From the inside out: How event teams are driving smarter innovation

On this episode of Inside the Brand Experience, Invision’s Laliv Hadar, SVP, Brand and Marketing, sat down with Katie Batten, Director of Strategic Events at Okta, and Allison Barrett, Head of Global Events at Asana, to explore a question many experiential marketing leaders face: how do you build intentional innovation into your events program before it becomes an afterthought?

Katie shared how Okta's Octane Ambassador Program turned internal enthusiasm into a real operational advantage, and how one ambassador's AI idea changed the way her team works. Allison introduced the 50% Rule, a framework borrowed from Tennis Australia that challenges teams to intentionally reinvent their events year over year. The conversation also got honest about AI, where it actually belongs in a live experience, and where it risks getting in the way of the thing people showed up for.

This isn't just about efficiency. It's about creating the conditions for better work and better moments.

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Transcript

Laliv Hadar:

Hi everyone. Welcome to the Invision Podcast, Inside the Brand Experience, where we discuss trends and approaches that cut through the noise and allow brands to own every moment with their audiences. At Invision, the idea of owning every moment really comes down to designing intentional connected experiences across the entire journey. Not just one big event, but everything surrounding it.

I'm your host today, SVP of marketing here at Invision, Laliv Hadar. Today we're continuing our new series, Innovators in Experiential, where we spotlight fresh practical ideas shaping the future of event marketing. In this episode, we dive into how teams are driving smarter innovation through concept like event ambassadors, the 50% rule, and even some AI powered workflows. I'm joined by two exceptional industry leaders who are bringing these ideas to life. Katie Batten and Allison Barrett. Welcome to you both. I'm going to turn it to you both to introduce yourself. Katie, do you want to go first?

Katie Batten:

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Laliv. My name is Katie Batten. I work at Okta, and I'm the director of strategic events, specifically leading our team that does our proprietary events like Oktane, our showcase mid-year product launch, as well as our tier on global trade shows.

Laliv Hadar:

Awesome.

Allison Barrett:

Hi, thanks, Laliv. I'm Allison Barrett, the head of global events at Asana. We lead all of our tier on proprietary events and third-party events as well.

Laliv Hadar:

Awesome. Super excited to have you both here today. Let's dig in. So let's start with the foundation. Katie, I've heard a little bit about your event ambassadors program at Okta, and would love to hear you take us through a little bit more about it and what you were first trying to solve when you introduced it.

Katie Batten:

Absolutely. This is our third year having Oktane ambassadors, which is really exciting. And the idea of an Oktane ambassador really was born out of the need for more resources internally as well as always getting pinged from folks about how do I get to Oktane? Why can't I go to Oktane? How can I help? And knowing that I didn't have the budget to hire all these bodies to help support Oktane, I thought, why not utilize our own resources here at Okta and create these Oktane ambassadors? So we did that. And in our first year a couple years ago, as this being year three, we had an overwhelming amount of people that were interested in really jumping in to help. And the trade-off was I would out of my budget support them going to Oktane financially.

Laliv Hadar:

Nice. And Allison, building on the idea of doing more with what you have, which sounds like a running theme. The 50% rule that you've spoken about, talk to us a little bit about that. Can you explain what it is and why teams sort of struggle to put it into use?

Allison Barrett:

Yeah. So this is a concept that I was introduced to very loosely from Tennis Australia. So I want to give credit where it's due there. But it's really just a thought provoking framework where the origins of the concept, and this is an internal mandate that they work towards every year, was that we were really looking for a way for their events to differentiate against their competitors. So the really big tournaments that are out there. You can on paper say that they all look the same. You have world-class athletes coming every year.

But it was really about how do they stand apart and provide a really unique attendee experience every year. But really doubling down on the fact that innovation, and just re-imagining it and giving new experiences every year was going to be a way to really set themselves apart. So that's where the 50% concept came about was just how do we internally benchmark and/or challenge ourselves to reinvent the event 50% year-on-year.

Again, I just thought it was a very thought-provoking concept that I think we would on paper say that we struggle with wanting to do that also because of things like resources and budget, and the amount of time and effort it takes to reimagine or create new experiences. And I think that we're all, as event marketers, very focused on intentional experience design, but have we ever put and/or do we mandate in innovation or benchmarks like that into our planning process? It's just something for us all to think about.

Laliv Hadar:

Yeah. Yeah, that's great. It's a great point. And Katie, if we bring it back to execution, kind of flipping back to the brand ambassadors, one of the things that resonated is how it does unlock value from existing people and resources. And so hoping you can share some examples of how that's changed the way that your team executes and scales, and especially in terms of creating more human personalized moments at scale, which we know is such a critical factor these days, does the event ambassador program lend itself to that?

Katie Batten:

Absolutely. Not only was it an opportunity to really tap into these internal resources that we had that were hungry to get involved with an event like Oktane, but it also opened up a bunch of skillsets and subject matter experts that we, as the event marketing team that leads Oktane, didn't necessarily have. Because this is an all company initiative, so anyone can apply, whether you're on our legal counsel team or you're a solutions consultant, it's open to everyone. It really did offer opportunity to rethink how we were doing things, or there would be ideas that would come up once someone was selected as an Oktane ambassador or in their application process that really got us thinking, hmm, that person would be a huge asset to us.

And I think one of the ones that sticks out, there's that little thing called AI that is top of mind for everyone. And in one of our ambassadors that we chose last year in their application, they talked about how they wanted to create a Slack bot that would help pull together all of the questions that were asked repeatedly in our internal Oktane Slack channel, and curate those answers to automatically reply. So it wasn't up to someone on my team to go in there and repost the exact same answer over and over again.

And we thought that was a really great way to use AI and help it be more efficient for us and our team so that we could really focus on the 50, 60% that's strategic, that isn't necessarily needed to be repeatable all the time. Getting kind of rid of some of that busy work that really bogs us down from the day-to-day. So we were really excited for that. And it actually led to us rethinking our application process this year where we had a specific question where we asked applicants, how would you use AI to either make the processes better for Oktane internally, be more efficient internally or externally? And the amount of responses we got were great, and some really cool ideas that I'm really excited for us to implement this year because we just selected our ambassadors for this year.

Laliv Hadar:

Nice. So it sounds like you're raising the bar and sort of optimizing certain elements to make sure you guys get the right people there, right?

Katie Batten:

Absolutely. And I think the other piece to it is we are a small but mighty team. Okta has over 7,000 people. And we can only do so much. We can only be in so many meetings, we can only answer so many Slacks. So the more that we can educate our internal advocates and ambassadors, the more it can trickle down to those teams and get people excited. And then they can share in their social networks or help evangelize what we're trying to get across internally and externally, which really then makes everyone feel like they have skin in the game on making this event successful.

Laliv Hadar:

That's a great point. And Allison, so on the flip side of that, how does one apply the 50% rule? I think what does it look like when a team is deciding what to keep consistent versus what to evolve? I think one of the things that we challenge ourselves at Invision with is balancing sort of proven experience design, what we know works, versus introducing innovation in a way that's both controlled and effective but also innovative. That's kind of the point. So how do you think about that for event leaders to consider in their approach?

Allison Barrett:

Yeah. So obviously there's some basics to events that we just can't change. We need to feed people or make sure there's breaks. There's things that like tried and true, those are things that you don't touch. So I think we all need to take this concept loosely. But I would start with as well the things that are either the non-negotiables or the things that are part of your brand promise, or what your attendees really highlight and talk about year upon year, what they expect and depend on from you. Those are things that you probably want to put in a category of, we're not going to either take this away, or if we tweak something, we might try a little experiment and do it slightly differently. So I think you need to start with your attendees and feedback and surveys, and making sure that you're not all of a sudden absolving something that they've come to really be excited about for year on year.

But also I think that it should be about, as well in terms of your themes, where you're going, like you need to bake in what your company's priorities and goals are, and that being considered as part of whatever the new innovations you want to bring in and make sure that's all in alignment as well. But I think it's less about a number. So I know it's called the 50% rule. And I think if people want to lock in on a percent or whatnot. For me, it's much more about just innovation benchmarking in general.

I in my planning have never thought about X percentage, or how much do we want to change or redo? And I think it's just a nice little challenge of reminding you like, yes, you want to keep thinking about that, not recreating the wheel every year without really thinking it through or giving a different experience that your competitors or whoever might not be doing. So I think it's more about building it into the process, whatever number or benchmark you want to put behind it, so long as it's measurable.

Laliv Hadar:

Fabulous. And then Katie, back to you, and thinking through how teams operationalize the event ambassadors programs. At Invision, we're often partnering with clients to find those kinds of scalable, efficient innovations. How do you do more with the same or sometimes even less? And it's really just about a smarter approach or model. So building kind of repeatable frameworks, and still allowing for flexibility across moments. So from your perspective, how does a program like the event ambassadors, what makes it successful? How do you measure that? And what should teams keep in mind if they want to start something like it?

Katie Batten:

And I think this goes back to what Allison was saying about the 50% rule. Because I agree. I don't attach a specific percentage, but I am always questioning us, was that the best use of our time, our resources? Is there something we could be doing differently? Oh yes, we heard that feedback at that moment. How can we implement that sooner or differently for the next year?

And so when we created the Oktane ambassador program, we weren't really sure how to necessarily measure success other than we're able to do more and get people talking about Oktane more. And so it was kind of an evolution. So we got this ambassador program, we created an ambassador leadership council, which really were folks from our customer success team who I'd been partnering with in years past, who were my go to people. And they kind of just evolved into this leadership council that I could spit ideas back and forth with and whatnot.

And so as we're progressing in the first year, I think we were measuring success as it evolved in what's the feedback from the ambassadors? Are they feeling more engaged and more educated about why Oktane? What's the purpose of Oktane? What are they hearing from their teams as they go talk to their teams and get feedback from them? So we were measuring it in that sense. And then on site, because I was paying for them to get there, and we had some swag and some moments to celebrate all of their help and success, it was really great to see them really come out of their shell.

And for a lot of the folks, this was their first time to actually attend Oktane in person. I think there was this kind of soft measurement of seeing people so excited to be part of the largest event we do as a company and really feel like they were contributing to that success and were able to hear the announcement firsthand. They were able to meet with our customers that maybe they hadn't met with, or had just had exchanges through the community platforms or through emails. And so for us, that was a huge measure of success because a happy employee is going to more likely stay and maybe want to contribute more each year. So we measured that piece of it.

And then going back to how we evolved our application process and really trying to get more in depth on what could this person help to contribute to the ambassador program. Same thing with implementing now this knowledge-based test. Are people retaining what's out there? Are they understanding what it is? And if they're not, if we're seeing that there is a large amount of folks internally, especially, that just aren't grasping why, what, where, how, all of those pieces, it really makes us take a step back and think, are we not delivering this to the best of its ability? What can we tweak on our end to make it better, easier, more consumable? Because if our internal folks can't get a grasp on this, how are we going to expect our customers, our partners, all the folks in our ecosystem externally to understand what we're trying to deliver at Oktane? So it was kind of just a full circle measurement for us.

Laliv Hadar:

Yeah. Well put. And Allison, back to you. With that balance, it isn't always super easy. There's always a tension between what worked last year, let's not touch it, and then how to keep things fresh. And so how do you recommend that to help teams think about ways to do that, to keep something stable? And you mentioned earlier being very customer centric, and letting surveys also determine there's just some things that are sacred, and we don't want to change versus what elements might teams consider being innovative with?

Allison Barrett:

I think this whole concept is just interesting to me as well because it also just ensures we don't get into autopilot. So obviously there's things when you start to insert more innovation, there's a lot of things you have to consider. Number one being that you're going to fail. Some things are not going to land. People either may miss the detail or it was just, yeah, like I said, didn't land. And so you might hear about that in the surveys.

So I think too, if I was thinking about the different kinds of innovation and the calculated risk, let's say, for each of them, maybe something like, for example, from what you know is really sacred to your attendees, and you just want to tweak, maybe it's not a rebuild, it's just an addition or a tweak. So if it doesn't land, it's not going to either drastically change what their expectation is, so that it doesn't massively break their entire attendee experience essentially. It's not something that they're not going to want to come back for.

So it's just probably thinking about the calculated risk of each move and what category it falls into. So I would just think about it that way in terms of, hey, we want to completely try something net new, but this is something that is a smaller detail in their entire experience so we can test it out a little bit on a smaller scale before we think about bringing it wider.

So I think it's just weirdly thinking about different categorization and finding those comfort levels. Also, I think though too, with innovation, for most people, at least when I first heard the concept, it was like, oh, change your event 50% year on year. Wow, that sounds like a lot of work. I'm already exhausted thinking about that because it's a lot of planning and stakeholders and approvals and conversations.

So when we think about innovation as well, I don't know, some people use that t-shirt concept size as like how much effort is this, and to what expected experience or impact do we think it's going to have because we're all still operating with the resources we have. And so at the same time, we have to keep the lens of team resourcing and bandwidth as well. Because you can innovate for the sake of innovating and drive your whole team into the ground, of learning something new or changing a process or this or that.

I go back to the point of like, this is a loose concept. People need to define it and figure out what works into their teams. But I do think one of the other concepts about this that we talked about is you build your tolerance for it year on year. So it just becomes a part of the rhythm and the motion. And I think that's the win. That's the key part. I've just never thought about benchmarking innovation like that. And whether that's in a metrics that you show to anyone else outside of your events team, fine. But it's just for us. It might show up in a different way with attendee experience, survey results, et cetera. These are just the different things that come to mind when you think about how much do I want to innovate, what level, what will it take, and what kind of impact will it have?

Laliv Hadar:

Yeah, yeah. Those are great points. Reminds me a little bit of our head of digital and innovation, Eileen Page always says, to take innovation literally, she heads up our digital innovation team, but she always says, "Tech is not for tech's sake." We employ it, we use it. And so the same with anything in innovation, it's like in the service of what? What are we getting from it? So I love the idea of the calculated risk and figuring out what the impact may be in making that calculation, if you will, of if it's worth it or not. So those are great frameworks. Thank you.

Katie, you talked about AI earlier as well. So I didn't know if there's anything that you or Allison may want to share just around AI. It is such a... It's not such a buzzword. We're all really trying to figure it out and utilize it. And I know that our teams internally are trying to get more efficiency out of AI and help us level up to the more creative and strategic work and take away some of the day-to-day things. And so you talked about it earlier. Any other examples that you want to share either around AI or any just trends that you're seeing upcoming this year and beyond? So Katie, let's start with you, and then Allison, if you want to jump in.

Katie Batten:

Yeah. No, absolutely. And I think that that's where strategic partners like Invision are so key because you have multiple clients and they have best practices. They have things that they've been trying. They have their 50%, for lack of a better term. So you can help bring that to your other clients if they're kind of feeling stuck in the rut on trying to think about how can we continue innovating, what am I not thinking about? So I think that that's where partners like yourself are so key.

And when it comes specifically to AI, I think we're in an interesting crossroads on the event marketing side because there's a side of what can we be more efficient, what can we be more scalable with that really bogs us down day to day? And then on the flip side, events are so human. We can't have AI running an in person event. There is that humanity piece. And I think the more that we in our spaces lean into AI for that efficiency and to help us, and I look at it as a partner also, I don't look at it as competition or I'm not scared of it. It is a partner with me. I think of how much more we need to lean into that in person experience.

And that's a place where I look to innovate as well because what is going to make this person want to invest in coming to a conference, paying for the ticket, paying for their flight, leaving their family, leaving work, traveling to wherever, most likely Vegas, because that's where most tech events are, and really spending those valuable days with us. And that's something that AI can't replace. But AI can be that partner to the event marketer to help free up that space in their creative and innovation part of their brain to make those experiences more impactful on site. And then I lean on AI to really just release that part of my mind so I don't have to think about it and do those things that can bog you down.

Allison Barrett:

I think the way that I've heard it that's very well described is that AI can be utilized more for behind the scenes, backstage things that Katie was talking about, for our event teams to help automate, be more efficient and process. The things that maybe attendees don't see as much, but doesn't take away from the experience itself. But there's things like, let's say, for frictionless registration or check-in, great, all of those things. But it's not something that we'd intentionally add another layer in into somebody setting up a network conversation or finding a peer or whatever. And there's some parts of tech that can help do that, of course.

So I think it's more, for me, I would think about the connection piece of it. And the things that can be easily automated, the things that I've seen it used well for is summaries from events, like notes, things that we use it for too in our day-to-day that just makes that very frictionless of getting the content quickly.

But the piece is about connection, and it's not going to change, it's not going to replace any of that side of it. And in fact, people come to events, yes, they appreciate obviously tech, at least Katie and I, we work at tech companies. So obviously they're tech savvy folks and they believe in that, but also they're coming to an event specifically to meet and network with their peers, to learn something from other customers, or chat with other prospects who might be considering the tool, whatever it is. That's the piece of events that we don't want to take away from that and that promise.

So I think event marketers just have to be very strategic about where does AI get thoughtfully introduced into an event that does not take away from those other elements. But I know our attendees, I keep going back to survey. They'll certainly let us know, at least if we're listening and we're paying attention to what is really helping further their experience, or what might just be throwing in completely unnecessary roadblocks.

Laliv Hadar:

Yeah. Well, I want to thank you both very, very much for being on the podcast today and sharing your approaches and the way you're thinking about events. It was very insightful for everyone. So thank you. And to our listeners and viewers, tune in next time for another episode of the Inside the Brand Experience Podcast, and our continued series on Innovators in Experiential. So thank you.

Katie Batten:

Yeah, thanks for having us.

Allison Barrett:

Yeah, thank you.