Happy Saturday to the 4k+ readers of the Collab!

If you are a Seed to Series A/B Founder or GTM Leader (or those that collaborate with them), this newsletter is written for you.

Here’s today’s 1 Big Idea, 2 LinkedIn Posts, 3 Tools to try.

Let’s dive in.

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The Big Idea

AudiencePlus' Golden Hour Movement

JK Sparks is the Head of Marketing at AudiencePlus. 

AudiencePlus is an owned media platform, allowing businesses to put all of their content in any format in one place, one branded experience that is on their website, and get all of the data on their audience consumption habits around that, and how it impacts revenue and pipeline, and also build a known audience through that. 

Jared: Tell me about Goldenhour.

JK Sparks: Goldenhour was an event that we threw 2 weeks ago in Brooklyn, New York. And it was something that was birthed, really, in November. It was six months ago that we decided to do this. November into December, we were kind of planning, like, okay, how do we want to structure it? What type of content activations do we want? What type of speakers do we want? Who do we want to attend? How big do we want it to be? Where do we want it to be? All of that. And we announced it in January.

And so what it turned out to be was a gathering of 300 B2B marketers, all in Brooklyn, New York, at a venue called The William Vale, launching a movement in the marketing industry.

We had full access to:

• Expo Hall Area

• Rooftop and the Restaurant. 

• We also rented the Vail Residence, which is a two story penthouse overlooking the Manhattan skyline. 

We set up a broadcast desk and did a four hour live stream to LinkedIn. 

And every 15 minutes we cycled speakers, influencers, and they were basically doing flash talks, fireside chats, just dropping knowledge and information and their experience. It was meant to be highly engaging, quick, fast hitting, because we really wanted it to be like a virtual experience.

Typical events are boring.

The camera in the back of the room that streams a 30 minute or 45 minute presentation statically is so boring as a virtual attendee. 

So we were thinking, how can we bring in a lot of what we were learning that day together, but also make it a very engaging experience online where someone wants to stick around for at least a portion of it, and they can also gain a lot of information and knowledge out of it and value. 

So that's where the live stream came into place. So really, we did two events at the same exact time. And it was a lot of work, but it was so rewarding, so worth it. 

We had an incredible lineup of speakers, it was great.

Jared: Can you unpack your playbook for launching a great event?

JK Sparks: We see events as a critical piece in an owned media strategy. 

And so even before Goldenhour we did a deep dive on our analytics and our revenue and everything, and we found that 40+ percent of our opportunities and closed-won revenue was generated through our event motion. 

So that was both in person and virtual exclusive events that we were doing monthly. So those blended led to that type of outcome for the business. Also, Anthony started Pulse at Gainsight, which turned into a 5,000 plus attendee event. So he also knows the power of events.

So together we're just like, we have to do this, right? We have to, we have to build an event, and we don't want it to be the boxed lunch, boring, like expo hall tracks, just boring sessions, recycled content. 

We want it to be different to find inspiration for marketers. So that's the baseline of where we were. 

• Content had to be inspirational

• Content had to be unique (not the same talk tracks)

• Content had to have tactical takeaways and be actionable

• We wanted to encouraging belonging through community networking

The morning was inspiration:

• Colin Fleming from Salesforce talked about how he was an F1 driver before he was a CMO.

• CMO panels on how the CMO role is evolving and what CEO’s need from marketing teams in 2024.

Lunch allowed for networking as it was a communal lunch.

Following we had a networking activation set up with different speakers at the event to basically give an inclusive networking experience. 

Naturally, we wanted to make it so that even people that weren't really comfortable just walking up and talking to random people had cards that they could start conversation with around relevant topics.

After lunch, we came back for the workshop sessions which we broke down into 3 tracks based on different aspects of content creation:

• Production

• Distribution

• Outcomes

Instead of doing a typical ‘Persona based track’ we structured it in that way to allow folks to gravitate towards what they wanted to learn about versus their general persona.

So even if you're a demand marketer, you might be like, man, I want to go learn more about production, because I've been learning about outcomes for my whole career. I want to go figure out this production piece, and you can go learn from the best in the business that are producing great media, great content for their businesses.

So that's why we structured it in that way. 

We worked with each one of those speakers in a way that we made sure that the content was going to be actionable and highly valuable. We wanted you to walk away from that with a notebook full of ideas and inspiration and tactical takeaways that you could implement into your business. So that was the afternoon sessions, and then we came back together for a little bit more inspiration. 

And so we had panels with creators and other leaders that have kind of bridged the gap between, like, B2B and B2C. So folks like Alex Lieberman from Morning Brew, Amanda Getz and Melissa Rosenthal, great leaders in the industry, that have done B2B, B2B enterprise, like, all of that. 

And then we ended on a game show, actually.

We had Devin Reed host it, and we had Anthony Kenneda, Camille Ricketts, former head of marketing from notion, and Dave Gerhardt on a panel, basically. And it was like the newlywed game style. So Devin asked them questions that they didn't know. 

There was no pre-seeing the questions, and they had to write down on a whiteboard the answer to that question and then all hold it up at the same time and then explain their answer. 

So it was like the end of B2B marketing as we know it. And so it was talking about different tactics that the old playbook, it worked in the old playbook, but it's not working now, things like that. Right? 

And we had great audience participation. They all had to, like, cheer on their candidate, and they had, like, giant head cutouts of, like, their people.

So we just wanted a fun, engaging experience at the very end. 

We went to a happy hour really focused on networking, like I said. 

And then one of the key parts, too, is a lot of events have exclusive dinners or, speaker only dinners or executive only dinners. 

We wanted everybody to be included in our dinner. 

And so we had long tables set up in the restaurant on the roof, and we had a seated dinner with all of the attendees. And during that, we also had Lindsey Sterling who is an incredible violinist and performer. She's built a huge following on YouTube and has just an amazing story about audience building. And it was very inspiring.

So between her playing songs on an acoustic set for everybody during dinner, she was storytelling and just telling us about how she does this, her experience, how she got where she is. And it was just. It was really powerful and very inspiring, 

Then we went to an after party, and we just had tons of networking time and opportunity, and it seems like it worked. 

I mean, people have been posting about Goldenhour and how amazing the caliber of people in the room, the connections that they made. A lot of people have said, like, it feels like I walked into my LinkedIn feed. And there's all these people I've been following for years or, like, connected with for years, but I've never met face to face. And we were able to facilitate that meeting place and foster connection between the B2B marketing community, which was our ultimate goal.

Jared: Can you share any pipeline or revenue numbers that came from it or leading indicators of what's to come? 

JK Sparks: Yeah, we had meetings booked there. But I will say this. We were really taking a pretty hard stance against just selling and hard selling. 

We've definitely had a massive increase in demo requests, meetings booked, and opportunities being generated for a business. Now we're selling a B2B product. Nothing is closed yet. So I don't have a hard roi number yet. But the early signals of this after less than a week are really good, that it did generate impact for our pipeline and ultimately our revenue as a business. 

Something cool we did with our sponsors:

We gave our sponsors a camera operator and an activation where they could showcase their product in an engaging way. 

One of the examples would be Vimeo. Vimeo has a video editing product and we gave them a studio on site where people could go record content and then within their product, they would edit that video right away and put a bumper on it about like being shot and recorded in under an hour and at Goldenhour, shot, edited and delivered to them in under an hour at Goldenhour. 

And so it was really showcasing the product and it was like done on a screen that everybody could see. 

We generated two plus terabytes of content out of this:

• We had one camera operator for every 20 attendees. 

• We have a person on the street content.

• We have interview content.

• We have all the live stream content.

• We have the session content.

• We have Tim cutting fruit and Obaid playing video games.

• We have content from the Happy Hour.

Like, there's just a ridiculous amount of content and it's all amazing stuff. 

We're starting to sift through it and edit it and get it into a post production state where we can publish it. So all of the content will be available on AudiencePlus by the end of the month, we'll have all of it. But like, we're going to roll it out as we, as we edit it and have it ready. Yeah.

Jared: Can you walk me through the afterglow of the event and how you go about keeping it going?

JK Sparks: Absolutely. I will say a cool thing is, like, I'm still seeing LinkedIn posts, like new LinkedIn posts about people's time at Goldenhour last week. And I expect to see that through, through the end of this week. And we have a plan to keep some momentum around it. So we have a sizzle reel that we're going to launch later this week. That's just like, it's a fomo video, really.

Like, hey, check out how awesome Goldenhour was. And if you weren't able to attend, make sure you attend next year, right? Because this is what it's all about. And it was incredible. 

And then on top of that, we have our documentary coming out very soon, which is going to be episodic content on how you do events and it's going to be very tactical. 

Jared: What brands are you gaining inspiration from right now in tech and then throughout as well?

JK Sparks: I will say outside of tech, like, the first thing that comes to mind because they've always inspired me is Airbnb. They are a brand-first company. I think they do an incredible job with their brand marketing. I love everything from how they lay out their website to the video content that they've produced, the ads that they've produced. I like Airbnb a lot. 

2 Posts

I. AudiencePlus launches a movement

II. B2B events desperately needed some innovation

3 Tools

I. Lusha

Lusha delivers the most accurate B2B database in a platform that makes prospecting easier than ever. Best direct dial contact info in the game. Check it out.

II. Castmagic

I use Castmagic to transcribe Zoom interviews into newsletters. I’m only scratching the surface with what can be done too. Castmagic is the fastest way to automate your content workflow with AI. Check it out.

III. Coefficient

Stop exporting data manually and rebuilding stale dashboards. Sync live data from your business systems into Google Sheets & Excel. Check it out.

1 Action to help the Collab Grow

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Until next week,

Jared

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