MossWarner

We have much to be thankful for this holiday season - between all our Clients, Partners and Associates, and the good fortune to collaborate with so many talented, passionate and inspirational people.

If you’re planning a high-stakes corporate gathering in 2025, whether it’s a leadership summit, management conference or national sales meeting, it’s natural to focus intensely on the event itself. But in our experience, the right blend of pre-, during- and post-event communications can transform the gathering from a transient event into the centerpiece of a larger campaign. BEFORE THE EVENT: Prepare, inspire and build anticipation. Pre-event communications should enable attendees to do any preparation they can to participate. Communications generally begin 3-4 weeks before the event, with a “pre-read” or, even better, a “pre-watch or listen”, like video or podcast-like audio to establish context, conduct polling, tease or launch the theme, and provide travel and scheduling information. DURING THE EVENT: Maintain constant, full-on engagement. Not all messages need to be delivered from the stage. Other messaging platforms include physical signs, posters, banners, or videos playing on monitors in the hallways. Also, you can employ a “small screen strategy”, delivering content to attendees’ smartphones prior to a given session. We almost always use apps to facilitate interaction. AFTER THE EVENT: Build community and cascade the output. Post-meeting communications should continue nurturing the sense of community that meetings help build by keeping people connected, informed, recognized and empowered. A cascade campaign can be tailored across roles, geographies and business units, and might include community-building platforms and programs, campaigns targeted to specific audiences, and platforms for feedback, reviews and reporting. A successful meeting is more than an event and the most successful achieve specific goals within a continuum of contacts and conversations. Follow the link below to read more.

Wishing you a ghoulishly grand time with your Halloween horde tonight. MossWarner’s minis are ready to go. Happy Halloween, everyone!

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We're #hiring a new Senior Graphic Designer in Mission Viejo, California. Apply today or share this post with your network.

If you’re planning 2025 meetings during this fourth quarter of 2024, one of the best ways to keep your budget in check is make sure your production company works closely with your meeting planner on negotiating with the hotel or venue. Why? Because it’s far too easy to overlook the hotel’s production-related services, which can come with hefty fees. Here are 8 ways you can negotiate with the hotel or venue in advance to head off surprise fees: 1. Overtime Plan ahead for pre- and post-production time, get early access to plenary and breakout session rooms, and allocate time for load-in and load-out. 2. Power Mitigate the impact of a power charge by negotiating it up front as a flat fee and establishing the rate of any upcharge for additional power if needed. 3. Lighting Want control over the lights to ensure your big opening goes as planned? That often costs extra, so be sure to build that into your negotiations. 4. Rigging Most meeting venues charge access fees for the rigging that supports lighting and projection, but the cost of access to that rigging is something you can negotiate. 5. Hi-Speed WiFi Many hotels charge for WiFi access in event ballrooms, so be sure to arrange for full-time, full-speed WiFi if you need the bandwidth for your planned program. 6. Environmentals Placing signage such as event posters and banners in the hotel comes with a cost, but those costs are always negotiable as part of your larger contract. 7. Reader Boards Reader Boards, the screens outside each meeting room announcing the current and upcoming program, are often customizable. Make sure that’s accounted for, also, during negotiations. 8. Room Drops Packets with gifts and information delivered to each attendee’s hotel room can add up if you have a lot of attendees. Plan accordingly. Make sure you check these boxes in your production and budgeting plan. To make it easier, we’ve summarized them in a handy Tipsheet that you can download at the link below.

We’ve all gotten used to technologies that connect people in real time, all the time. But for leadership summits, management team conferences, national sales meetings and other high-stakes gatherings, face-to-face interaction is still the best way to create the engagement that makes strategies, campaigns, processes and initiatives successful. Of course, conducting a successful meeting requires, in addition to the direct costs, an investment of time, effort and expertise. Having produced successful corporate meetings for more than 25 years, we’ve learned some ways to optimize those investments. Here’s a sampling of two of them: 1. Establish what success looks like. Ask yourself and your team: When the meeting is over, what do we want the audience to know that they didn’t know before they came to the meeting? What do we want them to feel about the company, its business initiatives, objectives, its leadership and their fellow associates? What do we want them to do, or do differently, when they are back on the job on Monday? 2. Make it theirs. Develop content that is meaningful, accessible and empathic for the attendees. A good rule of thumb is to focus on three big messages that you want attendees to retain. Also, follow the “90/20/8 rule” – keep sessions less than 90 minutes without a break, change the pace at least every 20 minutes, and include some type of audience involvement every eight minutes. Click the link below for more ways to maximize your returns, minimize your investment and measure the results of your corporate events.

Success is in the air. Literally. One of our clients operates a customer collaboration and consumer research center where a functional kitchen and home setting is part of the immersive experience. For many events, our team bakes cookies on site just before the audience arrives to reinforce the feeling of being in a home. Research suggests that aromas can help attendees subconsciously absorb a uniquely memorable experience that will dramatically enhance their attention and recall. While specific percentages can vary by study, some olfactory research indicates improvements in recall ranging from 20% to 50% and one recent study by University of California, Irvine even reported a 226% increase in cognitive capacity. We often talk about immersive experiences that trigger multiple senses. Usually, it’s about the awesome advancements in technology that we use in imaging, lighting, audio and programming. But for all the impact those technologies create, recognizable scents – like the smell of freshly baked cookies – can be a key to more acute recall . There are many well-known examples of this phenomenon in the entertainment industry, notably Disney theme parks’ pioneering use of scents to make their rides, attractions, and even overall ambiance come to life and remain in visitors’ memories for years. Scent diffusion technologies, for example, are part our continuing interest in new technologies that excite all of the senses to create more memorable immersive experiences at insights centers and meeting events. We’ve learned some interesting things about this recently. Click below to read what we found.

The bar has effectively been raised for business presentation events. About a year ago, we posted about the grand opening of the Las Vegas Sphere, calling it "a stunning breakthrough in presentation technology and a harbinger of things to come in business." That precise application of the technology was on full display (pun intended) this summer, as an immense, awe-inspiring backdrop for a keynote speech by Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s President and CEO, Antonio Neri. Neri's keynote fully engaged the audience's senses to reinforce the messaging and the spirit behind the story, making good on the promise of what the Sphere's environment and technology can do. The entire keynote is worth a look, but here are a few noteworthy points in the presentation that we found particularly inspiring from a storytelling and production perspective: 19:00 -- Use of a video module contained in the Sphere screen 28:00 -- Floor-to-ceiling view of the live screen area 35:00 -- Presentation view showing content and camera IMAG (Image Magnification) This is only the beginning for how immersive, entertaining experiences at business events are setting the expectation of what your key stakeholders expect. And the last thing any CEO wants is to be compared unfavorably to the competition. Multimillion-dollar venue experiences aside, we are seeing more and more clients incorporate full-sized LED walls, rich motion graphics and surround sound to tell their stories and connect their brands and audiences in engaging and memorable ways.