Event Marketer Spring 2023 - 66

SPICER
Allison
CURRENT POSITION: Manager-Events Management,
The Home Depot
DREAM TEAM TITLE: Senior Manager-Meetings & Events
WHY WE WANT HER: Culture is critical today, and
Spicer knows how to design and
lead internal programming that
transforms internal stakeholders
into loyal brand fans.
Allison Spicer originally envisioned a career
in broadcast journalism, but an opportunity
to join a healthcare think tank in Washington,
D.C, and accept a role in the meetings department,
carved out an alternative path forward.
She would eventually move to New York and
work within a diverse group of events for a global
insurance brand before returning to her roots
hooking up a phone dongle to the microphone
at a meeting early on in her career so that audiences
could dial in and listen in to speakers. She
compares that experience to today where you
can integrate a polling feature into the event app
so live and remote audiences can interact with
speakers, and each other, in real time.
" You do have two different audiences now, so
we ask-what are we doing for that
in-person audience so that they're
getting that experiential attendee
experience, and then to those individuals
that are joining us virtually,
how can we make sure that they're
engaged and feel connected with
that larger audience, " she says.
What has changed are budgets.
Digital offerings come at an additional
cost, of course. So, Spicer
challenges herself and the team to
develop ways to make the experience
for attendees more robust and
fulfilling so that they continue to
choose to attend in person. She also
looks for ways to structure budgets
in Atlanta where she joined The Home Depot
and a small but mighty team that manages corporate
events, ranging from board meetings to
associate-facing events to engagements for the
different lines of business.
Much has changed in the past three years, but
one thing that hasn't changed for Spicer and the
events she manages is the integration of technology
to connect audiences everywhere. She recalls
66
EVENT MARKETER SPRING 2023
creatively.
Spicer's team sits within communications,
which affords it a nice integration with the digital
comms teams and the internal television unit.
And in many ways, Spicer says, much of her role
in b-to-b event marketing is a form of communications:
experiential communication. The communication
aspect extends beyond attendees.
She helped to develop a strategic meeting management
program for the company that centralizes
enterprise-wide meeting- and event-related
processes, such as metrics and vendor strategies,
to better include key stakeholders, increase
spend visibility, and mitigate risks.
There is a renewed interest and energy around
business travel this year, something Spicer is
zeroing in on from an attendee experience and
hospitality perspective. Her team is doing everything
it can to alleviate travel issues or to help
attendees see opportunities in the travel.
" We're seeing more people taking advantage
of the pre-and post- rates and using the trip to
explore a city they've never been to or to visit
with a family or friend there, " Spicer says. " When
we choose a destination for an event, we try
to showcase in a short amount of time all the
unique, wonderful things about that location. "
Once they're on-site, attendees at The Home
Depot meetings enjoy surprise-and-delight
moments. One event for field leaders featured
a virtual reality demo that showed what The
Home Depot safety team is working on and why
they're so committed to it. The simulated activity
had attendees riding up in a forklift to retrieve
a box from a high level and as they stepped out
onto a " bay " the actual device they were standing
on dropped by an inch to simulate an accident.
" We saw in all of the surveys that came back,
those unique moments, things they hadn't experienced
before, really added up to creating a
memorable experience overall that, to this day,
they're probably still talking about, " she says. We
don't doubt it.
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Event Marketer Spring 2023

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