city-wide event. The solution isn’t always a coach, sometimes a 15-person passenger vans do the trick. Sometimes it’s an Uber.
- Tour the buffets not just for grazing opportunities but for ideas on how food can be more attractively displayed. The donut wall at the Starwood function at the SLS Resort literally gave me food for thought.
- Delight in a beautifully appointed room and creative ideas for amenities like the small model of a Marriott hotel room made entirely of chocolate. Or, the two water bottles and thank you note that were surreptitiously delivered to my room at the Cosmopolitan while I was downstairs at an industry reception.
- Critique the design and furnishings of a booth. Not just how a brand is pulled through but for color trends and furniture trends. This was the year of the colorful cube ottoman and mixed up seating options.
- Attend educational sessions to find the next hot keynote speaker and cringe in solidarity when the PowerPoint remote isn’t clicking through the slides smoothly. Jay Samit delivered a compelling session on Disrupters, despite the clicker difficulties.
- See new ways to disguise columns or trash cans and take pictures of potential branding opportunities for our meeting sponsors.
- Discover new resources for bringing fun or stress-relieving experiences into our conference. Imagine therapy dogs to cuddle on a break from seminars or a crafting activity where you decorate a gift pail to hold goodies for delivery to a sick child.
For someone whose business is live events, there is nothing like a trade show to fill the creative well. We return back to the office inspired, connected and ready to apply the ideas we see, all in preparation to deliver a similar motivating experience to our customers.
Beth Mauro has attended and staffed numerous trade shows, conferences and consumer events in a wide variety of capacities in over her 30-year career. And in that time, she has never attended a business-to-business event that she didn’t return with inspiration, orders and new contacts that more than paid for the travel and time out of the office!
