Event Planning Insights

At airtel, I ran an iPhone giveaway marketing campaign three times, and to my surprise, none of them performed. Logically, you’d think offering a prize as attractive as an iPhone, especially during the launch period, would drive massive engagement. The assumption is that everyone would rush to participate, download your app, engage with the campaign, and complete the required actions. But what actually happened was the opposite. Engagement was shockingly, embarrassingly low. In contrast, campaigns that offered much smaller rewards—like a ₹1,000 or ₹500 voucher, or even just a free mobile recharge—generated higher participation rates, more app downloads, and greater overall engagement. But why does this happen? This outcome can be largely attributed to consumer psychology. When the reward seems too large or unattainable, people instinctively doubt their chances of winning. The concept of *perceived probability* comes into play here. When the prize is something as high-value as an iPhone, people immediately think, "What are the odds that I’ll actually win?" This skepticism causes them to disengage and not even bother trying, as they don't see the reward as realistically achievable. On the other hand, smaller, more attainable rewards feel within reach. A ₹1,000 voucher or a free recharge doesn’t carry the same sense of improbability. People feel like they have a real shot at winning something smaller, which encourages them to take the necessary actions, leading to better campaign results. In essence, psychology plays a far more critical role in shaping consumer behavior than we give it credit for.

The event industry is moving faster than ever. So should your strategy. What should you keep an eye on? I designed this framework based on the work I do with my clients. I made it a bit more general so you can use it regardless of your event type. -> Who is it for? Event owners Event strategists Head of Events Event marketers running complex event programs -> How to use it: Start by scheduling a dedicated session with key stakeholders from your events team. Before the meeting, collect relevant data points and KPIs for each SWOT category. 1. Begin with Strengths - focus on what your event does exceptionally well and has data to prove it 2. Move to Weaknesses - be brutally honest about internal challenges 3. Explore Opportunities - leverage market trends 4. Address Threats - consider both immediate and long-term risks For each quadrant, identify 3-5 key findings that impact your event's success most. Create specific action items for each finding and assign ownership. Review it quarterly or every 6 months - the events industry moves fast and you may need to update more frequently as market conditions change. P.S. If you want a PDF version of this framework, ask for it in the comments. I will keep the download open for one week.

Most projects fail. But there’s a simple technique to give yours a fighting chance. It’s not a to-do list. It’s not a fancy tool. It’s not a 12-step system. It’s a single question that flips the way you think. Here’s how it works: It’s called a “premortem.” You’ve heard of a postmortem what went wrong after a project dies. A premortem asks: What if we ran that analysis now? Before anything dies. Before the first misstep. Before failure sets in. The premortem comes from psychologist Gary Klein. Here’s how to run one: → Gather your team. → Imagine it’s 2 years in the future. → The project has completely failed. → Ask: What went wrong? No sugarcoating. No happy talk. Start listing the causes of failure. Budget misfire? Wrong team? Lack of buy-in? Scope creep? Missed deadlines? You’ll be shocked how quickly people identify risks—once they feel safe predicting failure. Why this works: It defeats irrational optimism. • It turns hindsight into foresight. • It makes risk visible. • It aligns the team before chaos hits. Because the best time to fix a problem… is before it happens. Pre-mortems don’t require special skills. Just a shift in mindset: Don’t assume success. Assume failure—and reverse-engineer your way out. Ask: What will future-you wish you had done? Then… do that now. I run a premortem for every big project I take on. Writing a book? Premortem. Launching a podcast? Premortem. Planning an event? Premortem. It never guarantees success—but it always makes success more likely. Summary: The Premortem Playbook → Imagine future failure. → List the causes. → Turn those risks into action steps. → Adjust your plan today. It’s one of the most underrated tools in your productivity toolkit. Try it before your next project. You won’t regret it.

Marketing brain is 24/7. Its a curse 😂 This question kept our marketing team up for months "How can we improve our sponsor experience?" One simple q during our all hands We all hyper focused on it It lived rent free in our heads Which is the beauty of marketing But also the curse haha Once you get INCEPTION, you cant shake an idea So we went to work thinking through everything we could to level up our sponsor experinece for all our brand partners who are often investing $ six figure amounts. The creative burden of this question led us to revamp our entire sponsor experience, starting with dashboards. This ended up being the biggest driver of sponsor NPS. Real time registration dashboards for sponsors. That we now run with this 4 step flow. Here's how it works 👇 Step 1: Real time registrant enrichment As attendees register, we automatically enrich each profile using Clay, Clearbit, and internal logic. This gives us a live data set with firmographics, technographics, company size, title level, and geography. Step 2: Sponsor facing filters Each sponsor can view the dashboard through their own lens: Want to break down VP+ titles in financial services? Filter. Want to see companies with 200 to 1,000 employees? Filter. Want to segment by RevOps tools in the stack? Filter. Step 3: Weekly summary reports Every Friday, sponsors receive an email with three key indicators: 1. New registrants 2. ICP match rates 3. RSVP velocity Step 4: Mid flight upgrade triggers If a spike in target accounts shows up two to three weeks before the event, we give sponsors the option to upgrade in real time. That might include adding things like: Extra 1:1 meeting rooms Booking a sponsored dinner slot Adding a breakout or session bump -- My final 0.02 for you The best marketing takes obsession When you obsess over the customer experience like this, you're bound to come up with at least a few winning ideas. Even if you have a few clunkers a long the way. So set a high standard for 10X ideas inside your org and give people the space to take big swings, not just small optimizations of your current state. Marketing brain is a beautiful thing (even if it drives us crazy along the way 😂)

In leadership meetings, too much time goes into explaining yesterday and not enough into preparing for tomorrow. That is becoming a strategic risk. 𝗗𝗶𝘀𝗿𝘂𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝘀 𝗮𝗰𝗰𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝗮𝘀𝘁:   • 39% of core workforce skills are expected to change by 2030   • 45% of CEOs believe their company may not remain viable in 10 years if they stay on their current path   • Markets are already repricing many companies across multiple industries exposed to AI disruption The future is arriving faster than most organizations are adapting. Leaders with foresight do not predict the future. They prepare their business to move earlier, adapt faster and allocate resources with better judgment. Here is what 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗕𝗼𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵 𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗱𝗼 𝗱𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗹𝘆: ✅ 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝘀𝗰𝗮𝗻 𝗯𝗲𝘆𝗼𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗶𝗿 𝗶𝗻𝗱𝘂𝘀𝘁𝗿𝘆   • Ask management to bring 3 external disruption signals to a strategy discussion   • Review one adjacent industry to spot new business-model risks early   • Invite one founder, technology expert or investor each semester to challenge internal thinking ✅ 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝘀𝗰𝗲𝗻𝗮𝗿𝗶𝗼𝘀, 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗯𝘂𝗱𝗴𝗲𝘁𝘀   • Run one annual scenario workshop around customer shifts, AI or new entrants   • Ask: What happens if 20% of our revenues are attacked within 24 months?   • Define 2 to 3 trigger points that would force a strategic response ✅ 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗺𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗹𝘆   • Shift part of capex and leadership attention from legacy activities to future growth bets   • Reallocate top talent into digital, AI, data or customer-experience priorities   • Stop funding projects that defend the past but do not strengthen the next 3 years ✅ 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝘆 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗮 𝗕𝗼𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗘𝘅𝗲𝗰𝘂𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗲 𝗵𝗮𝗯𝗶𝘁   • Put future risks, technology shifts and innovation bets on the Board agenda   • Review every major investment with one extra question: will this still matter in 3 years?   • Track foresight through simple metrics: share of revenues from new offers, reskilled talent, speed of experimentation Leaders create value in the present. Foresight leaderships protects and builds value for the future. 💡 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘀𝗲𝗲 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗼𝗿𝗴𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘇𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗶𝘀 𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗲𝗿𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴? #Leadership #Foresight #Strategy #Innovation #BoardDirectors #Transformation #FutureOfWork

#KickOffWithKen ⚽ Today, all 16 FIFA World Cup 2026™ venues have now hosted matches. A major milestone for the Intelligent Command Center (ICC) we built for the tournament, providing a live, end-to-end view of the ecosystem with data flowing across 3 countries, with 250,000+ staff and volunteers working over 600 sites in motion. At this scale, you can’t manage what you cannot see. Most operational failures do not announce themselves. They start as small signals, a missed alert, an anomaly nobody notices, until they escalate. But can AI help overcome that blind spot? Simple answer 👉 YES. And for FIFA the answer is the Intelligent Command Center, built on Lenovo's Hybrid AI framework. By creating a live digital twin of every venue, the ICC delivers a single real-time view connecting crowd flow, weather, logistics, access systems, social media feeds and incident signals that would otherwise be monitored in isolation. It generates AI-powered daily summaries across all functional areas, so decision-makers are always reading the full picture, not just the last alert. It flags risks early and helps operators act before a single fan's experience is affected. One thing I would share with every leader running a complex organization👉 check your blind spots and shift from reactive to predictive. That is where AI creates lasting value. #BiggestGameOnEarth #FIFAWorldCup2026 #LenovoFIFA #AI #Smarter #WeAreLenovo

After years building event-driven systems. Here are the top 4 mistakes I have seen: 1. Duplication Events often get re-delivered due to retries or system failures. Without proper handling, duplicate events can: • Charge a customer twice for the same transaction. • Cause duplicate inventory updates, messing up stock levels. • Create inconsistent or broken system states. Solution: • Assign unique IDs to every event so consumers can track and ignore duplicates. • Design event processing to be idempotent, ensuring repeated actions don’t cause harm. 2. Not Guaranteeing Order Events can arrive out of order when distributed across partitions or queues. This can lead to: • Processing a refund before the payment. • Breaking logic that relies on correct sequence. Solution: • Use brokers that support ordering guarantees (e.g., Kafka). • Add sequence numbers or timestamps to events so consumers can detect and reorder them if needed. 3. The Dual Write Problem When writing to a database and publishing an event, one might succeed while the other fails. This can: • Lose events, leaving downstream systems uninformed. • Cause mismatched states between the database and event consumers. Solution: • Use the Transactional Outbox Pattern: Store events in the database as part of the same transaction, then publish them separately. • Adopt Change Data Capture (CDC) tools to track and publish database changes as events automatically. 4. Non-Backward-Compatible Changes Changing event schemas without considering existing consumers can break systems. For example: • Removing a field might cause missing data for consumers. • Renaming or changing field types can trigger runtime errors. Solution: • Maintain versioned schemas to allow smooth migration for consumers. • Use formats like Avro or Protobuf that support schema evolution. • Add adapters to translate new schema versions into older ones for compatibility. "Every schema change is a test of your system’s resilience—don’t fail it." What other mistakes have you seen out there?

I do dozens of interviews with top CMOs every year. I always ask what the best performing marketing channel is. And right now everyone is saying events. Post COVID events are back, but also now in an AI world, I think there's a stronger appetite to get out and connect with real people vs. just getting answers from ChatGPT. But: like anything in marketing, running events just because everyone else is doing them is a great way to set money on fire (and still not drive any incremental business). Whether it's a booth at a trade show. A VIP dinner. A 500-person conference. They can all work. They can all flop. The difference: having a real plan and strategy for that event going in. Why do it in the first place? (which continues to be the most important lesson in marketing - what's in it for me? what's the hook? why should people come to our thing?) We talked to two event experts on the Exit Five pod recently Stephanie Christensen and Kristina DeBrito — and here are 5 keys they shared for B2B event success: 1. Pick the right format. Not all events do the same job. Big splash? Go flagship. Want pipeline? Try VIP roundtables. Tiny budget? Host micro-events around existing conferences. Set real goals. 2. “Leads” are not enough anymore. Are you driving awareness? Accelerating deals? Generating pipeline? Define this upfront—or you’ll waste time measuring the wrong stuff. There are more metrics than just "did we get leads from this event" and in today's world leads are tablestalkes. 3. Align your team, bro. Sales and marketing must move in lockstep. Slack alerts for registrations. Sales meeting updates. Leaderboards. It all matters. This is a team effort. 4. Make it memorable. People forget panels. They remember custom pancakes and great venues. Was the food good? Did the WiFi work? Did Oprah show up? Just kidding. Making sure you'r reading. But think surprise and delight, not branded frisbees. 5. Put the work in on the follow up. Events don't close deals - follow-up does. Segment attendees. Create custom offers. Babysit the handoff to sales like your job depends on it. Because it does. You just went shopping and got all these fresh groceries - dont let them spoil. B2B buyers want real connection again. Events can create that. Are you feeling this desire for events? Are you doing events in your business right now? Let me know...

Making your events more accessible for blind & visually impaired people really isn’t as hard as you think. Here are my top tips. 1. Provide precise venue information. Include things like clear drop off and pick up point information, what the key features of the building are, a rough description of where the toilets are, describe where the reception desk is, and let us know in advance if you’ll need a Personal Emergency Evacuation Plan completed. Bonus points for using a service like Euan's Guide or AccessAble to provide specialist access information. 2. Provide as much event information as possible. Share all key details in advance, ideally by email in an accessible format. Include timings, speaker names, attendee names, a brief agenda, and any known accessibility considerations. It helps us plan travel, support, and energy levels and it also helps us know who’s attending so when we’re surprised with a “Hey Robbie!” we can narrow it down to who it might be. 3. Food information is key. It sounds simple, but make sure menus are firstly available, then accessible - even for buffets. Relying on a fellow attendee to tell me something “looks chickeney” gives me the absolute fear. Include dietary details in an electronic format we can read with a screen reader, and avoid handwritten or printed-only menus. Tell us how food will be served so we can prepare (for example, buffet vs plated service). 4. Ask about adjustments - don’t assume you’ll know what someone needs. Just ask the question when people register. Keep it open and inclusive, such as “Do you have any access requirements you’d like us to be aware of?” 5. Provide complimentary +1 places as an adjustment - if someone needs a guide, PA, or support worker to attend with them, they shouldn’t be charged double. It’s an inclusion basic that makes a big difference. 6. Finally, provide training to your staff and event volunteers. Organisations like The Guide Dogs for the Blind Association and RNIB can help you here with things like sighted guide training. And most importantly - don’t wait until someone asks before you do this. It won’t help just blind people, it’ll help everyone. Think about this list - is there anything on here that genuine would help you as a sighted person? Build accessibility in from the start and everyone benefits. #DisabilityInclusion #Disability #DisabilityEmployment #Adjustments #DiversityAndInclusion #Content

India is rapidly establishing itself as a global hub for live entertainment, The Economic Times reports. Fuelled by a young, highly engaged and increasingly affluent population, live events are now not only as a solid strategy for boosting brand awareness, reports HT media. This shift is significant. LinkedIn’s annual Skills on the Rise list ranks event planning and coordination among the top 10 fastest-growing skills for marketing professionals — underlining how events have become central to modern brand strategy. But as audiences evolve, so do their expectations. In an era shaped by AI, the live events industry is being forced to rethink how marketing events are designed, delivered, and scaled. “AI is taking live events from fixed agendas to fully adaptive experiences. It lets us design events that respond to behaviour, interest, and intent as they happen,” says Aditya Arya, Senior Conference Manager at Stellar Connect Events LLC. “We’re no longer just ‘planning’ events; we’re engineering smarter, personalised experiences that drive higher engagement and stronger commercial outcomes,” he adds. Moreover, this shift is also redefining what it takes to succeed behind the scenes in event marketing. As AI becomes more embedded in event planning and execution, new roles such as AI‑assisted content strategists, audience intelligence leads, and real‑time engagement managers will grow rapidly, Arya further says. However, he also adds that AI can deliver speed, scale, and efficiency — but it cannot replicate judgement, empathy, or creativity. “The real advantage comes from blending AI’s precision with a deep understanding of what makes people show up, engage, and return,” Arya adds. Check out our annual rankings of the fastest-growing skills across 10 job functions, in addition to the India Skills on the Rise list: https://lnkd.in/SOTR26INEngg #SkillsOnTheRise Source: HTMedia: https://lnkd.in/gqXnwWyp The Economic Times: https://lnkd.in/ghvTt4GN ✍: Divya Pathak, Priyanka Rathod 📷: Getty Images