Event Marketer Spring 2023 - 61

Laura
PARKINSON
CURRENT POSITION: Global Head of Enterprise Brand
Experience, LinkedIn
DREAM TEAM TITLE: Global Head of Partnerships
WHY WE WANT HER: Creating dimension at events with
consumer-centric experiential
moments and unique
partnerships is her super power,
and we think it's going to shake
up the playbook.
Laura Parkinson's career pathway into b-to-b
events is best described as a series of turning
points. After leaving her small town for the University
of Texas at Austin, and eventually taking
a job there to manage alumni events and study
abroad trips, the path forward was more impactful
than she could have imagined.
" It's a really exciting time, and I think the
theme here is growth. Somehow, I have hit it at
these different moments with these companies
where the future is just really bright, " she says.
spective, and accepted an opportunity to work
cross functionally on Apple events not long after
the launch of the iPhone and leading up to the
launch of the iPad.
" If you think about all the gorgeous stores and
interactions that happen in those retail settings
around the world-the energy, the store employees,
the beautiful design-it was a whole new
level of ah-ha for me that events that I create can
mirror that, " she says. " I learned from one of the
best marketing organizations in the world what a
good brand experience looks like. "
After five years working with
Google on some of their largest
launches,
festivals,
and conferences,
she joined LinkedIn in 2020.
It was a transformational time as
the world of work was shifting
and she joined to oversee some
of the company's largest brand
experience opportunities. Her
job is to ensure that from a brand
perspective, LinkedIn is meeting
and exceeding the bar in its experiences.
Her newly created team
works cross functionally across the
different event groups on business
In Austin, she had the opportunity to manage
partnerships for SXSW at a time when the interactive
festival was beginning to surpass the size
of the music festival. As she watched influential
brand moments unfold at SXSW, the launch of
Twitter being one of them, she felt a calling to
the brand side to gain a " behind the scenes " pereventmarketer.com
unit
initiatives, such as the flagship Talent Connect
conference for the h.r. community, one of
the most high-touch and important events of
the year.
Parkinson says as experience builders, there's
a great opportunity to help create playbooks that
will set a unified course trajectory across organizations
within companies and identify what
the brand's standards are and how it should be
presented in physical spaces.
Her past experiences in consumer technology
and entertainment brand marketing have
equipped her well for this new era for the event
industry, and one of the ways her team is taking
advantage of it is to raise the bar in b-to-b
event engagement by looking through a b-to-c
lens. She points to recent industry shifts, like a
new Cannes Lions award honoring creativity in
b-to-b marketing, as a potential turning point
where marketers will see more competition and
creativity across the b-to-b landscape.
And this message was communicated literally
for attendees of the brand's B2Believe conference
in November, an inaugural event for b-to-b
marketers held in San Francisco. For example, to
further the celebration of creativity in B2B and
all of the possibilities in the industry, the team
activated a live graffiti wall that had messages
like " B2Boring " imprinted on it. They invited
attendees to walk up and spray paint it or roller
brush it to " deface " the old way of doing things.
" The intent was, b-to-b doesn't need to be
boring. It can be a beautiful work of art that we
all collaborate on to make it into this amazing
thing, " she says.
She is now setting her sights on Cannes Lions
activations, and is consulting with the LinkedIn
Talent Solutions team on the flagship Talent
Connect Summit. Never a dull, or boring
moment, in this creative, strategic thinker's
world.
SPRING 2023 EVENT MARKETER
61
http://www.eventmarketer.com
Event Marketer Spring 2023

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