The Northwest, where I grew up, is an easy place to live for resourceful people. You can basically live off the land. Being Russian immigrants, my parents took advantage of that. Their obsession during my childhood was fishing. Fishing bored me, so I came up with my own version of what is now known as [...]

The event marketing industry is undergoing it’s own brand evolution. We are now increasingly one industry with face-to-face and digital experiences converging into on event marketing experience.   Branding is the sum of all points of contact your audience has with your event. It’s the wait, or lack of a wait in the registration line. [...]

The Market has changed. Everything has changed.   For starters, we are seeing a fundamental shift in human behavior. This is primarily being driven by the Internet, and more specifically, Web 2.0 technologies. These technology innovations, coupled with a generational shift are redefining how we engage—especially in groups. The ability to organize a group is simple [...]

Since the inception of the face-to-face marketing industry, show organizers and event planners have been challenged to increase attendance at events. Targeting appropriate prospects, connecting with them and converting these prospects into attendees have been fundamental obstacles in the industry.   Give a little, Get a little? As the U.S struggles to bounce back from [...]

Is your event is a bit ho-hum?  Are there fewer attendees than in the past?  Have you ever caught yourself thinking, “I wish my event were more fun?”  Perhaps what your event could use is additional PASSION. This past July I attended Comic-Con International in San Diego (SDCC) to see what a show with lots [...]

One aspect of global projects that can be challenging to clients and supply-side providers is the Value Added Tax or VAT.  A value added tax (VAT) is a form of consumption tax.  From the perspective of the buyer, it is a tax on the purchase price paid by the consumer.  From a seller’s point of [...]

One of the most impactful volunteer experiences I have had is serving on the United Way of Dallas grant review panel.  The objective of this panel is to recommend levels of funding for the non-profit agencies that have submitted requests to United Way.  The process required approximately 30-40 hours of time over an 8-week period [...]

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I turned 50 gradually, then suddenly.  My beautiful wife of 23 years, sensing the potential for a season of brooding, peremptorily whisked me away to Paris for a long birthday weekend to celebrate the milestone everyone who knew me in my 20s jokingly predicted I’d never make.   We’d briefly toured Paris together years before, [...]

As the baseball season begins, I start thinking about the tradition and long history of the sport – as much as the game changes it remains fundamentally the same. I love Yogi Berra as an icon of baseball and its culture.  His ‘Yogisms’ are legendary as he always makes it hard to tell if he [...]

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I remember September 2008 like it was yesterday.   The innervating horror stories about the financial meltdown on Wall Street:  Investment house failures, bank mergers, historic stock market plunges, industry bailouts, and collapsing ponzi schemes.   All while mysterious new terms such as, “subprime mortgages,” “derivatives” and “credit default swaps” started appearing in the American lexicon. And while [...]

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