Creating the ‘I Was There’ Moment: Inside CodeSignal Beyond 2024

Sep 26

Featuring Brenna Lenoir and Katie Fairbank of CodeSignal

Brenna Lenoir is the SVP of Marketing, and Katie Fairbank is the Director of Product Marketing at CodeSignal. Together, they are powerhouses in the world of experiential event production, leading CodeSignal’s most ambitious event to date, CodeSignal Beyond 2024. Both are seasoned marketing professionals who know how to deliver experiences that leave a lasting impression—whether it's with bold visual branding, unforgettable on-stage moments, or leveraging tech leaders like Steve Wozniak to captivate their audience.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

How Brenna and Katie conceptualized and executed CodeSignal Beyond 2024, turning it into the company’s largest event ever.
The strategic use of theater space to create a Steve Jobs-like moment for their product launch.
The role of creative branding, including the “space” theme and the introduction of Cosmo the Space Corgi, in creating a cohesive and engaging event.
How teamwork and a clear division of roles allowed them to pull off simultaneous event components, such as a live website launch and influencer marketing.
The importance of clear goals, meticulous planning, and trusting your gut in delivering large-scale events.

In this episode…

Brenna Lenoir and Katie Fairbank of CodeSignal join the Solution Seekers Podcast with Paige Buck to discuss the journey of producing CodeSignal Beyond 2024, the company's biggest event yet. Tasked with creating a monumental moment, Brenna and Katie focused on curating an experience that would be remembered—starting with a theater venue inspired by Steve Jobs’ iconic iPhone launch. This decision set the tone for the event, reinforcing the gravity of their product launch and helping CodeSignal achieve three key goals: filling the room, engaging the right people, and generating social media buzz.

The event was infused with creative elements, from the space-themed branding to the playful inclusion of Cosmo the Space Corgi, all designed to make attendees feel like they were part of something special. Brenna and Katie share how they navigated the pressure of coordinating a live event with multiple moving parts, including a simultaneous website launch and influencer marketing. They attribute much of their success to a strong team culture, which allowed them to divide roles effectively and ensure everyone knew their part in making the event a success.

Brenna and Katie emphasize the importance of setting clear goals from the start and staying focused despite inevitable distractions or scope creep. Their leadership, combined with a deep understanding of brand identity and audience engagement, resulted in an event that not only met but exceeded expectations. With over 100,000 signups for CodeSignal’s new product and significant media attention, they’ve proven the lasting power of a well-executed live experience.

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Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Kennedy Events.

Kennedy Events creates stress-free conferences and events, providing expert management and design for all your corporate event needs—from in-person to hybrid and virtual events.

To learn more about our services, visit our website at www.kennedyevents.com and schedule a consultation today to find out how we can guide you in making your event successful.

Transcript

Paige Buck [00:00:02]:

Okay. Welcome to the Solution Seekers podcast. I'm your host, Paige Buck. Past guests have included Julie Liu of Avepoint, Shay Sabolski of Adobe, and Mallory Schlossberg of Google. My guests today are Brenna Lenoir and Katie Fairbank. Brenna is SVP of marketing and Katie is director of product marketing at CodeSignal. Together and with some help from their teammates, they were tasked with producing the company's largest event to date. Brenna and Katie, welcome.

Brenna Lenoir [00:00:33]:

Thank you.

Paige Buck [00:00:34]:

We're happy to be here. Yeah, very excited to have you both here. And so earlier this year, you hosted code signal beyond 2024. It was your largest event to date and it was a huge opportunity for you. It had some amazing visual branding and standout experiential components. So before we get started and get into the how and the why and the strategy behind all your, everything that went into it, Brenna, could you just set the scene for folks and describe what code signal beyond 2024 felt like and looked like?

Brenna Lenoir [00:01:08]:

Yeah, sure. So first year, my very favorite quote after the event was like, wow, I didn't know you guys were so big. And we were like, we're not. We just pulled up this amazing event. It was, as you said, by far and away the biggest event that we had ever done. It was in a theater. We had a big led screen. We hosted numerous sessions throughout, from our CEO Tigrin sitting down with Sal Khan, to having Steve Wozniak on a panel, to having our CEO announce that we launched this learning product, which was so new and so exciting.

Brenna Lenoir [00:01:42]:

And it just, it went so well. It was such a fantastic day. We had a swag wall out front and a really fun picture booth, vip reception upstairs. And it was, it was beyond, it was in the name.

Paige Buck [00:01:55]:

Nice. Nice. Katie, what was it like for you all to conceptualize this experience? How did you get to what Brenna just described?

Katie Fairbank [00:02:05]:

Yeah, so it was, it was a real process. I think our initial inspiration actually came from when Steve was not Steve Wozniak. Steve Jobs announced the iPhone. We wanted it to feel like an experience where you were that person that was in the room when it happened. And so we started really with, we know this wants, we want this to be on a stage. And from there we really tried to think through how can we make this engaging and how can we make this something that people will remember and want to post about and share about and really just make it experiential. So we leaned really hard into creating an environment where when you walk in, you know that you are somewhere special. We ended up using a space theme throughout the event.

Katie Fairbank [00:02:51]:

That was really cool. It was partially because our little AI mascot and our product, Cosmo, is a space corgi. Adorable. But also, it ties into this idea of beyond. You're going beyond where you've been before. And so we really leaned hard into the concepts that we wanted to share there and how we could make it feel like you were living that experience as you attended the event.

Paige Buck [00:03:16]:

Wow. And so you just mentioned you felt like you wanted it to be on a stage. You chose a theater with built in seating. You could have gone in a different direction. You could have chosen a blank space and built out a stage and seating from there. What made you choose a theater specifically? Brenna?

Brenna Lenoir [00:03:36]:

I was going to. We made the decision together. It goes back to what Katie said. We really wanted to have that Steve jobs, like, I was in the room when he announced a moment, and Katie and I toured a lot of facilities for this event specifically, but other events leading up to this. And we really liked the location of this event because it was right next to Moscone. It just had that San Francisco tech vibe. And when we were looking at options, it just felt like the importance and the set off fireworks moment of our announcement needed a stage with lighting and all of that. And it just felt really easy to see yourself sitting there watching that.

Brenna Lenoir [00:04:21]:

Whereas when we looked at other spaces and we thought we could build it out this way, and we even looked at some renderings of, like, cool vibes and couches and all of that, it didn't have that monumentous moment of, we are introducing something totally new and revolutionary and so cool. So it just begged for a stage. And Katie, what was your. I know you and I spent so much time looking at different things. What was your experience in making that decision?

Katie Fairbank [00:04:48]:

Yeah, I remember everybody cautioned us, they were like, this is a big theater to fill. Are you sure you want to do this? This is a lot of space. If you go with the stage, like, you just can't work with the space as much as you do with other more open spaces. But really, it came back to, we're creating a moment here. We're creating that iPhone moment, and it needs a stage, especially in the tech industry. You know, you associate these big announcements with these stage presentations. We still see it today with OpenAI and what they're doing. And so when we walked on that stage, when we were touring venues, it was, like, sold.

Katie Fairbank [00:05:24]:

There's no other magic like seeing something unveiled on this stage we can work so much with. To Brenna's point with lighting, with audio, with all of the experiences, and really drop people into this moment where they're not gonna be distracted and feel like they're in a basketball gym or whatever. It's really a moment where you focus exactly on this big announcement and it feels monumental. As Brenna said.

Paige Buck [00:05:50]:

Yeah, yeah. It just. It helps me appreciate that you could see that you would have to you a goal of captivating people, that you would. That you would have to achieve that goal for it to work in a theater space. But then some of the work is done for you. With the seating, you know, arranged the way that it is and raked, you know, raked stadium seating. You've got everybody's attention in one direction and maybe. Maybe the absence of some of the laziness that can come with the other spaces.

Paige Buck [00:06:22]:

Right now I'm just like lounging in this chair. I'm going to hang back by this tall. By this tall table and hang out on my phone the whole time. You've done your job. The theater is like supporting you and getting everyone's attention. Yeah, yeah. How did the concept of code signal beyond and the. You mentioned the space theme, Katie, fit into your overall marketing and brand strategy? I said Katie's name, so I'm calling Katie again.

Katie Fairbank [00:06:51]:

I was just gonna say, brenna, do you want to take this one first? No, I speak to it though. But so, as I mentioned, one of the big things we were announcing was our big learning product. And in this learning product, there's the cute little Cosmo, the space Corgi. And so space was kind of went hand in hand with that. It really helped lend credibility to what we were launching and make you remember what we were launching and the core of the message that we were trying to deliver. We also had a little fun along the way, though, of dropping hints of what was to come. So, for example, we had a photo station where you walked in at the beginning and it was this cool moon and you could take pictures. And then afterwards we dropped our space Corgi in so you could take pictures with Cosmo.

Katie Fairbank [00:07:35]:

And so it was this fun thing for them, for attendees to walk in and be like, huh, space? Okay, where are we going with this? And then they see this big unveil and it all makes sense. We went back and forth a lot on we don't want this to be Space Mountain, but we do want it to be space. And there was a balance we had to strike with being too cartoony versus too literal. And I think we were able to nail it through, thanks to the Kennedy team, tons of different ideations and renderings and ideas and brainstorming. We found really the right balance there. Brenna, what would you add?

Brenna Lenoir [00:08:13]:

I was going to add to what you're saying. I think one of the really interesting things that this product launch moved us into was we were an enterprise b, two B brand. We were very much designed to be an enterprise b, two B brand with our colors and our graphic designs. And so this is a product that works for the enterprise, but also has a consumer offering. And so we got to really enjoy playing with colors and playing with the space theme and playing with this corgi to really shift people's perception that we're not just an enterprise brand. We do have that offering. We are built for scale, but we also have this really great consumer offering as well.

Paige Buck [00:08:52]:

How do you think about that in terms of your relationship to a corporate brand versus an individual or an individualized experience?

Brenna Lenoir [00:09:04]:

That was one of the most daunting things of this product line, even more than the event we knew, especially once we met you all, we could pull that off. But the question always became, what does our website homepage say? And how do we present this in a way that speaks to both audience and has the, you know, the gravitas of an enterprise brand that's trusted and quality and consistent, but the playfulness and fun of a consumer brand. And it took us a really long time and a lot of deep discussion. We've got a great colleague named Natalie who was very much spearheading that portion of the journey. And I think we found a really great way to land the messaging by leaning deeply into what our mission is and to our brand values. And then, and we jokingly called it the extension pack. So our graphic devices and our color scheme for the consumer side was an extension of our core brand.

Paige Buck [00:10:00]:

Can you say a little bit more about how your mission and values guide you?

Brenna Lenoir [00:10:05]:

Sure. So our mission, I said this from stage so many times, it almost could have been a drinking game. But our mission is to discover and develop the skills that shape the future. So discover can be understanding what those skills are. It can be hiring for those skills. Developing those skills is developing a team that has those skills that's going to perform at a company. It can be an individual that wants to acquire new skills for their current job to make a career change. And so that phrase, which was core to what the business wants to deliver, really is a message that works for all those different audiences.

Brenna Lenoir [00:10:42]:

And once we started learning that, like, all the pieces kind of fell into place. And it's like, well, you can interpret that in all the right ways and we can take you in all the right journeys, depending on who you are.

Paige Buck [00:10:51]:

Nice, Katie. I'm curious. You can tell I'm not reading this question. It's occurring to me as you were speaking about all of this. You're doing a big, like, you know, a big web upgrade or relaunch and rollout simultaneous to this event. You have a lot of stakeholders in the room. There's just so much happening simultaneously. How do you and your team keep your heads, keep your feet?

Katie Fairbank [00:11:24]:

That's debatable. Zero out of ten would recommend. Just kidding. It was a lot to take on and we knew the whole point of this was to launch this new product, so we knew there was going to be a lot to go into it beyond the event as well. And so what we really had to do is give clear role assignments. We took a look beforehand and we divided our team. This is exactly where you're focused on site. At the event, you group, you are focused entirely on website.

Katie Fairbank [00:11:53]:

We pulled in some folks from our engineering team just to be on call for website support as well, on site. And then, you know, we had just clear designations throughout and we put together a little war room in the back where folks could stay focused on what they needed to and have access to web and show. We were even crazier in that. Like, in hindsight, I'm like, why did we do that? We decided to launch the website while the show was happening because we wanted the news to go out simultaneously. And so we just made sure we had space and designation for everybody to do what they needed to do and very clear marching orders.

Brenna Lenoir [00:12:34]:

I'm going to brag about Katie for a second because she's not going to. I think long before the event started, it was such a daunting thing. So to scope out all these areas as one person is almost impossible. So Katie came up with this concept of work streams and captains, and so she kind of described it a little bit, but every area had a captain that was empowered to make decisions that would come back and report to the group, this is what's going on. This is what we're doing. And so she just orchestrated this incredible team across product and the marketing team and our CEO and external contractors and designers and anybody else that we could pull into this and made them all work together so well. So everybody had the super defined area, but they knew who to lean on. And Katie, I don't know how Katie kept everything straight, but she did across all of these different work streams that were going on.

Brenna Lenoir [00:13:27]:

But it's an excellent way to organize when you have to get so many things done so quickly and everybody has to pitch in everywhere.

Paige Buck [00:13:37]:

From the outside. I see a lot. You know, I run a tiny company. You guys are working for a much bigger company, even if you don't think you're that big. It's impressive to me anytime I see that somebody is empowered to do what you just described Katie doing. So I think that's a lot of credit to your company, to your culture, to your leadership that you were able to do that. Because I have been in the staff office of a conference where no one thought to inform anyone that they were going to do a big product rollout. And the engineers, like, a dozen of them, are coming in and being like, we need this conference table.

Paige Buck [00:14:12]:

Like, for what? Oh, no, there's other business taking place here. Like, how are we. How are we even going to roll with these simultaneous things? Like, it was a surprise to everybody. So the fact that you at least could foresee and plan and build all of that out and get everybody, like, rowing in the same direction, pretty impressive.

Brenna Lenoir [00:14:32]:

Code signal has a pretty special culture where we're all super empowered, but from Tigran, our CEO, throughout the entire organization, everyone will get their hands dirty. And there's no, like, why did. Why did you let this go so long? Or why it's like, nope, we're going to figure out a solution. We're all here together to solve it. The success of the event is the only thing that matters.

Katie Fairbank [00:14:50]:

And I will say, too, like, it was impressive how the team rallied. It was truly an all hands on deck culture and experience where no matter what your role was, we were getting pings from everyone saying, how can I help? And almost to a point where, like, this is so thankful. But honestly, you can help by just going away right now sometimes. But it was good, and it helped us see when we did have something that popped up, we could schedule people to be, you know, on deck and know who was available to help. So it was, we do have a really awesome culture where nobody is too high up or too busy to pitch in when we have something big going on.

Paige Buck [00:15:27]:

Wow, that is really impressive. Brenna, you had a lineup of bold faith leaders in tech. You touched on Steve Wozniak and Sal Khan. How did you identify and get the right people in the room?

Brenna Lenoir [00:15:40]:

Yeah, great question. That's actually probably a better Katie question.

Paige Buck [00:15:44]:

All right, I'll let Katie answer.

Brenna Lenoir [00:15:45]:

I will start off by saying, we all set Katie up by just saying. We knew that we wanted to have this Steve Jobs moment without the brand of Apple and without Tegren being recognized as the Steve jobs that we all know, one day he will. And so the first part of the strategy is we need some big names to get. We need to fill the room. And I think this is a really great thing for anyone that's throwing an event where you're like, we don't have all these things. You put some money behind big names and get them in. But Katie works tirelessly with so many agencies, so I will let her answer that part of the question.

Katie Fairbank [00:16:23]:

Yeah, I think one of the things that we did well with this event is we were really clear on our goals. We knew we had three goals. We needed to fill the room. We needed to fill the room with the right people, and then we needed people to post about it afterwards. We needed it to be shared. And so with those three very clear goals in mind, we were able to kind of back into the speakers that make sense for us. We explored a ton of different people that are real tech leaders. We knew that we wanted to fill the room with engineers, and so we needed to tap into the brands and the speakers that engineers.

Katie Fairbank [00:16:55]:

Engineers would care about most. And so that's where Steve Wozniak really came up. And we actually, one of our customers is Reddit. And so we sourced the CTO of Reddit, and we knew we were on the right track when our internal head of engineering was like, these are the two people that I nerd out. Like, I cannot wait to meet these people. And so we're like, okay, this is good. And then Sal Khan made a ton of sense for uS, too, because he's really a Pioneer in the Industry and where we're headed. So thinking about our audience as engineers and then partially Media as well, we knew that that was a nice Just Group to bring Together that would give Everyone something to talk about to the Media Point.

Katie Fairbank [00:17:38]:

We also invited, our panel moderator was somebody from Fortune, and so we invited her to lead that panel again to make sure that they would have something that they wanted from this. So that third goal of going Viral would be in better shape after the event. I will say, in talking to a lot of different speaker agencies, a lot of people had warned against some of the speakers that we were looking at hiring, saying, they're great. They're big names, but they're not really great speakers on stage. But we were really clear on our goals from the start, where you know what? That's great. We want really good speakers on stage, but the most important thing to us is that they're going to bring people to the event. And we know that the people we decided on ended up being great speakers, but also could drive that traffic that we needed. It was a big lever for us to fill the room to get the right people on stage.

Paige Buck [00:18:32]:

Yeah. All right, now, this is definitely for Brenna. What was it like for you to be on stage during the event, to feel like you were hosting this thing?

Brenna Lenoir [00:18:42]:

Terrifying. It's absolutely terrifying. I was saying, you know, I think Tegren had the hardest job because he had so many cues to hit and he had a live demo to produce and all of that. I think Michael and I had the second hardest job because we didn't get to go on and just be ourselves and answer questions. Like, we had to hit cues and pronounce people's names correctly and set the pace and the energy and all of that. And so every time we walked off stage, I was like, okay, it's almost like, check the box in that little segment.

Katie Fairbank [00:19:08]:

It's done.

Paige Buck [00:19:11]:

And then, like, shake off the adrenaline.

Brenna Lenoir [00:19:12]:

Shake it off.

Paige Buck [00:19:13]:

Yeah.

Brenna Lenoir [00:19:13]:

And then at the same time, it was so fun. It was so fun to look into that audience. It was so fun to be on the stage with Michael. I joke with him now, like, when we ever redo all hands, I'm like, okay, you gotta be my co mc. Like, prepared for life. So both terrifying, but also really fun.

Katie Fairbank [00:19:32]:

What did Michael call it? He called it what? It's a concept that I have two fun.

Brenna Lenoir [00:19:36]:

So it's not fun while you're doing it. It's fun while it's done, like working out or hiking or something. Like you're really glad that you did it when it's over.

Paige Buck [00:19:44]:

Type two fun is also. Isn't that the sort of fun where you get into, like, a. Such a focused space that it can almost be meditative? That might not be true on stage.

Brenna Lenoir [00:19:53]:

Maybe meditative on stage or like, dissociating.

Paige Buck [00:20:01]:

Oh, gosh. I'm also really curious. You started touching on, Katie, the three things you were really clear on, which. Full credit to you. We've produced events with a lot less clarity on outcomes than that. Fill the room, fill it with the right people, get them to post about it. Is that right?

Brenna Lenoir [00:20:19]:

Yeah.

Paige Buck [00:20:20]:

So we're going to shift gears a little bit and talk about return on investment. I feel like every event professional is desperate to measure this, and yet every event seems to demand a different metric for success. You had outstanding attendance figures, you had the people you wanted in the room. But besides these three things, how were you thinking about how you would measure the success of code signal beyond? Katie, start us.

Katie Fairbank [00:20:50]:

Thank you. So this launch was unique in that, as Brenda mentioned, it was more of a B two C product. And so one clear way we could measure the success of the event was the number of people who signed up to use the product. And we were really excited because we saw, of course, an initial spike after the event, but then long term momentum, too. And some of the things that we did well at the event that in hindsight were like, oh, we should have done more of that was by building relationships with influencers that then attended. And then they got live footage from the event that they could post and they could share. And that's something that we could use over the long tail as well. So it was the initial event spike, but something that we could repost and continue using to drive those signups.

Katie Fairbank [00:21:34]:

So within six months of the event, we had over 100,000 signups for our new product. So not too shabby. We're pretty pleased with that. Um, you know, still ways to go on measuring the exact ROi, especially with a new product launch. You play with pricing a little bit and discounts, and so we're still adjusting and figuring all of that out. But signups was a really clear outcome for us. We also looked at the media attention we got, and we got some recognition in key media outlets, which then built our brand credibility, built us up as a player in the b two b two c space that we were entering, and just, yeah, helped us build relationships with folks outside of our traditional b two b domain. So that was really good, too.

Katie Fairbank [00:22:16]:

Brenna, what else would you highlight for outcomes from the event?

Brenna Lenoir [00:22:20]:

Well, you know, I just page, I. Like all marketers, it's hard to prove hard ROI of an event. And I think that's because events are essentially a brand moment and a demandgen play. They're never just demand gen. And so if you're looking for immediate results, you may not see what you're looking for. And I think it's a problem with measurement more than it's a problem with an event. So if you do not have multi touch attribution where you can follow over time what people engage with, you know, did they start with a piece of online content and come to the event and then visit your website and then attend a webinar? If you're just looking at one piece in isolation, it's never going to show you the true picture. So I think you need to look over time and how long is going to be dependent on your sales cycle, and it's going to be dependent on things like what is the average amount of touch points that you get and what is the complexity of those touch points.

Brenna Lenoir [00:23:16]:

Do you have an audience that only engages with digital. Do you have an audience that only engages with in person events? One really interesting thing Katie and I have done quite a few times is if you look at a closed one deal, especially a large enterprise deal, and you can map back all the touch points. And if you can do that for a handful of them, sometimes it's very manual, sometimes you have systems that are sophisticated enough, you can start to see patterns in that. And one of the patterns is that there's generally an event, there's generally an in person event that somebody has attended to along the journey. So I think the way we measure events that we just do it right after, and it's these like, attendance and like, how many people converted right away, does not allow an event to really prove out its true long term value.

Paige Buck [00:24:06]:

Yes, Bren, I'm going to clip what you said. Every member of my team listens to this for that moment right there, because I think that's something we all struggle with. And then, Katie, I'm curious to hear from you as well, like whether you are empowered internally to set up the tools and the systems and get agreement on that success, that both the soft anecdotal piece where you map back over time versus the hard data, and is everybody in agreement in alignment about how we'll measure that success?

Katie Fairbank [00:24:47]:

Yeah, I think we're pretty fortunate in that we have a really strong ops team that helps us drive a lot of that process and manage those conversations. So we are very much a data driven organization with a lot of resources and tools that we lean on to measure the success. The other thing I was going to say, it's interesting because, like, one of the most annoying questions, I think, to Brenna's point after an event is what's the lead list? It's like, okay, that's important. We need to follow up on everybody that attended. But we often forget about customer relationships, too. And we were just looking the other day at our customer data, and the number one driver of customer renewals and expansion engagements was beyond. And so this is a huge opportunity for you to nothing, only drive new business, but maintain your existing business as well. And so it is important to do that, look back and see who did we engage with and what relationships were we able to build, not just whose badge did we scan and who took a photo at the photo booth? And so we do have a lot of tools and people to help us drive that kind of insight.

Brenna Lenoir [00:25:52]:

I will add one more metric to this employee morale. I think everyone coming into that room and seeing the giant led screen and the signage outside and the experience of it, and we had Cosmo cookies and all kinds of great swag. And employees came away just on a high of being together and being in that environment. Like, look at this company we work for. And that's never going to make an ROI sheet, but it's such an important moment for team members to just feel the brand and feel connected and feel really proud to have been a part of something.

Paige Buck [00:26:30]:

Oh, yes, you absolutely just jumped right into the question I was going to ask about.

Brenna Lenoir [00:26:34]:

I'm sorry.

Paige Buck [00:26:35]:

No, it's perfect. Secondary or ancillary benefits of executing an event. And when somebody walks in and was like, heck, yeah, I work for code signal, check us out.

Brenna Lenoir [00:26:44]:

Yeah, yeah.

Katie Fairbank [00:26:46]:

We also, I will say this was kind of a late thing for us, but we had this epiphany. We're like, oh, we can brand the outside of this building. We're essentially getting free billboard advertising in downtown San Francisco. Why would we not take advantage of that? So we really tried to maximize all of our opportunities to make an impact at the event and at the venue, whether it was for attendees or people passing by.

Paige Buck [00:27:10]:

Did you go back and get, like, traffic data? Like, I want to know how many people passed by that sign.

Brenna Lenoir [00:27:15]:

We're data driven, but apparently not that data driven.

Katie Fairbank [00:27:18]:

We draw the line somewhere.

Paige Buck [00:27:21]:

But that touches on something you talked about, Katie, you've got an excellent ops team. You're building tools that are built to measure some of the things you want. Were there tools you had to put in place to track the things you wanted to track? Did you, were you thinking through that with your product and ops teams beforehand?

Katie Fairbank [00:27:42]:

That's a good question. So we very much so did not want to invest in new tools for an event. We know that event systems can be very expensive and this is a once a year event and we didn't want to pay a bunch of money that we would use one time and then maybe dust off a year from now. So we were very dedicated to using tools that we had to run the event. So was it the most efficient process? Maybe not, but it was very cost effective for us. So we leveraged tools like Marketo to drive all of our registration, all of our emails, all of our advertising. We use good old Google sheets for collaborative tracking for invites and we used, yeah, the tools at our disposal we had already set up in advance. Luckily our, um, multi touch attribution models and all of our tracking from the campaign, so we just had to pull that in from Salesforce.

Katie Fairbank [00:28:36]:

So that was done and set up in advance. But we spent quite a bit of time talking about tools and do we need to invest in tools? And decided, no, let's. Let's leverage what we have. And it worked out quite well for us, I know, for not necessarily for everybody event. Um, would it have worked? But for us it was good.

Paige Buck [00:28:52]:

Did Marketo and Salesforce work for you in terms of like, mapping back to who posted and who took a photo and those things or.

Katie Fairbank [00:29:00]:

That's a good question. So mapping back to who posted and took a photo? No, but we do have a social listening tool for that. Marketo and Salesforce really helped us with the overall registration, tracking the source for the registration and then seeing through any opportunities that closed from there on out.

Paige Buck [00:29:18]:

Brenna, was there something you wanted to add to that?

Brenna Lenoir [00:29:20]:

Just agreeing? Yeah, I mean, we had a team of people that figured out how to make that work and I think if you don't have a strong ops team, we have a super savvy digital marketing person that did some magic in the reservation system when it was going wonky. So it was not without its challenges. But we did make it work and we saved a lot of money on more sophisticated tools. Yeah.

Paige Buck [00:29:47]:

Well, it sounds like what you've had was already reasonably sophisticated and you knew and you had sophisticated folks who could like bend it to their will.

Katie Fairbank [00:29:56]:

Some wizard.

Paige Buck [00:29:58]:

Yeah, I think often like a much wiser choice than like, let's just bolt on another tool.

Brenna Lenoir [00:30:05]:

Come with its own integration challenges.

Paige Buck [00:30:07]:

Yes, yes. Yeah. And then you're getting like further away from your core focus and your core. Your core tools. Yeah. So what has, what have some of the big takeaways been? What are some of the big surprises? But when you look back, what still excites you about this? Brenna?

Brenna Lenoir [00:30:27]:

I mean, there was a moment when I was like, are we going to pull this off like this? This is insane. And not just the event, but like, we were hosting the influencers and media and we had this vip reception and we were launching the website and as Katie said, like, we were literally waiting for a word Tigran was going to say on stage to hit go and was everything going to render properly? We had some stuff on product hunt and it just felt like, what have we done? We have just bitten off way more than we can chew. So I don't. Maybe this is a glass half full answer, but the fact that it happened the way that it did, that it was as flawless as it possibly could have been, that it was received the way it was, the last moment, was so nervous for it all, and it just could not have gone better.

Paige Buck [00:31:23]:

That's fantastic. Same.

Brenna Lenoir [00:31:26]:

Yeah.

Katie Fairbank [00:31:26]:

So if I think about, like, I'll do the Rose thorn, but. So our rose, to Brenna's point, it went off without a hitch. And I really was not sure it was going to happen. There were a lot of things that needed to fall in place, and it went well. And coming back to those three goals, being really clear on those goals, we were able to say, check, check, check. We crushed that. So I think that's something that went really well, was being clear on what we needed to accomplish and then driving towards that. Something that I think we could do better next time is we spent a lot of time agonizing over a lot of experiential details, and the experience was very important.

Katie Fairbank [00:32:04]:

If I could go back, though, I would have trusted my gut at the beginning because we ended up going with some experiential elements that, that we had initially thought of and then over thought and spent way too long of our short planning period focusing on that. I think my advice to people would be trust your gut on experiential, focus on the stage, focus on the message you're delivering, and make sure that the experience supports that. Um, and then the bud for next time. I think one of our key takeaways and surprises from this was the power of influencer marketing. Um, so if I were to do this over again, I would definitely engage with influencers again with one of our goals being going viral. Engage influencers and give them a special experience, focus on their experience, focus on their ability to spread the word for you and invest a little bit more time and effort there.

Paige Buck [00:32:53]:

And did you, were you, were you aiming at influencers at all, or was it that was just an afterthought or.

Brenna Lenoir [00:32:59]:

I actually think this is one of the beautiful things of the culture. And the way that Katie set this up, that idea came from someone that wasn't, like, spearheading anything. It was like, hey, it was our social media person, Claire, who's amazing, was like, I want to try this experiment. Can I have a small budget to do it? And we were like, I don't know. That's not part of the plan, but sure. And now we're like, we should have given more money.

Katie Fairbank [00:33:21]:

Yeah, totally.

Paige Buck [00:33:23]:

Nice. Oh, I love that you also, again, that you have this culture where somebody could say, like, I want to run an experiment. Let me. Let me be part of this. And you can expect. And then you have this lovely discovery that comes out of it. Yeah. So besides that, trust your gut advice.

Paige Buck [00:33:39]:

What would you say to somebody looking to produce a big product lunch?

Brenna Lenoir [00:33:46]:

Trust your gut covers so much. I mean, one of, one of the things that trying to find the right, and I know this isn't a commercial for you all, so I won't make it into that, but, like, finding the right vendors was so incredibly critical. From event producers to designers, we really trusted our gut on who to go with and we asked the right people. So we found you all because the venue that we went to was like, they do amazing things, you should go work with them. And we had someone else picked out, but we kept going, like, I'm not really feeling it, even though we knew them really well. And so trusting our gut and finding vendors where it's like, they get us, they get our budgets, they get what we're after, they know what our goals are and they're going to help us deliver from the messaging firms we worked with to Kennedy to support that we had on site. Like, just really going with people that are understanding you and, you know, in your gut care and are going to help you deliver. It was a critical piece of it all.

Katie Fairbank [00:34:49]:

Yeah, I would say, too. One of the, again, one of the things we did well is we were really clear on what we wanted to accomplish and it was very easy to have scope creep in there where it's like, oh, well, we actually really want to do this thing too. And we had clear alignment. Brenna was really good at driving clear alignment with our CEO and he fully supported. These are the three things we're after and we are in support of these three goals and nothing else. If something falls beyond that, we can tackle it later. But we do not need this event to be absolutely everything for everyone. We need to crush these three goals that we have.

Katie Fairbank [00:35:22]:

So I think being really clear on what you are there to do and what this event should accomplish is really important, too.

Paige Buck [00:35:29]:

Oh, you just really hit the nail on the head for me when you're like, this event is not everything for everyone. So often, again, like bolting things on or scope, scope creep or shiny object syndrome from leadership just makes these events.

Brenna Lenoir [00:35:43]:

What about this audience? And what about this person?

Paige Buck [00:35:47]:

What if I do $50,000 for my executive budget to make a dinner happen afterwards? And you're like, thanks, but no thanks. Yes. Yes. So good. Good on both of you for, like, keeping that alignment and, like, helping people, like, let go of ideas or put them in a parking lot. Whatever you had to do to do that. Genius.

Brenna Lenoir [00:36:08]:

Yeah.

Katie Fairbank [00:36:08]:

No can be the most important thing you say sometimes, and it's a full sentence.

Brenna Lenoir [00:36:12]:

Yeah.

Paige Buck [00:36:14]:

Amazing. Well, so, as we're wrapping up and winding down, is there anything I didn't ask you about your team, your experience, the event that you want to make sure you share?

Katie Fairbank [00:36:25]:

I don't think so.

Paige Buck [00:36:27]:

All right. And, Annie, I would love to just wrap by asking you each if there's somebody, somebody or something in your business interactions that you. Somebody that you admire that you'd like to share with our audience.

Brenna Lenoir [00:36:42]:

I'll just be cheesy and say, like, our team is my favorite. I am happy to come to work every day with them, and I know whatever challenge comes up, like, everybody comes together, and we have so many funny isms and little inside jokes, and. And one of the best things about this is how much we laughed along the way. And how many do you remember when or, like, I don't even know. Funny things that just happened during planning that we look back and they're like, they're a part of our team culture now. So I admire all of them, and I just love that, you know, great ideas come from everywhere, and everyone pitched in and did everything to make it successful. There were, like, there was no. That's above my pay grade, or I don't.

Brenna Lenoir [00:37:27]:

I was like, okay, I'm going to go figure out how to do this. So I admire the team.

Paige Buck [00:37:32]:

It's pretty admirable.

Brenna Lenoir [00:37:34]:

Beat that, Katie. Sorry.

Katie Fairbank [00:37:36]:

I don't know how I should have gone first. I don't know how I'm gonna follow that. We have to have some fun and laugh along the way. Events can be really stressful, and if you're not having fun with it, you're just. You're not gonna survive. You're not doing it right. I will add to that, too. We are a small team, a powerhouse team, and we don't have a dedicated event person.

Katie Fairbank [00:37:58]:

So that's why the partnership with Kennedy was so amazing and so important. But we also leaned heavily on former colleagues that do work in events and so thankful for their support. We have a former colleague who is at Servicetitan and pitched in to help us just figure out what's important in the event. Gotchas. Things to look out for, and that actually helped guide us to the Kennedy team as well. She's like, oh, these people look like they have their stuff together. We had floated a couple contracts past her and things like that. So thankful always for our network too, that can help us plug gaps and fill in expertise where we don't have it.

Brenna Lenoir [00:38:35]:

One of the greatest events people ever. Tenny, we love you.

Paige Buck [00:38:38]:

That's brilliant. That's brilliant. Well, thank you so much. I've been talking to Brenna Lenoir, SVP of marketing, and Katie Fairbank, director of product marketing at Code Signal. Brenna and Katie, thank you so much for joining me today.

Brenna Lenoir [00:38:50]:

Thank you.

Ready to Learn More About What the Kennedy Events Team Can Bring to Your Event?

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PAIGE BUCK

Paige Buck is the co-owner of Kennedy Events, a large-scale event management company based in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. Our team creates stress-free conferences and events with a positive impact, which allows our clients to resonate with their audience. Kennedy Events specializes in producing flawless product launches, award ceremonies, fundraisers, and multi-day conferences while keeping our eye on retention and engagement goals.

About Kennedy Events

Kennedy Events began with one goal in mind—to produce high-level corporate events with just as much strategy as style. Maggie founded the company in 2000, found her match in Paige, and in 2011 the two became official partners. Since then, these two resourceful and brilliant creatives have pooled their strengths to build one one of the most the most sought after corporate event companies in San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles.