The Experiential Strategist with Jenny Howard-Maxwell
The industry spends $128 billion on experiential every year. Only 23% of the people producing it can prove it worked. The Experiential Strategist is the podcast for experiential professionals who are done being measured by logistics and ready to be recognized for outcomes. Hosted by Jenny Howard-Maxwell, founder of the Edgucation Institute and creator of the Certified Professional Experiential Strategist certification, this show covers the psychology of experience design, the science of measuring behavioral and emotional outcomes, and the framework that changes how you work and how you are valued. If you have ever produced an activation that landed and still could not prove what it drove, this podcast was made for you.
Episodes
Why do some event professionals get compared on price while others become indispensable strategic partners?
In this episode, Jenny Howard-Maxwell takes us back to the toy catalogs of the 1980s to explain a challenge facing today's event industry: when everyone appears to offer the same thing, clients have little reason to choose based on anything other than ...
What if the most important KPI at your next event isn’t on a spreadsheet?
This week on The Experiential Strategist, I sit down with Dahlia El Gazzar, founder and Chief Ruckus Maker at Dahlia+ Agency and winner of PCMA’s 2026 Visionary Award for Digital Event Strategist. Google her and you’ll see tech. Talk to her and it’s all energy, emotion, and people.
We get into why...
If you own an event business and you've been in this industry 15+ years, this episode is for you. Jenny Howard-Maxwell breaks down why busy is not a business model, why a fancy new title won't change how clients price you, and the 2017 billion dollar acquisition event that changed everything for her.
Plus, the one ques...
If you're a planner stuck in logistics after 5, 7, even 20 years in this industry, this episode is for you. Jenny breaks down why the events market is completely saturated with the same title carrying wildly different skill sets, why that's making it harder for hiring managers and clients to know exactly what you specialize in, and the one thing that changes your position in this market: a designation that tells your s...
Ever watched a decision unfold in real time and just known it was going to backfire, but stayed quiet anyway? This week, Jenny gets personal about the hardest skill in event planning: knowing when and how to say no.
Jenny walks through three real stories from her 20 years in the industry: a headline performer that killed the momentum of an entire fundraiser, a mechanical bull that almost derailed a western...
Every event planner has a version of this story. You produce something beautiful. You do everything right. And then one detail, completely out of your control, becomes the entire verdict on your work.
In this episode, I'm telling you about the fifty thousand dollar, three story holiday event I planned for a well known brand. Fourteen foot branded Christmas trees. Live entertainment. A quiet lounge for gues...
Dax Callner has spent over 25 years building marketing programs for brands like P&G, American Express, Google, and Microsoft. But what earned him a seat on this show isn't the client list. It's that he looked at an industry spending billions of dollars every year and realized almost nobody in it could prove what their events actually produced. So he bu...
I dropped an F-bomb on this podcast for the first time. That should tell you how strongly I feel about this one.
Last week I moderated two debate series at Event Konnector, and one conversation got more heated than anything else on the agenda: how far the events industry is willin...
This week I'm joined by Liz Lathan, co-founder of Club Ichi, a social club for B2B event professionals with nearly 800 paid members in under two years. Liz spent 20 years in corporate event marketing at Dell and IBM before leaving to build Club Ichi with her co-founder Nicole, and she's here to break down ROE, Return on Emotion, and the five emotions her t...
Five people can watch the same event and walk away with five completely different verdicts, and not one of them is speaking the same language. In this episode, Jenny Howard Maxwell breaks down the moment that changed how she builds events for good: the six month project that got reduced to a tip jar and a slow valet, and the framework she built afterward so her work would never again rest on one person's mood. This is the story beh...
Jenny has designed activations for Bentley, launched brand experiences most people never get invited to see, and worked with some of the biggest names in the industry. On paper, she had made it. But more times than she wants to admit, she would watch a room full of people feel something real, and still have the whole event judged as a failure because one person walked in with a bad mood and nothing had been agreed on in advance abo...
You are never going to feel ready. Not for the certification, not for the career move, not for the conversation you've been avoiding. This week, one comment on a post that reached over 500,000 people asked Jenny the question everyone is afraid to ask out loud: "How do I know if I'm ready?" Her answer didn't come from a marketing playbook. It came from watching her 8...
Most event professionals can tell you attendance numbers. Almost none of them can tell you what an event actually made people feel, and whether that feeling was designed on purpose or just left to chance. In this episode, Jenny shares what came out of an unplanned fifteen minute call with Liz Lathan of Club Ichi, and why that conversation led her straight to return on emotion, the measurable framework behind acceptance, activity, a...
Every experience produces an emotion whether you planned it or not. Eight years ago I planned a memorial service for a woman named Mindy who chose me for a job when nobody else in that room wanted me there. I did not know it then but every decision I made that day was the framework I would spend the next eight years building. The pink couch. The world map with pins from every city her guests traveled from. The champagne with her lo...
This one is personal.
Jenny spent a year planning a football-themed Mitzvah. Custom turf dance floor. Stenciled logo. A smoke-filled entrance moment that made her client cry. Every detail intentional, every element designed to land. And it did.
Matthew Barney left the Coast Guard, bought a one way ticket to Seattle, signed a lease on an apartment he never saw, and built a career producing experiences for some of the biggest brands in the world including AWS, Delta, and Microsoft. He describes himself as a creative person who became operationally dangerous. The moment I read that I knew we had to talk.
I was standing in a former Denver Broncos airplane hangar in a gown, throat on fire, two major experiences back to back that weekend. And when I woke up on Monday morning I could not tell you what a single one of them did for the business. Not one metric. Not one data point.
Twenty five years in this...
You have been in that budget meeting. The one where someone asks whether the event was worth the spend and nobody in the room can answer the question. In this episode, Jenny Howard-Maxwell makes the case that events are not a line item to defend. They are an asset to invest in. And when you start showing up that way, everything changes. Your budget. Your title. The way your clients see you. Jenny shares the story of a $15,000 RFP t...
There is a title that has been quietly redefining what the events industry pays for and who gets the seat at the table. Experiential strategist. And if you have been in this industry for seven to ten years, designing corporate events, brand activations, and experiential campaigns, there is a good chance you already are one. You just do not have the language to prove it yet. In this episode I share why I held the titles of VP of Mar...
Most event planners are not hearing what the job boards are actually saying right now. Last week I pulled 12 real experiential marketing job postings from Google, Reddit, Versace, SKIMS, Vuori, and A24. What I found changes everything about how you need to be presenting yourself in this market. Seventy five percent of those postings did not require a degree. But every single one required the same thing: proven results. In this epis...
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