There has been a lot of talk in the industry during the pandemic about revolutionizing event strategies, taking risks, and designing new and unique experiences for attendees. However, this is much easier said than done, and many returning events have gone back to their pre-pandemic blueprints without major changes.
Back before the pandemic hit at the end of 2019, Haute, the B2B creative and event agency of Haute Companies, organized the epitome of an innovative experience for members of its eventprof community: a secret business trip. Attendees didn’t know where they would be going when registering, only that they would be flying somewhere with a group of like-minded people for a unique educational and networking experience.
Since the secret business trip, Haute has continued to engage their community both virtually and in-person throughout the pandemic, and the insights from their strategy and approach have never been more relevant as eventprofs seek to reinvent event experiences and make in-person attendance worthwhile for their audiences.
XLIVE caught up with Haute’s Chief Community Officer Nicole Osibodu to pick her brain about how she approaches designing memorable experiences, and opportunities she sees for the industry in 2022 and beyond.
XLIVE: How did the idea for the secret business trip come about? What were the goals, and how did that inform how you created the experience?
Nicole Osibodu: Because we're all friends in the event industry, we thought, and still think, that most events for event professionals are terrible. We thought: let's reimagine and recreate how people want to engage. Putting a keynote speaker on the stage is not the way. I can watch YouTube for that. Talking to people in the hallway is what we built our events around back in the day, and we still have that as an ethos of what we do. We bring people from brands and from the partner side — I hate calling anybody vendors — together. At the end of our events, people would say this just feels like family. So we thought it would be fun to do a family reunion. And then I thought it would be really fun to keep the location a secret, and that’s exactly what we did.
From there, we wanted to find a place that we could give something back to. And I don’t mean let’s go build houses — that’s very great, but you've heard of it before, and it doesn't do anything to grow a business and grow the community. We ended up finding this place that had never had a group event before. They needed us as much as we needed them. Now we're talking, because that's a two-way conversation, which is the whole ethos of our business. For eight months, we kept the location a secret, and we had 80 event marketers and marketing professionals, including 20 CEOs of multimillion dollar companies, sign up to go on this trip. And I somehow convinced our CEO Jeff to let me charter an airplane, because why would I go commercial when you can go private?
XL: How did you build up anticipation in advance?
NO: We told everybody who signed up that all they had to do was show up on November 2nd at 2pm at TWA Hotel at JFK, pack for five days of 65 degree weather, and bring their passport. We literally told them nothing else. We sent them these teaser pictures, because little did they know, we went to this place a year in advance and we didn't tell anybody. So we were sending them pictures of a cloud in the sky, or the dirt on the ground, and saying “Here's a clue!”
In terms of anticipation, I always think an event needs two things: something to look forward to and something that calls you back. And what else would you look forward to more than not knowing where you're going? Especially when you're an event professional, who a lot of times are Type A. We did a reveal party at the TWA Hotel — we did a countdown from 10 and then we dropped this sign that said ‘Tuscany’ and people lost their minds. So that's kind of where the journey began.
XL: What were some of the design and experiential elements that made this event particularly special?
NO: I wanted to reimagine the way in which we get there, because a lot of things, especially with events, talk about the destination. And the destination is awesome, but if you think about it in the context of life, it's the journey that everybody talks about. So two hours later, we were on this plane that we called Haute Force One, where we reimagined everything and made it as engaging as possible.
We created a custom inflight magazine that had everybody's profile and different kinds of information. And they were standing up and switching seats to talk to each other. Liz [fellow Haute co-founder] and I got to be flight attendants and create the in-flight safety briefing. We read them a good night story. We played Never Have I Ever with paddles that they had in their seats. We created our own safety briefing card that had people sliding down on blow up flamingos. And just they weren't expecting it. I guess you could put that under surprise and delight, but it was so much more than that. It was designed to give them something to look forward to in this next stage.
By the time we landed 12 hours later, everybody knew almost everybody on that plane. We were all tired together. We all went through this experience together. And it was just so fun because we designed it that way and we didn't give them any rules. Everybody was running the event, not just us.
XL: How did the in-flight experience lead into and enhance the onsite experience?
NO: Everybody knew before they came that we would be creating the agenda together. Backing it up to why we chose this place is they had never had a group there before. The understanding of the group was that we were going to give them feedback. The venue was an Agriturismo, an organic farm. It's not a resort. They're going to be learning a lot for the first time, and we want to give them feedback at the end of every day — we want to, by the time we leave in five days, have built their marketing, sales, and event strategy for corporate event professionals like us. And certain experiences weren’t that positive, but we helped them with how to communicate to corporate groups — here's the verbiage that you might want to use, here's when and how you give that to them, this is when it happens, etc. Everybody understood that the assignment was to experience and then help them craft it, so that was really cool.
What we did onsite as far as the content of the event was something that we call a Spontaneous Think Tank™. We took these giant sticky notes, and we created the agenda onsite. All they knew is that we were going to have conversations that matter to them, and that was it. We had the timings of the sessions scheduled, but we didn't know what the topics would be. We’ve all been to an unconference before, those aren't new. But what was special was the human interaction pieces and the way that we brought them together. The only rule we have is no sales. When you give everybody the floor and tell them no sales, it was amazingly wall-breaking, even for the partner side. They actually had real conversations about the industry in general, not about just their company specific things. We created the agenda around people’s problems and solutions.
They're always facilitated by the members themselves, because they're the experts. And the environment is insane. One night, we were in a thunderstorm and all the power went out, and everybody was just talking in the dark. Nobody was worried. Nobody looked around wondering who was going to fix it. It didn't matter. It's what you take away that allows for real things to happen, and especially the conversations and connections that you want to have.
XL: Even though participants weren't allowed to explicitly talk about sales, what value resulted from the event?
NO: We actually didn’t know the number of actual business that had been done through the attendees until about a month and half ago. What we do is at the end of the event, we give everybody everybody the full attendee list and contact info. That's the understanding. It’s the honor system, and in all of the events that we've ever had, never once has anybody taken advantage of that. We thought we were at about $7 million in business because we were somewhat tracking it on the group’s WhatsApp channel — which, by the way, we made to communicate logistical information during the event but has stayed active all this time. That's where they hire from, where they RFP from, etc. It all happened naturally. We then found out in January at our next iteration of this experience that we were actually at $17 million in business among the participants of the trip together.
Also, now there’s a real metric to that to say experiences like this can be measured. We did a research study last year with a research consulting firm — whose lead researcher also happens to be a professor at Johns Hopkins University — to figure out a way to measure return on emotion, or ROE. We thought if we can create a metric, it would change not only the event world and the conversations you have around ROI, but literally everything in business and marketing. We wanted to be able to tell everyone else how to do what we had achieved. It turns out there's five emotions that you need to elicit in order to close bigger deals faster. It’s formulaic — it's a blueprint before the event that marketing and event teams can use, and then afterwards, it's a measurement, which sales cares about. We have closed the gap between marketing and sales using events, which is really exciting. I encourage everyone to take a look at ROEdrivesROI.com.
XL: You mentioned another iteration of this experience. Is this something that you plan to keep doing to continue to engage the community?
NO: I think when you say community, a lot of people think online platforms or online communities. And yes, there are online platforms that fuel online communities, but this is not that. I think community is when you can call somebody on their cell phone and they'll answer. Success to me is somebody that's excited to pick up the phone when I call without even knowing what I need or want. I think the next iteration is applying ROE into these programs and developing that way of thinking.
Before the pandemic hit, we were thinking about where we would go for another secret family reunion, but then we couldn’t go anywhere. So we created this travel show, and every single Friday we would go to a different destination, completely live, via Zoom. We went to 28 countries during the pandemic while everybody was at home, and now we're going to them in person. Then we started to think about what we were going to do for the next big thing, which we just did in January, and we called it Flashpoint: Where Ideas Spark.
We said, you know what the worst part of an event is? It’s when the content traps you. Here I am in the Bahamas — why am I inside a ballroom for the whole day? What we did was craft the agenda so we had sessions in the morning and in the evening, because that’s when the cocktails are, and gave them the day to actually be out in the sunshine and enjoying the property. But then we found that meaningful conversations happened naturally — people were sitting with their toes in the sand, and they could literally get a chair and go sit wherever they wanted to and talk. And the venue loved it, because now the group was able to take advantage of tours and other fun activities during the day.
XL: Do you have any final tips for eventprofs navigating this post-pandemic “new normal”?
NO: I think we as an industry need to wake up. I think events are worse now coming out of COVID than they were before. What I mean by that is that I think that people are so focused on the physical logistics that now have to be a little bit different — which I completely understand. But we stopped thinking as an industry about what the attendees actually want. When I go to these events, I look around and I think, if I were them, how would I have created this? I feel like I'd only be thinking two things. One, what is the content that I need to get out? So first of all, I didn't think of the actual attendees.
The second thing is the logistics of it. Like, why don’t we go outside? Why are we in this room? I think the industry is missing a chance to truly try to break this in half and say this is our opportunity to get out there and do something crazy and different. And we do that by thinking of the connection experience that goes with the attendee. Of course, not everybody's doing it that poorly. But we are in a different time, and now is your opportunity. No more complaining. We had two years to reinvent ourselves and go from event logistics experts to event marketers and really understand the buyer’s journey.
At Haute, we think that business is personal. And if everybody designed events like that — if everybody started by thinking, “Would I be excited to attend this event before I even got there? Why? Do I feel like this is the one that I want to spend my money on next year and come back to?” People aren’t going to as many events as before because they don’t have to. The old way is dead, and this is the new way. People have choice, and they're choosing connection and the most human-based experiences that think about them first, and the content second. If eventprofs design for that, events will rock the world again, and we would be the comeback story of the century.