EVENT ABOUT IT: Event Marketing, Strategy & Business Growth

Most event teams are not badly run. They are badly wired. Three teams doing the same job in three different directions, and the event ROI conversation never actually happens because nobody owns it.

This episode runs a live diagnostic on that wiring. Ten real decisions event teams make every week, sorted in real time into executor thinking or executive thinking, with a guest, Sara Ann Straw, who has walked into fractured global event...

Every event on the circuit is running some version of the same program right now. Comp the badge, comp the flight, comp the hotel, get content in return. Suddenly the registration list has "creators" on it, and almost nobody in the room agreed on what that word actually means, or what they're paying for when they use it.

The quick answer: a content creator asks what to post this week. A thought leader asks what only they can say. An...

Everyone talks about the agenda. Almost nobody talks about what happens before the venue is even booked, or what happens to that content a full year after the show wraps. In this Aftershow, we get into the parts of event content strategy that don't make it into most conversations: how sponsored sessions actually get negotiated, why celebrity keynotes mostly fail, and the one connection that made an Olympic-themed keynote at Tableau...

Picture this: a dozen rooms, 200 attendees, a paid hands-on training session everyone showed up specifically for, and the Wi-Fi just... dies. Not for five minutes. For hours.

Turns out the culprit wasn't the venue's internet at all, it was a stranger walking the floor with a pocket microwave sucking up bandwidth. This week's guest lived it, owned it in front of her entire leadership team, and turned it into one of the biggest lesso...

The events industry keeps publishing research about Gen Z. Nobody thought to read it back to one.

So Megan brought her assistant Sierra Siebulrud to Cvent CONNECT 2026 for her first-ever industry conference — and her first major conference of any kind — then sat her down and read out thirteen published Gen Z stats to her face.

Some of them held up. Several of them did not. The ones that fell apart are the ones your agen...

Cvent just bet a billion dollars that presence, not swag, not badges, not brochures, is the rarest signal left in B2B marketing. They're calling it the presence premium: in a world where AI can fake almost anything, showing up in person is the one thing it still can't.

Megan Martin spent Cvent Connect 2026 in Nashville as one of only ten creators hand-picked for Cvent's first-ever hosted creator program, the first of its kind in the...

Most event teams are organized under marketing. But what if that's the whole problem? Aleksandra Panyukhina has been building events as a go-to-market motion for twelve years — and the difference between how she operates and how most companies run events is not a small gap.

This is the Aftershow — where the strategy goes deeper and the guardrails come off. We get into the architecture behind it all: how she thinks about ...

Most event teams are sitting on a goldmine of buyer intent data and handing sales a lead list instead. Aleksandra Panyukhina has spent twelve years figuring out how to close that gap — and today, she's putting it to the test.

Aleksandra Panyukhina is the Experience Marketing Director at Pixelz, where she leads FLOW, one of the most intentional event-led growth motions in B2B marketing today. She has driven millions in pipeline...

Innovation isn't invention. It's the question you stopped letting yourself ask. That's the reframe Diana Kander brings to this Event About It Aftershow, and it changes the entire game for event marketers, sales leaders, and growth teams chasing the next big idea.

In this deeper-than-the-main conversation, New York Times bestselling author Diana Kander joins host Megan Martin to translate her curiosity methodology into something an e...

The events industry has a curiosity problem. Attendees changed. Buyers changed. Metrics changed. And most of us rebooked the same hotel.

This week on Event About It, New York Times bestselling author and innovation keynote speaker Diana Kander joins host Megan Martin to diagnose five stagnant event strategy problems nobody in the industry is naming out loud, and the curiosity question that breaks each one open.

If you're building an...

Most event teams can't answer the most basic pipeline question. Steph Pennell built the framework. Here's the whole thing.

She googled the domain mid-call. Bought it on the spot. A few months later she quit ZoomInfo, flew first class to the south of France with no plan, and came back ready to build something from scratch.

This is the Aftershow. It goes deeper.

Steph Pennell — The Event Critic — is back for the second half ...

Your event had 2,000 attendees, a standing ovation, and an open bar. Cool. But did it drive pipeline? The Event Critic has thoughts.

Most B2B event recap decks look the same: great attendance, strong NPS, everybody had fun. What they rarely say is whether any of it moved the business forward.

In this episode, Megan sits down with Steph Pennell — The Event Critic — to play Pipeline or Party, unpack what large-format trade ...

Yes. She canceled Christmas. And she went to Waffle House instead of making Swedish pancakes.

But before we get there — this aftershow is one of the most dense, useful, and occasionally unhinged episodes we've done. Christine Martin is back, and we go deep on the things that didn't fit in the main episode: speaker management truth bombs, post-event metrics that actually matter, a tax crash course event pros desperately need, r...

Your events are being graded in real time by attendees who will never fill out your feedback form, never tag you in a post, and never tell you what they actually thought. They'll just decide whether they're coming back.

Today I brought one of them into the studio.

Christine Martin has attended, spoken at, and worked trade shows and conferences for 30+ years — as a tax professional, a solutions consultant, a road warrior, and no...

It was the last day of RISKWORLD 2023. The show had been the best one yet. Danica Patrick was about to take the stage for the closing keynote.

Then Stuart Ruff-Lyon got pulled from the show floor and walked, without explanation, to a room where the Chief of Police of Atlanta was waiting.

Two miles away, there was an active shooter on the loose. Four hotels on lockdown. Two shuttle routes stopped. Nine thousand attendees in the buildi...

Everyone says celebrity keynotes are out. Data says audiences want practitioners, not personalities. So why is RISKWORLD, the world's largest gathering of global risk professionals, doubling down on names like Adam Grant and Michael Strahan?

Because sometimes the data is right and your audience is the exception. And knowing the difference is exactly what separates an event operator from a Chief Commercial Officer.

In this episode of ...

You asked your speaker to show up. They did. You offered them exposure. They smiled and said thank you.

And then nothing happened for either of you.

In this Dynamic Dialogue After Show, Megan Martin and media strategist Beth Nydick pull back the curtain on the unspoken agreement between event organizers and speakers that nobody is formalizing, the myth of exposure as compensation, and what it actually looks like to build a media stra...

What do you do when someone steals your mic, your camera, and your clicker right before you walk out to a standing room only crowd?

You scream. Literally.

In this episode of Event About It, host Megan Martin sits down with Beth Nydick, former TV producer turned media strategist and creator of the Mic to Millions system, to talk about what actually happens when event speakers show up prepared and the event is not.

Beth takes us inside...

The Attribution Conversation Event Teams Need to Have with Their CMO

Most event reports are a PDF nobody reads. What if your post-event data told you exactly which VP-level executives engaged with your sponsor's content — by name, by title, and by intent signal?

In this Event About It Dynamic Dialogue After Show, Megan Martin and Florentin Ngabitsinze go deep on what event attribution actually looks like when it's done right &m...