CEMA Newsletter July 2022

Jess Bruns

Senior Manager, Global Strategic Events

Raised as the daughter of two US diplomats, Jess has had her fair share of international travel and moving. Growing up in an array of different countries and cultures, she had to adapt and manage frequent change, make friends fast, as well as attend many dignitary functions (aka events). Flash forward to her time at university, it wasn’t a surprise she earned her degree in business marketing and hospitality management and sought out a career in global events.

15 years later, as a Senior Manager for ServiceNow, Jess Bruns oversees global operations and execution of their strategic user conference, Knowledge. Her goals are to create events that deliver and showcase the celebration of ServiceNow’s customers, drive global consistencies, stimulate account growth, create and accelerate pipeline, and build brand affinity. She enjoys being creative and working in a fast-paced environment where every day brings a new challenge, collaborating across internal/external cross-functional teams and gets energized from being on-site seeing all the hard work and planning come to life.

Jess is currently based in Folsom, CA with her husband, two boys, (the eldest starting high school this year—yikes!) and two dogs. When not working (haha, funny) she can be found taking a class on her Peloton Bike or enjoying a nice book outside with a strong cup of coffee. She loves the CEMA community and is looking forward to seeing many friends at the Summit in a couple weeks.

Executive Profile

Ravi Chalaka

CMO and VP of Product Management

Jifflenow

Ravi Chalaka is the CMO and VP of Products at Jifflenow, the world’s leading software company for event meeting scheduling, management and reporting. He is an expert marketer in B2B SaaS, events, and enterprise software and IT systems with a track record of developing and executing strategies that enable companies or products to achieve market leader position and in accelerating growth. Ravi has MBA degrees in marketing and finance and frequently speaks are industry forums and webinars. Previously, Ravi worked as CMO or vice president at Hitachi Vantara, BlueArc, Neterion and Maxxan and held senior marketing positions at NetApp and Adaptec, where he was responsible for product marketing, product management, event marketing, digital marketing, branding and GTM strategies.

With over 25 years of experience, he brings the expertise for market driven transformation, faster growth, and positioning companies as a leader in their categories. As leader in marketing and product management, Ravi Chalaka has the unique expertise in developing compelling new products and technologies and marketing them by solving real world problems. His overall focus is to enable the transformation from using legacy and manual workflows with low ROI into highly productive process using disruptive digital solution that changes the way we work for the better. He loves to help and mentor individuals who want to make a difference in their work and the world. Learn More

Executive Profile

Anna Mader

Head of Creative
XD Agency

As Head of Creative at XD Agency, Anna leads a team of multi-disciplinary, award-winning designers across the agency’s Atlanta, New York, and San Francisco hubs — and she has not been afraid to shake things up since joining XDA last year. With over 15 years of experience in the experiential marketing space, including her time at the Freeman Company, Anna is a high-impact leader known for her vision, creative strategy, energy, collaborative approach, and deep desire to create the kind of work environment where people thrive. Her strong digital chops paired with a fearless passion for experiential storytelling made her a great match for XDA, which in the last year alone has grown in staff size by 63%. Anna was recently instrumental not only in several of the agency’s latest big wins, but also in the upcoming launch of XDA’s  refreshed visual identity and new brand positioning: Create Better. It’s a call to action to shift culture by creating it — bringing our best selves to the table to create better experiences, relationships, and worlds — every single day. Working alongside other senior leaders, Anna and team have dug deep to redefine XDA’s values and ensure the agency is actually living up to them — by adding a strategic management layer, deep training and coaching for staff, and even partnering with Ukrainian creative talent — it’s a commitment to create better creative work for our clients, a better workplace for our people, and where we can, a better world for us all. For more information, please click here.

Join us at the Make it Pop! Lounge by Impact XM at CEMA Summit to refresh, relax, and create pop-able moments to share with your friends! We’ve played on the popular design phrase, “make it pop”, to offer you bubbly bites, pop-able art, plinko prizes, and of course, we’ve included a photo-“pop”! “Pop” on over and check it out!

Learn more about Impact XM and visit the CEMA Summit registration page CEMA Summit  ‘22

Peer into the future during the 2022 CEMA Summit Industry Forum!

Join an expert panel of seasoned event executives as they explore what the future role of event marketers will look like in the face of rapid change and disruption.

As the “Great Reshuffle” continues, event professionals are re-evaluating their professional choices and organizations are reimaging business models. Join Julie Lynch, Strategic Events & Programs, F5; Colleen Bisconti, Vice President, Events and Experiences, IBM; Marsha Maxwell, Head of Events, Miro; Ben Nazario, Chief Growth Officer, MC2; and Mary Fehrnstrom, Senior Director, Experience Marketing, Workday, as they discuss the implications of this shift.

You’ll learn how the event professional’s role is evolving, in turn demanding new skills, responsibilities, and perspectives…and creating new opportunities.

Thank you to Travel Portland for sponsoring this year’s forum!

Colleen Bisconti Reinvents IBM’s Think Conference

In this month’s Convene Magazine, PCMA’s premiere publication on the event industry, Senior Editor, Jennifer N. Dienst does a deep dive with CEMA’s ’23 chairwoman.

For 20 years, Colleen Bisconti has had a hand in shaping IBM’s event strategy. Currently vice president of global conferences and events, Bisconti will soon add another role to her impressive resume — she is the incoming chair of the Corporate Event Marketing Association (CEMA), a wholly owned division of PCMA. She will be a keynote speaker at PCMA’s Convening EMEA, Sept. 28-30 in Vienna, Austria. In May, Convene sat down with Bisconti, fresh off the launch of IBM’s Think on Tour, who shared the ups and downs of producing a brand-new event and what she’s looking forward to in the year ahead.

Congratulations on kicking off IBM Think on Tour. How has this flagship event evolved over the past few years?

It used to be, pre-pandemic, that Think was our single global conference — our flagship client and business partner event. In 2019, when we held the last Think in person, we were in San Francisco with close to 35,000 people. Fast forward to 2020 — all of a sudden, we had six weeks and we had to turn it digital, and we learned a ton, just like so many other people in my position, in terms of, how do you really think about the value that you can drive digitally versus the value that you do in person? We learned so much in the first year — we had over 120,000 people join us.

In 2021, we had to do it again [digitally]. We started using newer technologies, we started looking for ways to have deeper engagements with a digital audience — people were tired, they had Zoom fatigue. We watched our average viewing time on digital events go from a half an hour down to 14 minutes, so we really had to rethink that program.

What’s different about this new version of IBM Think?

For 2022, we had put together a plan that took all of our learnings, both face-to-face and digitally, to get us back to a big global moment, to an event that would have worldwide appeal and that would generate some buzz around our client base. Instead of 30,000, let’s bring together 5,000 of the best. Let’s move our venue to a new place — Boston.

We were deep in planning mode and when I went and pitched the plans to our CEO and executive leadership team in January, I was met with dumb stares and quietness. Our CEO said, “The pandemic’s not over, so why do we think that bringing people from all over to Boston is a good idea?”

We very quickly changed our model. It became invite-only, it became complimentary, it targeted the right clients and business partners. So we put together a much smaller, more intimate plan. We kicked off a 14-city tour, starting in Boston [in May], and this model is actually working. It’s an invite-only model. We were hoping to get 250 people in each city and we have far surpassed that in all five cities [so far].

Tell us more about the tour concept for 2022 IBM Think — what is the purpose, how does the in-person experience work logistically, and what is different about the digital experience, specifically the Think Broadcast, produced with WIRED Brand Lab?

It’s this idea of bringing the content to you. It’s one event that we’re running 14 times. So, the consistency across the branding, the assets, the journey, the experience, the content — it’s all resonating, we’re actually creating buzz.

I shifted the [digital] strategy to be more like a news program, like the “TODAY” show. So if you tuned in to the Think broadcast, you didn’t watch what was happening in Boston, it just happened to be coming to you from Boston. It was very fast-paced, no segment was more than two minutes. We have two hosts we hired from WIRED magazine and we told client stories and had a little bit of fun.

We saw about 150,000 attendees [tune in] and the average [view] time was 91 minutes. That model totally shifted the digital behavior of people that joined us. We didn’t want to create a sense of FOMO, that wasn’t the intent, it was still to deliver high-value content, but do it in a completely different, unexpected way.

What are some of the challenges you see the industry encountering as we return to in-person events?

In the tech field, at least … we used to charge for these kind of events, right? So, there was zero appetite for people to pay to come back. Associations and other industries are different, but for the tech field, that’s how we paid to put these things on, by charging a [registration] fee. We need to do more focus groups, but I think that was another key learning, doing this complimentary — have we set ourselves up right for this, and is the new model moving forward? What will that look like in 2023?

How has being a part of CEMA benefited your career?

It’s been at least five years that I’ve been either a member or acting on the board. Even though IBM is this massive company, and even though we have over 300 event marketers, we still only know what we know. I wanted to find a way for myself and a couple of the key leaders on the team to be part of something where you could have these ongoing conversations, where you have ongoing education from outside our company. I started meeting people at CEMA and I was amazed at some of the conversations and the peer-to-peer exchanges and what I was learning.

When the pandemic hit, the bottom fell out of our industry overnight. And you had people within this industry that just said, okay, we have to wait this thing out, and you had other people that said, this is a huge opportunity to reinvent, to reach a much bigger audience. Kim [Gishler, CEMA’s executive director] and Olga [Rosenbrook, CEMA’s director of member services] did an unbelievable job of putting together education programs to help people through this. And it wasn’t just about how do you run a digital event, [it was] talking about mental health, how do you stay motivated, and how are people seeing success that maybe you can learn from.

What do you hope to achieve in your role as incoming chair at CEMA?

Education is so important inside IBM, but we tend to educate people on our products, like how is IBM changing the world. But what about what I need to do my job every day? Like digital event marketing, because we will always have a digital component? I would love to be a bigger force in the industry and use a lot of the connections that I have, the learnings that I have, to really foster conversations. That’s what I’m hoping to do in the second half of this year and into next year.