An experience innovator, thought leader and brand storyteller, Kim Myhre’s also an event industry expert and Managing Director at MCI Experience.
In this video, with full transcript below, Kim offers insights from his global experience in event management to share how an event agency works and explain its role in creating brand experience events.
What we’re here to do is to understand what the client’s need is, to ask all the right questions up front so that we really break that down into something that we can reply and respond to.
Then to deliver something that achieves those objectives for the least amount of money and the least amount of heartache. That’s what all those skills and talents are here to do.
I used to use this example of how brand experiences create expectation within. I used to hold up my Apple phone and I would say, “can anybody tell me what this brand is?”
Everyone would say, “oh, it’s Apple.”
I say, “okay, we’re going to an Apple event, what’s the venue like?”
They would say, “oh, it’s somewhere cool.”
“Is it a young crowd / old crowd?”
“It’s a young crowd.”
“Are they in jeans or suits?”
“They’re in jeans.”
“Are we eating chicken or sushi?”
“Sushi.”
So, brands bring strong attributes of every component level of the experience. It’s not just the speaker, it’s not just the signage. It’s how the whole thing comes together in one choreography of experience.
That requires many hands and many different skills, some of them basic planning, some of them more creative, some of them are more client management but they’re all important and they’re all interlinked. Not one part of that team can successfully deliver the experience.
The entry-level roles in agencies like this are – there’s lots of different ones. In fact, we have an internship program that we run in the summer. I think we had someone here this summer working on our strategy team who’s studying Egyptology or something.
So I think there’s lots of opportunities to come in, in the strategy, in creative, account management, operation, and production. There are lots of different opportunities to get involved.
On the creative side, we’re obviously looking for people who have some talent in the areas of digital and technology, and understand how social media works. We’re finding lots of young people having terrific skills in that area compared to old guys like me.
Then of course, in the area of strategy, people who have worked in any kind of planning or research role where they’ve developed personas of target customers. They’ve brought insight from the industry and the different research. We use that to help design experiences that really focus on the very specific attributes and requirements of audiences. It’s been really, really important and we’ve got lots of young people coming to that area.
Then of course, the production area where, in the end it comes down to, as I say, chairs and tables, and drayage, and curtains and carpets. At some point, we have to set up these experiences. There’s a lot of support required in doing that and we use a lot of freelance talent to do that. We also bring in lots of interns and there’s lots of entry-level opportunities there.
Then, of course, there’s the whole area of account management. For those people who actually like dealing with complicated clients, and we have those, there’s lots of opportunities to get in and work with clients, respond to their needs, get to know them, build relationships with them and help interpret their requirements.
“Teamwork is really important. Everybody having the same goals, everybody covering each other’s backs, everybody understanding that in the end, we are working for the client. That’s really, really important.
You may like to draw things in a circle and the client may like them in a square. You have to learn to compromise and work with your client and build those kinds of bridges. I think everybody on the team here, many of them very experienced in this area, know how to do that.”
