Name: LEAVE YOUR MARK
Uploaded: 2026-09-10T16:30:08.782Z
Duration: 58 min 48 s
Description: LEAVE YOUR MARK

Transcript for "LEAVE YOUR MARK": Welcome, everyone. I'm so glad you're here. We are so glad you're here. I am Amy Lucia, chief marketing officer. This is episode three of our behind the rebrand series. And if you've been with us from the beginning, thank you so much. And if it's your first time, you are welcome. We're we're welcoming you here today, and, you definitely picked a really good one. So before we get into it, just a couple quick housekeeping items. We are live right now, but this session will be recorded. So, if you can't stay on for the whole thing or you need to go back and watch the other ones, you can do that. We're going to send that link to you in your inbox. And a few things. Today, we're gonna do some polls throughout the session, so feel free to interact with those. We'd love to hear that. Chat is open. I already see everybody actively engaged in the chat from locations, in many places, which is really exciting. And, we also have the q and a tab open, and we will do a q and a session at the end. So thank you so much. With that, I'm gonna jump right in because we have so much content that, we, probably crammed a lot into a short session, so we might start talking fast toward the end. But we reviewed all the questions you sent in and a lot of really good good things you wanted us to cover. So we curated this just for you. So here's where we've been. Two weeks ago in episode one, we talked about how to know your next brand move, how we knew that it was time to rebrand, how you can also do that and make the case, and some steps to follow to conduct a rebrand, and then also how to get the most out of your brand if, you just wanna get more out of it, but you're not actually planning a rebrand. And then in episode two last week, we talked about before, during, and after your event and how to get the most out of your content, which was really something that Goldcast Events really helps the event really reimagine that we're really grateful for, and it's really changed the game for us. So today is about how do we pull off that brand flip and how can we, make an incredible memorable moment? Whether you're doing a brand flip or not, some of these principles can apply, whether you're doing a product launch or something really exciting you want to announce. So have those principles apply. We're gonna show you some of the behind the scenes footage and and exciting things like that. So with that, I'm joined by two people, Kaela. These two people, by the way, their leadership on this was instrumental. Caleb, please say hi. Everybody, I'm Kaela Vandenberg, the VP of corporate marketing here at Cvent. And, I'm so excited to share this part of the story with you because I can honestly say this was one of the coolest projects of my career. Yeah. And then, of course, we have another special guest, who I don't know if she really needs an introduction. She's been in the trenches throughout the whole execution with Cvent Connect, specifically Rachel. Hi, everybody. I'm Rachel Andrews, senior director of meetings and events here at Cvent. I've been in the industry a long time, and I have to say that this was definitely the most wild and most rewarding and logistically insane thing that Yeah. Definite I but I'm excited. to show the story today. Great. Awesome. Okay. We're gonna jump right in. So, we are gonna show you a five step playbook for making a memorable event moment. And again, from the backdrop of us launching our new brand at Cvent Cvent Connect, our annual conference in Nashville this year. So here are the five. I'm not even gonna run through them right now because we're gonna go through them each one by one. So jumping into our first step, which is defining your North Star. So this is, something that a lot of teams either skip or they do it kind of loosely, And it could create problems downstream where you have to, really think through before you plan an activation, before you book a single vendor, you know, what are you trying to accomplish with this memorable moment you're creating within your event? For us, we knew that our brand launch was really gonna be a special moment. I talked about it in the first seminar about, you know, we we wanted to create a moment where people felt something. So we decided that connect was the right moment. Kaela, you wanna share a little bit more about that? Yeah. I mean, connect was the right stage for so many reasons. The audience alone. Right? You get your customers, your prospects, the press, analysts, partners, all in the same room together at the same time. So just like the scale, the emotional weight, it is our flagship event. It's the one moment every year where the entire Cvent universe comes together, and it just gave us this amazing opportunity that you couldn't manufacture that if you tried. Right? So it was clearly going to be the setting for this brand flip. Yeah. Alright. So I'm gonna jump into the brand foundation because like Amy said, people tend to skip this step, but I wanna be clear. Like, our objective was not just to create this really cool moment. It was, you know, this is the global reintroduction of who Cvent is and our role in the world. The one thing I kept saying is this was not a ta da, here's our new logo moment, right? This was a saying like we're AI powered tech backbone. We are here to help people connect. We're here serving marketers, event professionals, hospitality. We wanted to drive the outcomes, right? It was a different statement we wanted to make in the markets. We went back to our brand foundation. I brought this up in episode one and we talked through all of these elements. You have to establish your brand foundation. So the way that we executed the brand flip, the way that we reintroduced ourself to the world had to serve these brand foundation moments. And, so we started with our higher purpose to show the world what events can do, right? That put a lot of pressure on us to figure out a way to do that, Yep. making sure that we still illustrate on our mission about building technology, powering the highest performing events, making sure that all of our differentiators rang through through this AI powered trusted platform, the data advantage, the unrivaled ecosystem, the deep expertise, And then again, serving all the different audiences. And this just leads to the rally cry of expecting more from your events. Yeah. And, you know, after doing brand work for a few decades, I can tell you that one thing that really separates the powerful brands from everybody else is if you actually can deliver on that promise and demonstrate you're doing it. It's not just a message or a slogan because you can say anything, but can you actually, you know, deliver on it? That's that's the important thing. Yep. And that mean that meant at launch day, at Connect, everything that we planned had to ring true to all these things we were saying we were as a company, our new introduction, our new identity. So I'm just gonna jump into some of the the proof. We asked ourselves, what exactly are we going to show at Connect that makes people feel that proof? Right? So we looked at from the product and customer experience side, what are the innovations that we were going to showcase there and really pushed our teams to drive better innovation, more innovation, to really deliver on this promise. And we wanted to deliver on that promise of performance for our customers. This is all about outcomes and performance. We wanted to deliver on brand awareness, obviously, demand gen, thought leadership sides. We wanted to create a beautiful Cvent Connect, which, I mean, I think we did, but I'm biased. Right? And then we wanted to make sure that we were amplifying this even beyond the moment itself. So, you know, you don't need to memorize any of this, but the point is you need to look at the proof. Where is the proof? Because that's what's going to make it land and not come across as, you know, marketing fluff. Mhmm. And then there's the other part of that north star, which is the emotional side. Right? Yes. So the tangible proof is one thing, but then you really got to think about the think, feel, do. This is actually, Amy, I think you taught me this framework. And so we looked at our attendees that that come to the event and they witnessed the rebrand. Like, what do we want them to think? You know, we want them to think that we're an AI powered leader that has earned the right to show them what's next. We wanted them to feel validated, challenged and actually excited. We did not want them to feel pitched to nobody likes that. Right. And we wanted them to share what they heard, engage with us and the ecosystem, have true human connection with their peers that were there and in the industry. And then we wanted them to challenge us and themselves to expect more. Yeah. Yeah. Those of you who were there, you can tell us if we we accomplished that. Let's jump to step two, setting the stage. Yes. So what I mean by setting the stage is once you know your North Star, you have to define your guiding principles. Every decision should reflect these principles. So for us, we landed on six guiding principles for connect. So these became our filter through which every decision was made. We wanted to make sure that we were showcasing top tier innovation and experience through our products. Our storytelling had to be outcome led with real customer proof. It was not about the feature, it was about the outcome that it created for our attendees in our market. Everything we wanted it to have a high polish finish. And so, all of you out there that plan events, you know, the easel boards are, like, the bane of your existence. Right? We we're, like, Yeah. no easel boards allowed. We wanted everything to feel high polished. foam core is a little bit of course. Yeah. Yeah. And then a unified host presence. We wanted to make sure that everyone that was there as a brand champion for Cvent, you you could clearly identify them, and they were a a unified front, championing the brand, telling the right story. So that was a big piece for this. We wanted to make sure it was meaningful value exchange. So creating the connection that wasn't just networking, but is it meaningful? Are we creating a value exchange? And then it was a global event that just happened to be locally executed in Nashville. So we wanted to make sure that the the scale and the impact didn't stop at the walls of the actual conference. Yeah. And, you know, I say this just in general in business. It's always good to have those guiding principles you set because when you start to move through execution or people start to challenge or question things, you can say, well, these were the guiding principles of what great looks like. So in this particular case, we can hold really fast to these guiding principles and say, look. We're gonna hold the line on these, and we're gonna make sure that we don't sacrifice them. And if we have to change something for some reason, we're doing it really intentionally versus by accident. So it keeps that quality bar really high. Let's jump to, measuring success. Yeah. So, you know, I want everyone to hear this. We we all have measurable goals for the event, right, for the performance of the event. But if you're creating a brand moment, you also need to be assigning goals to that brand moment because you don't want to leave it up to anecdotal feedback or the vibes. Yeah. And, you know, we talked a little bit before about how we've tracked our ongoing brand health, because the brand launch is not necessarily just it's a it's a moment time, but it's not the full story. So we made sure that we, did some work in advance to understand how our brand was perceived and then even to talk to customers, after the event to understand and do a survey to say, like, did this change your perception of us in the way that we were hoping for? And and that's an important part of it as well. I think also just to add here is when you're setting the stage for kind of your moment to do this, whatever it is, wherever you decide, You need to get clear on the guiding principles and define what success looks like for you, for your management team, for your stakeholders, before you execute. Right? Mhmm. Not after. So before. I think that's the key. Yeah. For sure. Alright. We're moving on to step three. This is an exciting part that might make some people's heart race a little bit. It was time to build a plan, and I wanna be really transparent about how the section began for us because there were some interesting questions online about this or even some speculation about some things, and we wanna just clear the air on that. We had an annual conference budget, and that conference budget had real constraints. You know, we knew that we couldn't just layer on a brand flip because we didn't have the money to do that and it wouldn't wouldn't necessarily been responsible to do that. So we had to think about what we were actually spending for the event. So, Kaela, why don't you tell everyone what I told you? Yeah. No extra budget. It had to be cost neutral. Yes. That either made me the the grouchy CMO or the popular CMO. I'm not sure depending on who you ask. But no. Cost neutral. What I mean by that is the same budget the team had for Connect to execute Connect, they had to do it and do the brand flip on top of it with that budget. So, I'll just ask both of you, like, what was your honest reaction when I sent that to you? Okay. I won't say panic, but it definitely had a moment and then had to go my brain immediately went to problem solving mode of, like, what do we stop doing? What do we do differently? Like, what are our levers to pull here to to figure this out? Yeah. Yeah. Not not panic, but I'll be honest. I was like, Close. Yeah. I'm not sure how we pull this off, but I do love a challenge, Amy. So let's do this. Yeah. And I know it was a big challenge, but, like, we're kinda go big or go home. So, Kaela, why don't you walk through, what what's next here? Yeah. So before we could really build the plan, then we had to audit every assumption we had ever made about this program. Right? The every single archway, every piece of print signage, the layout and structures within the innovation pavilion, registration treatments, literally every decision was on the table. Nothing was locked in. So when you've been running a program for a long time, I mean, all of us are like you start executing on autopilot, you know, why fix what isn't isn't broken? But, like, you have to be careful about that because it's, you know, when when is the last time that you questioned everything? Yeah. Yeah. And I would just say, like, for for us, we were looking at three major pillars because we had to plan building cost efficiently. And so these were the three main pillars that we're gonna go through. Yep. So first, I'm gonna jump into digital first. I remember when we did our site visit to Nashville, I remember we're walking through the venue, and I literally was asking the team, and I could see the, like, the panic in their face. I was like, do we do we need print signage? And and challenging them to really defend every single piece of print signage that we planned. You know, we all know when you're doing a brand flip, digital signage can change in seconds. Print cannot. And it's expensive and, you. know, can't create waste. So yeah. You know, I just wanna, like, also just say before we move forward because I wanna make sure that anybody who wasn't at Connect has a little bit of context. The plan was that everyone would arrive to the conference and experience the old brand. And then on our second day, during the keynote, the whole brand would flip. The whole conference would flip inside of the room. And then throughout the whole conference, when they walked out, it would be new brand. And then around the world, things would happen simultaneously. And, you know, the reason that we did this because it would have been so much easier to just say, well, you know, let's just do it when they arrive. It's so much easier. The the the reason. we did that is men as I mentioned on our first webinar, I wanted to create a moment when people felt something because it was really important to us that our customers knew we were serious about this new promise we were making. I I mean, this new promise about being a performance brand changes everything. It changes, how we even think about, you know, our product innovation investments and and where we prioritize those. So I want people to feel that moment that we really marked that change and and and say, wait. That was the day something changed with Steven. Mhmm. Yep. Exactly. And then I'm going to move on to, the second lever here. Let's talk about the three brand states that we had. So this required a lot of detail orientation. This is definitely one of the most stealable things, I think, for all of you out there thinking about creating a moment, And it is the most popular question I got from our internal steering committee of, like, how we were gonna pull this off. And they wanted to know, like, you know, how are you gonna do this without reprinting every name badge, every piece of signage? And this was the answer. We took a multi brand philosophy approach here. Everything on-site, we looked at everything that we built and branded, and we said, which of these brand states does it actually belong in? So we had old brand. This was for anything that would only exist prior to Tuesday morning, would be shown, and would be gone before the flip. So that meant any of the content decks on Monday, the keynote directional signage, anything that was before the reveal. We could brand in the old brand, the legacy Cvent branding. Then we had this state, what I like to call the Limbo Brand. This was for anything that was seen on Monday, but still would be in use Tuesday. These were the trickiest pieces. We went really minimalist on purpose here, went dominantly neutral. I think some of you probably noticed we did text based logos instead of the old logos on things, And, we had hints of the new secondary colors of the new brand. So there were hints of the new brand in this limbo brand, but not enough that it would give it away. And then the third state was anything, obviously, new brand for anything that was only gonna be seen after that keynote moment dropped, we were all in the new end. And I want to highlight probably the the most common question I got here was about the name badges. This is a perfect example. Right? We didn't we didn't want to have to reprint every name badge because, Yeah. one, Yeah. that's very costly, right? And what are we gonna do? Chase down every attendee and swap out their name. badge like that? Change not gonna. happen. Yeah, exactly. Like, tackle them in the hallway. So this became a limbo brand item. And then after the keynote, we had flair that was intentionally sized for the size of the name badge, so people could make it, they could turn it into like a custom piece in the new brand. Yeah. I want to also, I mean, we didn't hire brand tacklers for, you know, people not in, Yeah. in that, but we did want our employees to fully embrace. So we had a whole plan around that of making sure everybody, and I think Audra in the chats mentioned, like when they came out, all the employees were in their new shirts. We made sure they flipped their lanyard colors from blue to green just to, like, really, grab that impact in the moment and make it even more visible. And also just rally your employees to, like, be part of it. And it's not just a production moment. It's a... You're making a statement moment with everybody on-site. It was awesome. Yeah. And this wasn't just creative complexity for the heck of it. It was about controlling waste and eliminating unnecessary print duplication. And then we also used the environment itself. Like we really leaned into lighting, digital surfaces, texture instead of in like, instead of actually branding a piece. Is there a texture that you can put on it to make it look more elevated? So really carrying the brand experience through things that you don't always think about as part of the brand experience. So that saved us significantly. And it made, I mean, I think it made the event feel more elevated when we were very intentional about the items that we chose to brand. Yeah. Amazing. Well, the third lever was partnerships, which is huge for me. I mean, we... We're not... We're nothing without our partners. But I would say that Cvent has a a... An advantage of being an event that vendors and our partners genuine... Genuinely wanna be a part of. A lot of people that come to Cvent Connect, as you all know, are event professionals, marketers, hospitality profs. So this is a room that a lot of companies want exposure to and and eagerly sign up for. So rather than us treat sponsorships as a nice to have, we we treat them more as a budget strategy. So it's not just like trade a service for digital exposure. Sometimes it's about bringing real sponsorship revenue that offsets where you wanna spend elsewhere. So, ultimately, your net cost is flat. Right? So look at the vendors in your space or your, your your different vertical. Those partners who wanna access your customers, figure out what they want and how to create real value for both you and them. You wanna make sure that they're getting value as well. So let's let's actually tee up a poll, my friends. Let's see who's who's awake and lively today. Have you creatively leveraged partnerships to keep costs down? We'll give it a sec. Alright. We got some coming in. I love... I think the best thing about this industry is that we... We're all we're all pretty creative when it comes to stuff. like this. So Yeah. The one thing I'll say is that, historically in my career, you know, I've I used to focus on the main ones that are just normal. You know, they these are vendors or partners who kind of align to your industry. But one of the things I learned about ten years ago was you can really go after nontraditional partners that you wouldn't even expect to to be interested in that event. But they want your audience for some reason. So you can get really creative about, you know, like, I remember one time, there was a food brand, you know, that we pursued for one of our, you know, they were doing, like, a really, healthy snack type food thing, and they were really interested in that audience. So a lot of creative ideas there that you can really step into. Alright. I think we're ready for step four. And I think. I'm up. Right? Alright. You are. Step four. That is where the plan becomes real. This is about prepping your employees and your execution team that's on-site. So before we get into how we prepared our people, I just wanna give you a sense of the full scope, because like I said, it wasn't just swapping signage at a conference. This was a simultaneous global brand flip across every single surface that Cvent touches. So, Rachel, do you wanna just really quickly talk about that? Yeah. I mean, when you look at the full picture of what we had to flip, it was a lot. And if you were there, you kinda saw that. We first tackled the plan, you know, obviously, much in advance than before, but we tackled it kind of from the top with all the major categories of jobs to be done. Jobs to be done was a big part of this. But from from the event side for me and in that moment, we had to tackle, you know, things from content. What's our content strategy? What does signage look like? Kaela touched on that a little bit. The production run of show was, you know, so many line items long. We had to make sure that. Sure. every single thing hit. Right? Some of the. other things were aligning with our vendors and partners to make sure they had the plan. And the biggest piece, I think, was the staffing plan because we had to make. sure the right people were in the right places. So each each thing, each major category had its own brand checklist. Yeah. And then, you know, Rachel really hit on what was happening on-site, but we had a massive team of people handling everything that wasn't on-site. So talking about the website, social media handles, the internal aspects of this. This is what all had to happen leading up to the rebrand and during that forty five minute window of our CEO, Reggie's, keynote. Yeah. No pressure. And I think, like, you know, we we did have a big team. I would say that, you know, depending on the size of your organization, it just means that the people who are in charge of certain things all had to be all hands on deck. So if somebody wears two hats, they they can help with two things. But the product team was something interesting that that I wanted to talk about too because that wasn't optional. We couldn't flip the brand of the event and leave customers staring at the old one and the product they use every day. People told us that was a pretty bold move. Kaela and I have done it, you know, at another company before, things like that. But, you know, we worked really closely with product and IT and, like, a huge shout out to our product engineers, our UX team, our corporate IT team that were working with us months ahead of time and then in an all day war room, making sure that everything was going off without a hitch behind the scenes even with our, web team and marketing, etcetera. So it was a really, big all hands on deck. So that forty five minute technical window was the most crucial window of the day. And like I said, you know, that coordination started, like, well before we got to Nashville. So let's talk a little bit about how we prepared our people. I I love some of the comments I'm watching in the q and a. Let's talk about how we prepared our people. There were two groups, our employees, so about 6,000 employees at Cvent, and then there was our execution team. So on the employee side, we had made a really deliberate decision to read in the entire company about two weeks before the launch. So not just the people who are gonna be on-site, but, like, everybody in the whole company, 6,000 people. Yeah. Silly. Tell tell how we got thousands of employees to keep that confidential, Amy. Okay. So I'm gonna back up. I'll back up and say this. We triaged who needed to know what when. So there was a core team working on the rebrand. As we mentioned in in part one, we had a committee and all that. And then as we started to start to execute the brand in preparation for the launch, more and more had to be disclosed to do their pieces of things, like the people working on the website behind the scenes and things like that or people refabbing content, all the things that we talked about in our first session. So that all had to be done, but then, you know, not the whole company. Right? That was a very small subset of people in the company that were helping us with some of that pre prep. The list of people who got disclosed got bigger and bigger and bigger, and we tracked it. So people knew you're on the inside track, you're on the list of inside track, and you are held to keeping that confidential. But then when it got to a point where it was like, we're gonna open it up two weeks out to, you know, five, six thousand people. Yeah. Two weeks out. That was, definitely a thing. I. would say that, yeah, I. was definitely sweating. would just get a jump in and say, like, you were sweating it. We were all sweating it. That was, very stressful. Yeah. And you know you know why? It's because I don't actually think people are malicious. Right? People don't purposely leak information typically. It wasn't about that. But as. I said, I knew I wanted us to create that moment. So for me, I was really I kept reminding everybody, and I I feel like I Yep. people probably wanted to strangle me because every presentation, every meeting, I was like, this is confidential. This is confidential until the keynote. But what I've learned is if you explain the why behind something to people, they'll actually get on board with you. If it's like a rule, like, well, don't tell anyone. But when I explain why, I think people really got behind and got excited about it. Yeah. But, Amy, like, in fairness, you were telling us you're trying to create this moment. Like, the special. Yeah. moment is we can. just hold it to the keynote. She just kept saying this on repeat. And I'm like, okay. I believe. Right? So it would be memorable. Yeah. and. be actually worth it at the end and look where. we are. It was worth it. Right? Yeah. I was like, guys, just trust me. Trust me. You don't if you don't know what I'm talking about, just trust me. Because when it happens, you'll feel it. So we asked them to keep it quiet, and they did. Mhmm. Now, of course, we had a no before you go. That's what we call it. You know, our little prep for the conference, which is agnostic of the brand flip. Right? We also had a all company town hall that two weeks out where Kaela and I actually walked the whole company through the new brand, what it was about, what it meant, key FAQs. And then we had a mandatory brand training that they had to take and certification so that every employee was well versed before we set foot in Nashville. So that. was really, really important. That training and certification, yeah, so so funny. Sometimes people talk about what we educated them. Like, well, communicating in education is different than training. So make sure that you certify and take that quiz so they can actually be active with the information. But then, we also had an on-site pep rally the morning of the launch for the team that was on the ground. And our global offices well, let me back up for a second. Because should I I guess I should go to that for a second, the pep rally. So the pep rally was really about I want a one final moment. But if for any reason someone was distracted or hadn't taken their quiz or was confused, we. all get aligned. Here's what we're doing. I think I mentioned this previously, in another session. But this is a photo of us, like, around 07:30, 07:50 in the morning before the keynote, the launch day. We all got in a room. I was running across the stage like a maniac. People needed coffee. They were still, like, you know, waking up. And I was. like, let's get a picture. And that was the picture of our employees on-site celebrating the moment where we're about to turn green, and so much more. So that was cool. But, you know, we talked a little bit before, and I know there were some questions about employee culture. And this is really important because, you know, we only had a handful of employees, well, maybe more than a handful, but we only had a subset small subset of our employees that were on-site. But we have people around the world who've been part of this, but wrapped prepped and worked on this. And even just any employee was really excited about it. So we wanted people to feel like, you know, they were part of it from a culture perspective. So we actually had captains in every office around the world and asked them to plan a watch party, and they would, kind of flip their offices a little bit. I don't mean, like, real estate flips. I just mean, like, you know, balloons and decor and food and colors and things like that. So why don't we roll that video, of that, employee parties we had around the world? I'll just kinda talk over this a little bit. You can see that they actually all use their own creativity for what their office wanted to do. We wanted them to really make it special in their own way. So it wasn't like we had to do it this way every office. We just said have fun and, you know, use your kind of existing morale budgets if you have them. And otherwise, people got really creative, so it wasn't very. expensive to do it all, which was really neat. Alright. And then, Amy Lucia, I'll just jump in here and say, you know, there was something you did on-site that I thought was such a cool extra touch. We had, you know, Oh, yeah. we had the global watch parties with everyone supporting us around the company that you can't bring, oh, you know, 6,000 people to an event. So Amy Lucia was creating these, videos specifically for the marketers that were behind the scenes supporting us, at Cvent. And, she was sending them, like, little clips and videos so that they didn't have complete FOMO. They they felt like they were still part of the experience. I'm gonna share one of the ones that she recorded and sent to the full marketing team. The calm before the storm. Like everybody. Music City Center when all brands It's just the carpet, but I keep telling people that we paid them to do that. I don't think people believe me. Kind of fun though. Like, literally obnoxious. That's so funny. When I got there and I was like, oh my gosh. The carpets are a new color. Planned it. Alright. So, a lot of those little fun videos, you'll see them in the in the big film we put out in a couple weeks, but that was that was cool too. People seem to like those. And, again, just really easy for me to flip my camera on and just say, hey. Check this out, team, and drop it in the Slack channel or whatever chat channel you use for your teams, and they felt connected and were really excited. Okay. So, execution team. So the Friday before the event, I have to tell you, I was nervous, because there were so many things that had to go really well at the same time within a really quick window, right, while people were in the keynote. So I, really wanted to make sure everything was documented, and I wanted to know that every person who was responsible for doing something for execution knew what their role was and was was very clear, knew what time they were to do it and where they needed to be. So we had a call with all the captains that we had appointed of the different aspects of the execution on-site and around the world. And, basically, I was like, okay. I need, you know, verbal yes. I'm clear. I'm on point for this. Mhmm. I agree. I understand. Do you have the cell phone number of the person you're gonna call if something goes wrong? You know? So we're not, like, scrambling. Oh, no. This didn't work. Who do I call? So every kind of detail was, was thought through and and and checked through, like, a checklist of, like, who's on first for what. I think that really helped us because there were a couple areas, honestly, full transparency where someone had written in marketing. I'm like, who in marketing? Who in marketing. is doing that? So it was it was a good moment. Yeah. Alright. I'm gonna jump to step five, you guys. This is it. This is the it all came down to step five, pulling it off. We had forty five minutes during our CEO, Rachel's, keynote. We were in front of thousands of people live, thousands of people online watching. We had members of our board in the room, so I was very nervous. Our top customers were in the room. We had executives. from the world. So, I wanna set the scene. So, Rachel, why don't you take them to the night before the flip? Yes. I love the... 'twas the night before the flip. Yeah. We could see some videos that are playing here of everyone kinda rallying around. We had to we had to do some wristband, action for our light up wristbands that we had that changed color? in the room. Yeah. That. was was. it was a lot. It was a marketing staff sitting on the floor doing this. Everyone was all hands on deck. Right? But we had a full brand night before action list. Right? We re communicated the plan that we had gone through with with Amy and team, to every marketing staff member that was there. We flipped all the spaces that could be flipped that attendees didn't... Wouldn't see that night, with our partners. So the breakout rooms were flipped because they weren't going in there the next day. The expo spaces were already flipped. The product area, the activations that were behind closed doors, everything that could be done early, we got done. Right? We we walked every floor of the venue to make sure nothing was leaked because that also was a a risk, because they could be setting up before you know it. Some... Sometimes that goes wrong. Right? We. put a big checklist. We have a big checklist in our our staff office that has, like, a whiteboard, huge whiteboard that anybody could come in and check off something. So it's all hands on deck. So, and I would say the last thing we really did was to reconfirm that run of show for the next morning, and we reconfirm the day of plan with every single owner. Like, you good? Alright. Cool. You good? Alright. Cool. And so by the time we left that night, like, every chest piece was in place. Right? I will say I think I annoyed everyone because I asked, like, a 100 times if there were security or seat banners posted outside of those spaces to make sure no one who was lost wandered in to the wrong place before our flip moment. I'm now an official security guard, Ryan Franklin. I think that was, like, super true because security is a key piece. If you want to keep this super tight and confidential, you you gotta keep that, like, schedule tight. You have to make sure either staff or security standing at that door because you can't really rely on the venue to keep it completely locked all the time. They're not the, you know, the owners of your event. So I would say, like, that morning, we walked all spaces first thing again to make sure staff was in place. Amy held the staff rally that we're talking about. The signage flippers were waiting in the wings, rigging staff was on standby. So every vendor with venue access was, like, confirmed and ready. It was kinda like mission, you know, mission control almost. Yeah. Right? It it was. Yeah. Alright. So let's talk about the before. Right? So alright. It's Tuesday morning. Keynote doors are open. Our AV vendor Clarity was ready to go. Our emcee takes the stage. He's doing a fifteen minute window of like housekeeping and warming up the audience and, getting everyone in the room. And meanwhile, like Rachel and I are like, how many people are in the hallway? When's our go signal? We're, like, waiting to tell people to go because every team globally had been instructed that at 09:15AM central, and being a global company, I cannot stress to you the importance of time zones when you're when you're, picking a very specific time like this. So 09:15AM central, you start, but they had to wait for the signal. So, Rachel, do you wanna walk them through what actually happened during the flip on-site? We are totally calm, cool, and collected. No no. no panic whatsoever. at all. Yeah. You know what? The one thing I will say is that we were over prepped. So one... Once we were, like, good to go, got the go, it was like clockwork because we had it by detail every minute. And so it's like level three, then level two, then level one kind of thing. And, you know, in level three, we have our banners going up. And to do that, it was a high risk... This was one of the high risk flip areas because it was over major, it was over major arteries. So we had to shut down escalators. We had 15 to 20 rigging people managing, like, putting the banner up, standing under, making sure people are safe, like you can see in this video. So that was high risk. That all had to be done by 09:45. They're like, it could be it could be twenty minutes or it can be a full hour. We're like, we need it to be more like, you know, under thirty minutes, please. And, they they managed to happen, and it happened flawlessly. Thank god. We had to flip our registration kiosk. So we had our app support team switching the touch screen simultaneously. We had, our digital teams, our our digital team walking the floors confirming all the flips. Our Innovation Pavilion was mostly flipped. We were just going over and reconfirming that everything had flipped over. The gobos, the lighting, the the velocity screens, the entry arches, the the the plants, the uplighting color changes. Attendee hub and mobile app were flipped live for for our virtual team helping support during that brand video. So people are looking at it on their phone. Website and social were flipped real time, globally coordinated. And finally, we talked about employee apparel, and distributing that and innovation pavilion during those moments. There were people literally walk... Running to the bathroom to change their shirts so that everybody was in brand. The key, I think, was just, like, making sure that the attendees, like, experienced the whole thing and felt every single touch point was like, that was the moment. Yeah. Yeah. And then for those of you who weren't there, you can watch this on demand, so you can watch the flip in the keynote room. I think they're going to drop it in the chat. But the key point there was that we had a brand video that was our introduction of our new brand promise. So this was the moment that they met the new Cvent, and then we made sure that when they left left the room, it was the new Cvent everywhere. Like we were genuine about who we were. So I'm going to jump into mission control. So this is a little bit of behind the scenes. This is what, was happening on-site. This is what Amy and Rachel and I were all watching during Rachel's keynote. Right? So this is the mission control channel, and you can just see the amount of people that were involved in telling us that everything had flipped and it was good. Yeah. I mean, if I was sitting in the keynote, and I have my phone in my hand and someone that I was sitting with I was sitting with some of our customers who had worked with us on the rebrand and given feedback. And I was sitting there, and one of our employees, our my colleague said to me, like, you need to breathe. Because I was like and, Yeah. I couldn't breathe for a minute. But I was watching, and it was, like, flipped flipped flipped flipped. And people were hearting it, and I was just like I literally get emotional every time I think about it because I was just, like, so proud of our team. Yeah. I mean and and I'll say, like, the the room reacted in the keynote room. The the market reacted. We sent record breaking social impressions from this event for us. We got record breaking follower growth from this. Like, people who weren't even on-site were talking about it. The Uber drivers in Nashville were talking about it because everyone was talking about it in gosh. That was hilarious. crazy when we heard about that. Yeah. And and thank you, yeah, thank you to those of you who are on-site because the fact that you were excited about it and you talked about it is why we can say that it went well. So you you were really a big special part of it, you know, when we were, you know, kind of, just really humbled by. But, again, people didn't just react to the visual flip flip. What I was most excited about is that they actually seem to get that we were making a new promise, and then they were stating online, you know, the performance promise, the AI promise. They were talking about not just the brand moment, but, like, what we were actually committing to. So that told me that that checklist of things that had to be true actually were accomplished or was accomplished at the event. Yeah. And then, I want to jump into the part of step five that I think gets, gets forgotten about or underestimated. You have to capture this moment. Right? Like, before the event, we made sure that attendees had a way to participate in the moment, not just observe it. The wristbands, the photo opportunities throughout the venue were specifically designed for social sharing. And I know we talked about, you know, how much people reacted. We did not anticipate this type of reaction, but, like, now. I look back and I'm like, well, of course, we had a bunch of marketers and event planners in the room. Of course, they're going to appreciate. the level of they took to put this off. to us. I mean, it really. meant the world to us that you noticed that. Like, I cannot begin to tell you, like, how special that was that, you know, when your peers noticed that. See, I get so emotional. Anyway, do you wanna show the other one, do wanna? play play one of the Yeah. yeah. Rebrand. I mean, that's rebrand. We go in to give us the Gutierrez and Barrows tour, like, leather braces. They're, like, having a good time, and then they change to the rebrand color. While we're in, you know, the app refreshes rebrand. We go outside. Everything's been rebranded. A giant banner hanging with a new rebrand as a glorious spider. Registration desk, it's rebranded. It's a rebranded. Every slide deck, rebranded. As a marketer, it was the most impressive rebrand pull up I've ever seen I've ever seen in my life. Yeah. And I'm sorry. You might not have been able to hear that one. But, Okay. but I'm sure many of you saw it. And, yes, Amy, you made it on the leaderboard. There you go. Thank you so much. Just, watching all your comments here. Okay. So the next is scale it. So we scaled it after, you know, everything that happened at Connect became the fuel for what came after. The video story that's coming out, in the next week or two that goes into this in a in a fun little, you know, way with more behind the scenes footage, the webinar series, the social content, the press coverage. And this is really about, what we talked about in the last, session with Kelly about the before, during, and after your event. We had the plan for the actual event content and what was being shared about Cvent's new offerings and all the new innovation we were announcing thought leadership, programming. But this flip or this moment and, again, you can insert any moment you want. It doesn't have to be a brand flip. Also ended up being something that we could amplify. So I think the other pea... Pieces we were really intentional. Like, we set up time lapse cameras. We gave kind of before and after direction to the photography team. I think for things like this, you have to think through that for posterity's sake. Like, what what actually happened in that moment? What was actually flipped? Like, if you're creating that, don't forget to capture that because then you can use it afterwards, especially for your employees and your customers. You can show what it actually look like. Okay. We're going to jump into another poll here. What's the biggest barrier to creating a brand moment at your next event? Interesting. Okay. Well, again, I think maybe we could do another session sometime, Kaela, on all the creative ways, Kaela and Rachel, on the creative ways to maximize budget to. to. do For it back because there's so much cool stuff that, that that I know we've all had the opportunity to do. And maybe we could open that one up somehow so that you guys could share your best practices too because I'm sure a lot of you have a lot of good things to share with the broader group. Alright. So let's recap. Five steps. Right? Here we go. Again, these are not Cvent specific. They're not Goldcast Events specific. It's whatever you're doing that you wanna make your event memorable around. These are the steps, that we think could work or help guide you, and we want you to be able to take this playbook, to steal it, apply it, and expect more from your events because of it. So before we open up to q and a, I wanna pull up, this little rapid fire q and a I created for Rachel and Kaela because, I've been watching your your registrations and the questions you put in that. I'm gonna go really fast through some of those while we tee up some of the q and a here, that is in the chat. So, I think the first question is, did we rehearse the flip, Rachel? No. I mean, it's hard to it's hard to actually rehearse the flip because a lot of the moments are live, but. we did, in our advanced prep calls, go through it pretty extensively with roles and responsibilities. We did rehearse the the production in the room, like, extensively to make sure that the the colors in the room changed, like I mentioned, but that's only something you could really do. You can't really do that on a dry run. So you got... You can only do it verbally, really, until you see it in in IRL. Yeah. Okay. I'll ask you both this one. First, Kaela, what would you do, differently? Would you do anything differently? Yeah. I mean, always, right, when you look back at a project. I would say for me, it was, the the amount of rehearsal time that we had was really dominantly for the content that we wanted to share. And so some of the more production focused rehearsals got deprioritized because, obviously, you wanna make sure that, all the presenters, all the messaging is landing right. And so we were, Amber, I was with the lighting tech, and we were rehearsing the bracelet color timing, like, five minutes before doors. That was a little stressful, so I would build in more production focused rehearsal time. I love it. I would? I would do nothing differently. We're completely perfect, Amy. Exactly. Yeah. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. I mean, there's tons of stuff. I I probably woulda had a few more run of shows potentially, like, involving more of the partners and things like that. But but, honestly, like, there... There's so much that the goodness of what did go right. I I think you can always over prepare, and I think we did that, like, pretty well. Mhmm. Yeah. And I think I'll answer that one too. I think for me, if we had all the bandwidth in the world, I would have planned a little bit more, like, teasers about the brand launch prior to the event. So we did that precontent piece that Kelly talked about last week for our event content. But the the flip, we had an idea that maybe we could do some teasers and, like, throw out some Easter eggs on the Internet and stuff. So it was kind of teasing that something was coming. We were so out of bandwidth because we were literally you'll see in the video we put out in a couple weeks, we were literally doing stuff up until, like, eight the night before. So, you know, writing social. copy. or getting terms and conditions with legal two weeks out. So there's wasn't time for that. I would say one other thing I would probably do differently is plan my outfit because I was on keynote stage, and I was so focused on helping the team write copy, do things to execute that I realized I got on-site, and I didn't have the right clothes. So I had to send a friend out to help, like, go shop for, like, what was I gonna wear on the main stage because. I hadn't. Yeah. Oh, I'm sure I have one more. The. credentials plan being, just really super tight about the credentials plan. We had a security plan, but our team was managing it. I I probably would have hired us credentials and security, like, manager. to do every single door because, like, you know, our employees are amazing, but sometimes they are talking to a customer or something. Like, the the security team was on it, but we needed, like, I think, one more layer on top. of that. good. Okay. Did anything fail? Someone asked that in the chat. Not that we know of. So If it did, you guys wanna tell us. quickly. Yeah. Because, so hopefully, hopefully, nothing failed. How many people have Rachel helped with the on-site flip on-site? Because we know there was around the world, but on-site. right? Yeah. I mean, on-site, we had a few dozen marketers, helping us. And then, of course, our our vendors, and contractors on-site were, they were there were, you know, tons of them. There's... Everyone everyone had a job as I I meant... I did the rundown earlier. I mean, all of those people, there there were at least two to three people working on that, per vendor, and we had a ton. Yeah. And they had to do all this on top of their flip job their their event job. job, Yeah. Because it wasn't like we had a flip team flip an event execution team. They were the same people. jobs. So that made it really fun. I'm sure, Rachel, was, I haven't figured question. out how to buy locate yet, but I'm still, like, working on that. Yeah. Yeah. But would be great. is why for those of you who asked in our other session, did you take pay PTO? That's why. There was a little bit of PTO after that because people were running pretty hard going into that. Okay. So were you nervous about the flip potentially failing? Yeah. I'll jump in first, I guess, on this one. Yeah. Of course. Of course, we were. I personally was, I think six months and nine days into working at Cvent at this point. So I was very nervous that, like, this huge project that I taken on as soon as I started was I was like, oh my gosh. If this fails, this will forever taint my career at Cvent. So, yeah, I was I was terrified. Oh, oh, yeah. I mean, it's when you're a performant... A performance brand and unveiling unveiling show the world what events can do. Like, there is no option to to fail, Amy Lucia. So, like, no pressure, and we're doing it in front of the entire events industry. Cool. Yeah. Let's let's go. Yeah. I think I probably should have felt like, thought about that more, but I was just like, hey. The team's gonna get it done. I know it. I mean, like I said, though, I was a little nervous, you know, at that moment just because butterflies, you know, everything's. happening. Okay. I promise we'll get to the other questions in the q and a, but these are some that came in in advance. I just wanna get to them really quick. Did we have a plan, Kaela, if there was negative feedback on the brand? Yeah. I mean, you always need to have, a plan for that. It wasn't necessarily flip specific, but it was, from a PR perspective. Right? There were issues with our brand. Yeah. We were we were on deck and ready to address them. Now okay. Good. Rachel, you covered this a little bit, but how do we get employees to change their lanyards and t shirts so fast? We set up a separate table in a different room, and we gave them a window which to change in. So, you know, not everybody could come all at once. There's, you know, over... There's a, there's a lot of employees on-site. So, we gave them an area. We said, go from this window to this window and change really quickly. You have to go into the bathroom and change. Yep. So plan your outfits accordingly. Like, we gave them examples of what to to to wear that day so they can change really quick. But, yeah, we had a whole setup area. We had staff dedicated to just bam bam chain... Changing out with them and, yeah, worked. Our employees played along. Like, they were like, alright. Fine. Oh, they they. more than played along. They were, like, brand police, man. They were holding each. other accountable. It was awesome. Mhmm. Did we have to, get approval from the venue to do everything we did, like dropping banners? Yes. Yes. I would say we had to get a whole safety crew aligned. As I mentioned before, there were 15 rigors. That was the that was the most risk area because when you're dropping... And I I think someone, asked in the chat about stray wanderers who weren't in the room when the switch was happening. We, we, that was a calculated risk for us there. Mhmm. We did count. We have hallway readers and we looked on RFID of how many people were in the hallway. We're like, 20 people in the hallway that most people are in the keynote. It's okay if these 20 people, see it because they're about to see it in the next five minutes. Everything's gonna. flip. So that that part was, it was Yeah. But the approval, the approval from the venue, like, we had to read them in on everything. We had to make sure that they knew what was happening. They signed, you know, confidentiality agreements, and they... Because they knew that we were flipping signage on top of the Bridgestone Center. Right? They knew that we. were flipping all the digital signage, and they knew that this rigging team was gonna come out and shut down escalators and get it up. So... Yeah. For sure. Alright. Let's, I'll I'll come back to some of mine. Let's let's get some of the ones from today's chat if we didn't cover them. Let me switch to those. Okay. What did you do. with the Skype? Go ahead. Yeah. We just answered this one. Okay. We just answered this one because we we just basically let them, see it in the in the real moment, Mhmm. but really push people. We had a whole marching band pushing people into general session to make sure there was no one else. on the hallway. That helped. I don't know. I don't know if you can get a marching band, but that's what we did. was our precon, our preshow, little entertainment. Happened to be a good coincidence this year. Okay. Any other questions we need to push, or should I go back to some from the presubmitted ones? I can Let's. see. So someone asked what platform did you use to communicate with the team? Oh, we were on Slack. That's our Mhmm. chat. Are you talking about, like, during the conference, I would assume? That was our Slack is kinda like, you know, Teams or or whatever you use for your. chat. That was we created a little channel for the on-site flip. We had a a global flip channel, but, that was how we all communicated with, you know, captains on-site. And then we have a different channel that we always have for all the marketers on-site who are running the event. So if it's like, oh, we need more coffee here or this bathroom needs to be cleaned. So there are different channels that we monitor, but that's pretty much what we do on-site. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What did we. sacrifice? Oh, there you go. Kaela, do you wanna hit that? Or I mean, honestly, I'm gonna say it. I don't think we sacrificed anything. It was really, we just kinda changed how we executed on things. So, like, we had less print signage overall, but we didn't sacrifice the attendee experience or the branding. We just did it in a different way. So, I don't think we cheapened any of the areas. It wasn't like we served people peanut butter and jelly so we could afford the digital signage, you know? So just looking at how you execute, it's not we didn't really sacrifice any of the whats. We we changed the hows on how we did things. is I think this is important because 15% less, signage in volume and then much lower costs for signage because it went digital. This is a really. important thing because we had some people online, you know, say, hey. Did you create waste or whatever? And we actually were really thoughtful about that, Mhmm. because we want that, you know, to steal the show. Like, hey. You guys weren't responsible. So we tried our best to be responsible and ended up being more cost effective to do the digital in that way so then we could make room for other things. Yeah. What anything that we did have to print, we made sure that the... Our vendor we have? it be a sustainable fabric that they, you know, that they took back to the warehouse and and, recycled. Like, that was all talked about in this. Yeah. Okay. I'll I'll jump in and take this one because, love this question, Kaela, because you're a machine and, like, how you've pulled this off, I'm with the team. Crazy. this was a really cool and so we actually so we you know, with your speakers, you have to give them the template for your event weeks in advance so they can build their content in the. new templates. And so what we did is we gave them a template in the legacy branding that they could start building all of their content, and then we have them submit their decks to us in advance anyway so that we can get it loaded into, you know, the attendee hub in in the app and everything. So what we did is we actually the way we laid out the original template was it was tokenized. It was very calculated where we had logos, where we had design elements, and and there was a a lay like a layering effect that we had done where we could like, we knew where the new elements were going to immediately go in and flip those tokens. And so we were actually because we built almost a one from one mirror of the legacy brand to the new brand template here. When we got the decks to load them into the hub, we actually were able to run it through, an agent, an AI agent that could do tokenized branding swap because it was a one for one swap out. So that was huge. I mean, I think, one of my designers told me that they did, 80 rebranded decks in less than a half hour using the agent, which is pretty nuts. I think that's all we have time for today, but there's I'm looking here in the chat, and there's more questions in the q and a that I really wanna make sure we find a way to answer for you. So, my commitment to you is to figure out a way to get more information to you, but I wanna be respectful of all your time. So before I go, let me just close everything out. So, again, all three recordings, they're available on demand for you, and then, we can pull up the slides, Kaela. I think, that would be. good. And then, you can share those recordings with everybody from these, you know, webinars. Also, we want you to have something tangible. So remember we told you, like, we were gonna give you kind of the playbook. So these were kind of the steps that we showed you in each of the three webinar series, but we're gonna package everything up as promised and give you the templates, give you the things that we shared. Obviously, you'll put your own spin to this, but we wanted to share how we did it. And I'm sure you'll learn new ways to do things even better than we did. We're excited about that. And then, we're also working on a behind the scenes story, a video that actually tells the story, kind of end to end. So you might wanna watch that, although you've already seen the behind the scenes and some of the details, Yeah. but see the story, more footage, etcetera. And, again, I just wanna say thank you for spending so much time with us. This series has been, like, one of my favorite things that we've done as a team. And the fact that you asked us for it and then showed up, it means so much to us. So I hope this was interesting to you. We will circle on how to get the rest of the questions answered. I wanna say a huge thank you to Kaela and Rachel who didn't just help me tell the story, but actually led the charge, coordinating thousands of employees, managing every detail of the flip, and pulling it off something, you know, something that we really, really are really proud of, a big moment, for all of us and our teams, and hopefully for you, our customers, because we really did it for you. And to everyone watching, I just wanna say, you know, we hope that you're ready to expect more from your events. We thank you for being, part of this journey with us, and we look forward to continuing to deliver value for you in every possible way, whether it be thought leadership and our product innovation or services. We are here for you. We thank you. We're grateful for you, and we salute you. So have a good rest of your week, and we will see you all soon. Bye, everybody. Alright. Thanks.