XLIVE is proud to present its second annual list of Emerging Leaders. Our group of 2022 winners includes young event professionals — across both B2B and Fan Experience — whose innovation, creativity, and drive are pushing the industry forward. We will be featuring all of the winners on XLIVE over the coming weeks, so be sure to check back!
Mark Lopez’s career began in food and beverage, and he started working events and music festivals at an early age. These experiences shaped his interest in events, and during and after college he found himself working all areas of events, from venue management to hotels to hospitality. Eventually, he began producing concerts and events on his own.
Lopez shares that he had been working with Steven Evans, founder and CEO of Show Imaging, for several years before they began talking about working together in 2011. Evans eventually brought him on board, and they grew Show Imaging’s team from two people to close to 200 people across multiple states.
In 2019, Lopez moved into the role of Chief Experience Officer, and he spends most of his day looking at the future of the company and how they can best serve their customers. “I’m consistently looking at our existing and future service depots and how they impact our customer experience,” he says. “We are a unique full-service experience company, so it’s exciting growing and evolving with current trends, technology and brands.”
Lopez’s favorite part of working at Show Imaging is getting to creatively problem solve and deliver exceptional results to clients. “I love when we get a call for the new project that poses any sort of unique challenge,” he says. “Seeing our team pursue solutions via ideas, design, logistics and technology is so rewarding. I get to review that and help build a company that is known for such successes and pursuits.”
When it comes to the work that Lopez and his team have been doing recently, he notes that there have been many exciting projects. “I cannot highlight just one,” he notes. “The team did an amazing job! We have done everything from stages and brand activations at Coachella, to some of the largest business summits in the auto world, to producing 4x music festivals from the ground up and many national and worldwide conferences and business meetings.”
Although the past year has been exciting as events come back post-pandemic, it has also involved a lot of last-minute planning, and Lopez shares that he’s looking forward to some normalization and expanding the new relationships in the coming year. He also believes that in-person experiences will have to continue to step it up in order to capture audience’s attention.
“One thing a pandemic showed us is that a 15” computer screen can never replace the live experience,” he says. “However, at the same time, people are becoming more mindful on the events they choose to attend, and attention spans are exponentially dropping in a media filled world. The future of event experiences will be more meaningful and impactful with a continual tie to social media as more brands look to capitalize on experience.”
While Lopez helps produce experiences for hundreds to tens of thousands of people with the Show Imaging team, outside of work he is busy experiencing exact opposite. He can be found hiking, backpacking and mountain biking in the mountains or road biking and running the coast.