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Event podcasts are designed to give listeners a backstage pass to the world of event planning. In today’s market, a podcast keeps corporate meeting and event planners in tune with their industry. From interviews with thought leaders and topics ranging from new trends in event design, event technology and management to setting up your events and so much more, these kinds of podcasts also highlight the world’s most daring events and the people who make them happen.

Podcasts are recorded audio files produced and distributed online for free. It’s like an on-demand radio show for a certain demographic, genre or fanbase. For corporate event planners, always on the go, podcasts take a lot less effort to listen to than watching a video or reading a newsfeed. So it’s no wonder that the industry is seeing high-quality, industry-related event podcasts popping up everywhere.

“Podcasts have been around for a long time,” said Keith Johnston, managing partner of i3 Events in Chicago, IL. “All of the things in podcasting now are those that public radio stations used to play back in the day. Then, you would have someone who would have a little show about planning events on your local public radio station on a Saturday morning. Now, podcasting allows people to produce niche content that anyone can listen to anytime.”

There are many places to listen to podcasts, but the big three are Spotify, Apple and YouTube Music. “There is a great number of industry-related podcasts, and my colleague Bob Toovey and I created a site called Phizzpod, which has become the home of the event industry podcasts. Anyone that we can find that’s active is there,” said Johnston. Toovey is also the founder of Event Planner News and co-host of the Bullet List podcast.

Leading the pack of event podcasts is EvenIcons, hosted by Will Curran, an experienced event professional and founder of Endless Events and the creative force behind #EventProfs Community. He is also head of Klik at Bizzabo, an event operating system platform that features smart wearables, deep insights and even apps. On his podcast, he sits down with event industry influencers to discuss topics like event technology innovation, management and AV, just to name a few.

“EventIcons got started primarily as an experimentation for a live-streaming conversation platform called Blab that was tied into Twitter,” explained Curran. “This was before the Periscope or Meerkat streams were huge. These streams allowed four people to get on screen and talk to each other quickly.”

Curran thought it would be interesting to experiment with a live interview-style podcast for the events industry. So, on a whim, he started EventIcons in 2000. Since then, he’s done over 400 episodes. “I wasn’t necessarily setting out to create a long-term podcast, but I realized the livestream recorded conversations could be repurposed as a podcast. So that was how that started.”

Today, EventIcons is the longest-running podcast in the events industry. “Fortunately, and unfortunately, we’re sunsetting it just because the interview format is kind of overdone now,” he said. “But out of that, we spun out a podcast called the Event Tech Podcast. My co-host, Brant Krueger, and I became good friends. He was a guest on the show several times, and we realized that our banter was really good. We could complete each other’s sentences. We noticed that no podcasts were talking just about event technology, so we started that podcast.” As event technology has become increasingly critical for any event planner, Krueger and Curran interview and discuss the essential tools. Guests on their show have included Scott Owens, director of Event Technology at Salesforce, and Alon Alroy, CMO and Co-founder of Bizzabo.

“What’s that word when you like pain? Yes, well, I decided to start a third podcast called the Event Brew Podcast,” said Curran with a chuckle. Event Brew talked about the podcasts that were circling around the things that everyone really needed to talk about in the events industry but didn’t.

The podcast’s design is “to tell it how it really is” — the kind of unfiltered conversations planners usually have in the lobby bar at an industry conference. One of their first episodes was about why everyone in the industry needs to stop talking about the word “busy.”

Curran developed two pieces to fit the topic. “One is that whenever people say, ‘Hey, how are you doing? They say, ‘Oh, I’m busy.’ And it’s like, look, being busy is not necessarily a good barometer for how you are doing. The other piece we uncovered is that we uniquely love to ask other people how busy they are as a barometer for how well the industry is doing or how well you’re doing compared to the rest of the industry. So people love asking, ‘How are you doing?’ And if someone says, ‘I don’t have a lot of events going on,’ and the other person does, you wonder, is my marketing working? Is my event design or tech not working? What’s going on? But in reality, there are so many different events going on!”

And the reaction from the industry? “Oh, they loved it!” Curran said. “Honestly, after that episode, I thought people would either stop wanting to work with my company or be angry that we call people out. To be clear, we don’t call people out by name, but we call out the typical things we see, which just shows that people crave realism in the world. Sometimes, we are so nice about things, we sugar-coat things, but in reality, there are some big things that everybody’s talking about, but no one will really say it out loud.”

This kind of transparency is what attracts Cheyenne Nelson, HMCC MMP, with McVeigh Global Meetings & Events (MGME). MGME is a leading full-service global events agency with over 30 years of expertise in event planning. InteleTravel, an integrated travel distribution group, recently acquired it.

“I listen to podcasts all the time,” said Nelson. “While many offer insight into events and trends that might affect us, my focus is on global trends and to hear what’s in the zeitgeist. If you are hearing a topic across multiple podcasts or even across several mediums, you know that it is on everyone’s mind and isn’t isolated for one group.”

Event Podcasts

“The topics I find interesting are event technology trends and innovations, strategies for effective event planning and management,” said Nelson. “I also like to listen to topics like industry best practices and case studies, as well as sustainability initiatives within the event industry and negotiation techniques for vendor contracts and partnerships. And, of course, personal and professional development for event professionals, crisis management and risk mitigation strategies for events.”

The podcasts on Nelson’s radar include:

• GatherGeeks
• The Event Planning Podcast
• The VIP Collective
• The Event Tech Podcast
• Event Industry News Podcast
• Event Marketing Redefined

Amanda Ma, founder of the EventUp podcast, has worked in the events industry for over 20 years as an event planner. Her podcast was “formed out of a desire to help others gain insight into the current happenings within the events and marketing industry.” She continued, “EventUP has blossomed into having guests from multiple industries spanning marketing, PR, and topics that can help propel event and marketing professionals. Another purpose is to highlight other top diverse and women professionals.”

Ma’s listeners love to hear how big brands such as the NFL, Fox, Amazon and Zoom run their events. Every episode is packed with tips and advice she knows will benefit the audience. “Thought leadership is always our goal,” she said.

The Topics | The Guests

With that in mind, how do podcast hosts determine what topics to cover and which planners/personalities to have on their shows? “We look at their experience and what that company is known for,” explained Ma. “Whether it is Zoom with what new event tech is available or how the NFL prioritizes and engages the fans, we always touch upon what we know they do best! Our guest speakers are leaders and top professionals in this field.” Last year, Ma had Erin Edwards from the Los Angeles Dodgers Foundation as a guest. “It was a treat to hear how they incorporate the Los Angeles community within every event they produce. They know the Dodgers fans make the experience special, so they prioritize it. We’ve had so many fantastic guest speakers on the EventUp podcast.”

The topics that event podcasts talk about today differ from a few years ago, added Curran. “The thing that we’re talking about now that we didn’t before is the big data conversation. This is where I spend a lot of my time now.”

Those conversations start with, ‘How do we actually properly gather data at our events, and how do we use that data to plan better events?’

“With Klick, we have the ability to know where attendees are at any given moment. So why are we not designing our events around that data, knowing where they’re moving around our venues?” Curran said.

Something to Talk About

The event podcasts are not like other industries or careers, explained Johnston. “Event people tend to get wrapped up where our job is our life, and our life is our job. Because we’re traveling, we’re moving. There’s all this new education that we need, and podcasts can help with that. Not everybody is a reader. Not everyone wants to go to a web page and read all about Costa Rica, for example, and what it can do for meetings and events,” he said. “Whereas with a podcast you can sit down and listen to someone talk about that country, the hotels that are there, the activities, and you can consume this content all the time.”

Johnston’s favorite time to listen to podcasts is when he flies. He said the second the door shuts on the airplane, he dials into one of the many podcasts he listens to. “I learn things every single time. And there are podcasts on every subject in the event industry. Tess Bismill and I have the Event Tech Pull Up podcast, which is a podcast that talks about event technology. It’s a great way to gain knowledge and learn about software products without sitting through a sales call.”

Sustainability and DEI are two hot topics in the industry, said Curran. “I’m not the foremost expert at both of those, and everybody’s talking about them, so I don’t tend to spend a lot of time on them. But I think one of the interesting things we’re talking about this year is last-minute registrations and struggles around sponsorships.”

Creating more white space for attendees is another dialogue Curran finds worth chasing. “I consistently hear that we need to serve up lots of content, but in reality, you can watch a thousand TED talks back to back online. What makes the in-person experience different is our ability to network — to talk to each other, to process the information and build through the conversations of what we learn.”

Starting Your Event Podcast

So you want to start your own event industry podcast? Curran offered some great tips.

“If you’re going to start a podcast today, you must be everywhere, sharing it in all the groups and telling everybody you know that you have a podcast. If you’re doing the interview style, rely on your guests to be the self-promoters and bring in their audience. And then I would say, too, find a way that you can do collaborations with other people who already have audiences.”

So, for example, you may try collaborating with Bizzabo, a software company with a vast audience, by hosting one of their webinars. It worked for Curran. “The more I put myself out there to host webinars and to do guest speaking engagements, it drew just the audience back to the podcast, and then the podcast drew those on themselves and became this kind of flywheel.”

The audience follows the conversations, and they, in turn, feed other dialogues. When Curran was asked if there was anyone in the industry he would like to have on his show, he said, “Amy Kule from Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.” Why, we asked. “It has always been a joke that she was the one person I couldn’t get on the show. We’ve had everybody on EventIcons, but not Amy.”

And again, why her? “She planned one of the most iconic events there is in the world. What’s also really interesting is the security, coordination and live broadcast challenges. And those are the kinds of things that I like to talk about with guests who I like to have on the show. We could have 1,000 conference people come and talk about conferences, but our best learnings came from the people who were doing just wild, different events. The festival people learn from the conference people; the conference people learn from the festival people. And I very much believe in that nonlinear thinking in terms of inspiration.”

Ma suggested planners must be clear about the why and who they want to attract. Is it more seasoned planners or those who are just starting in the industry?

Like any new venture, there are challenges involved in starting and maintaining a successful events planner podcast. “That depends on your structure, of course,” concluded Ma. “Ours is all self-funded, and we’re looking forward to having sponsors in the future. With that said, we invest our time and resources in building this platform, which we are very proud of.” C&IT

The Most Popular Event Planning Podcasts

The meetings and events industry podcasts have it all covered — from episodes featuring industry professionals discussing real-life event experiences and cutting-edge innovations, to programs covering the international events industry, highlighting topics like growing and attracting talent, planning events and bleeding-edge marketing strategies. Here’s a list of the most popular event-planning podcasts:

• EventIcons
• IN-PERSON Podcast
• Techsytalk Unscripted
• Event Tech Podcast
• Turn Of Events
• The Meeting Planning Madness Podcast
• Meetings Podcast
• The Savvy Event Planner
• Eventful: The Podcast for Meeting Professionals
• GatherGeeks
• Event Industry News Podcast
• The Exposure Podcast
• EventLAB
• Meeting Minds with Charles Eide
• Events Unpaused