Creative Feedback, Ideation, and Panel Picking: ChatGPT
Every year we dream up hundreds of titles for panels, workshops and keynotes. We’re good, but ChatGPT makes us better—sometimes. We use ChatGPT to both dream up new ideas and also double-check that we’re getting beyond the same old mediocre crap. For example, after looking at what others have done, and suggestions about talking about investments at various stages, we came up with “StartUp Therapy: What Investors Expect at Every Stage,” for one of this year’s CES panels. Succinct and never done before (we think). ChatGPT should be your go-to tool for generating conference slugs, panel or event themes, track titles, session descriptions, speaker questions, moderator guides, agendas, and research summaries. Just make sure you’re not regurgitating a lukewarm, already been done idea. 

Registration: CventIQ 

CventIQ is a set of AI-powered tools focused on events. Their registration tool is a feature-rich, but somewhat pricey, approach for larger events. If you've got a smaller event you might prefer Eventbrite, which is not all that user-friendly in terms of your attendees accessing their tickets, Whova, or Partiful (which is more fun). For big events Cvent makes handsome registration pages, recommends sessions, automates attendee communications, and answers questions with AI assistants. It’ll also auto-generate supporting content such as event descriptions and speaker biographies. Pricing for the registration portion of CventIQ is available for each of its various modules, but the registration module is one of its more powerful.

Build Out the Graphics Side of Your Event: Canva Magic Studio 
Canva Magic Studio can give your entire event a coherent identity starting with your logo and branding elements, save the dates, speakers agenda, and social media elements. Its AI features let you generate headlines, remove parts of images you don't want, expand and reformat photos, create icons, and generate illustrations from text.  Magic Studio is the name for the  entire AI toolbox in Canva. It will generate layouts (Magic Design), write text (Magic Write), edit images (Magic Eraser/Magic Edit), convert formats (Magic Switch), and animate elements. 

Exhibit Area Booth Creation: Canva AI and Dream Lab
Dream Lab, an offshoot of Canva, is the specialized engine inside the Canva toolbox that you use when you need to generate high-quality images from scratch, using text prompts or reference pictures. It might be the best way to conceptualize a booth area design for an event. Give it a prompt like “Design a 10x10 exhibit area featuring a humanoid robot with an LED screen behind it, projecting interactive displays," and it will do your bidding. Dream Lab’s built-in Style Match lets you adjust the aesthetics, colors, and fonts of a booth, banner, or signage design to match your brand. It’s best for rapid concept development and sponsor proposals.

I schlepped David Pogue’s book, Apple: The First Fifty Years, across the country to have him autograph my copy. In his keynote speech at Silicon Valley Video Summer Camp, David romped through Apple’s history, from two Steve’s doing all-nighters to impress the Homebrew Computing Club, to a multi-million dollar empire that was a Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride of luck, skill, perseverance, and yes, a touch of psychedelic karma. What makes Apple great, says Pogue, comes less from inventing every new technology and more from searching out technologies in need of productization. Take the iPod as an example, which came to fruition after seeing Toshiba’s round hard disk (that they didn’t know what to do with). 

Pogue listed several Apple strengths, such as its commitment to beautiful design, a commitment to storytelling that crafts a narrative about its products, and a commitment to testing ad nauseum before a product launches. Yes, he even told the story of the rigorous testing on identical twins before releasing facial recognition. Then there’s the closed ecosystem—only rigorously vetted companies are allowed to build Apple accessories or products. And an insane dedication to simplicity in design. 

To kick off his keynote, Pogue, a musician by training, put some of the book's sentiments into song. And here, for your listening pleasure, is a poorly recorded version of David Pogue’s “Don’t Cry for me Cupertino,” ironically delivered at DeAnza College, Cupertino, California, where Woz is a big donor and Apple headquarters are just down the road.

Tyler Priest-Heck reports on BizBash’s June 17th webinar, “Put Your Audience in the Driver's Seat: A Framework for Experiential Events,” featuring Elena Coates and Tim Thomson, Creative Directors at Staging Solutions. They share a framework for better understanding experiential events and their role in modern marketing strategy. 

For events, “experiential” is a term with a wide range of interpretations and ambiguities. It’s not simply interactive programming. It does not necessarily mean sensory or transportive, either. Elena and Tim offer a more precise definition: experiential is the opposite of presentational. (Worth noting that presentational approaches have their place.) 

A truly experiential program generates a unique and personal story for each participant, every time they engage with it. Experiential, say the study’s authors, is not defined by a venue or destination, it's a methodology for delivering a meaningful, participant-driven engagement throughout an event. And that’s easier said than done. 

So why should organizations invest in experiential over other strategies? Elena and Tim offer three distinct advantages. First is active learning, which you won’t get from one-sided communication. Second, when experiential events combine with effective data handling and social media, they become very effective internally to the organization. Experiential allows audiences to become more active in sharing themselves, so they are more likely to give you more information about themselves because they feel comfortable. Lastly, experiential marketing provides much more engagement at a social level. It's a powerful tool for building loyalty and turning attendees into enthusiastic brand advocates. 

Magic the Gathering or The Gathering: Magic 

When I need a dose of adrenaline before planning our next event, I turn to David Adler, my events muse. Adler reads the room and understands how to get folks into their “gathering state.” Bottom line, is crafting a curated, dopamine-creating experience, with an added dose of serendipity. Here’s David being interviewed by Al Mercuro, a brilliant events practitioner himself, in this freewheeling talk about the Magic of Gathering.

Dogs, Babies, Robots and Showbiz

A word to the wise when making pets, kids, babies, or even robots part of your show. Check the venue’s insurance policies 3x over. At one of our recent events, Toby, Unitree’s G1 robot, was supposed to co-emcee with me on stage. Alas, at the 11th hour, the venue gave Toby the boot for not being properly insured. Triple check your venues, folks. Maybe it was all for the best, because he was actually a little wobbly on his feet. Watch the video.