Andrew Pearson is the chief marketing officer at Webex Events (formerly Socio). Pearson is an experienced co-founder, sales specialist and marketer with an impressive track record of scaling SaaS companies, now operating in the event tech space.
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Talking with Pearson it is clear that he is a big advocate of using events to drive sales and market brands, this is something that he has been doing throughout his career. With leadership rolls across the number of technology companies, Pearson has also kept a sometimes parallel entrepreneurial journey going and describes himself as an event tech entrepreneur.
Pearson is a proponent of creating intuitive experiences through event tech, and has lots of ideas and opinions about how to do this. One of his core beliefs is that simplifying the options available in event tech and the way we access event tech is crucial. This is a trend that Pearson sees in the latest edition of Webex One, the company’s flagship event that attracts a large online attendance from the entire Cisco communications technology conglomerate, that Webex is a part of.
One of the areas that Pearson is particularly interested in is the idea of having a single source of content truth. When it comes to data about attendees sessions and even sponsors there is often a duplication of data sources and places where the data should come to life. By having a single source of content truth synchronized with all the places that data need to be displayed, this can save a lot of time and make the data management process much more efficient.
During Pearson’s time at Webex Events (formerly Socio), Cisco acquired Socio and brought it into the Cisco fold. What was a relatively small team, now has the power of a large corporation behind them. Pearson is reveling in this possibility and with an uncertain financial outlook for the next year sees this as a big advantage in the competitive event tech market.
Pearson is awesome monitoring closely how virtual event experiences are changing. Some of his insights include how virtual events really need to have fun moments and fun activations included in them, this helps tremendously with attendee engagement. He also sees interaction as the reason why attendees want to participate live, rather than on demand. He recommends all planners make interaction an important part of each event, and fully exploit it in their marketing to attract live attendees.
As always, we dive deeper into these topics and so much more in the episode, so click on the player at the top of the page to listen in full, or head to your favorite podcast app! Don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode.
