ADHD: Does a Diagnosis Actually Change Anything?

Show follow-up looks like one line on your to-do list. Your brain sees 47 tasks inside it, so nothing gets sent. Is that ADHD in events, burnout, or just the job?Megan Martin doesn't have the answer yet, and says so. This solo episode is part 2 of the ADHD series. It picks up where Maddie Morris left off with the question Megan didn't expect to land on: if the systems you've built already work, does an official ADHD diagnosis change anything?In this one:What executive dysfunction is and how it relates to ADHD. It's trouble with the brain's air traffic control: holding information, focusing, filtering distractions, and switching gears. It overlaps heavily with ADHD, but it isn't a DSM-5 diagnosis and it can show up without ADHD.What an adult diagnosis changed for Maddie: a cheat sheet of common trip wires, less judgment, and relief and grace instead of grief, plus what it took to get one.How to stop post-event follow-up from stalling by starting with one tiny task instead of the whole list.Why Megan takes a 24-hour re-entry day after a show and won't celebrate a deal until the contract is signed.The 4 questions she can't answer yet about getting diagnosed as an adult, including how to tell ADHD from burnout in an industry that wears exhaustion like a badge.Have a question for the event pro and the physician joining Megan next? Send it to eventaboutitpodcast.com or DM her.Megan isn't a doctor. The lists in this episode are hers, not clinical, and nothing here is medical advice.Mentioned in this episode:Maddie Morris's episode, "Is It ADHD or Just Events? What Actually Helps Either Way": https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/is-it-adhd-or-just-events-what-actually-helps-either-way/id1799764241?i=1000800191414Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, "InBrief: Executive Function": https://developingchild.harvard.edu/resources/inbrief-executive-function/Further reading on executive function and ADHD:CHADD, "Executive Function Skills": https://chadd.org/about-adhd/executive-function-skillsUnderstood.org, "Is executive function disorder a real diagnosis?" by Thomas E. Brown, PhD: https://www.understood.org/en/articles/is-executive-function-disorder-a-real-diagnosisAbout Your HostMegan Martin is the founder of M Squared Dynamics, a consulting, facilitation, and content strategy firm helping event leaders, marketers, and sales teams turn live experiences into measurable business growth. She's the host and executive producer of Event About It, co-founder of Opportunity Hunters, and a two-time PCMA Visionary Award nominee (2022 winner). With nearly 20 years in the industry, Megan operates at the intersection of event strategy, marketing alignment, and behavioral intent signals, turning events from line items into pipeline drivers.Connect with Megan and M Squared Dynamics:Podcast: EventAboutItPodcast.comNewsletter (Step and Repeat): msquareddynamics.com/stepandrepeatsignupConsulting and strategy: msquareddynamics.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meganmartincmp/Instagram: @m2dynamics and @eventaboutitTikTok: @eventaboutitKeep the Conversation GoingSubscribe to Event About It so the next conversation in this series lands in your feed. Send this episode to the event pro on your team whose follow-up list is older than the show it came from.

You can hold 400 moving parts in your head for eight months straight and still not mail the card that's been sitting on your counter for two weeks. If that's you, you've probably wondered whether it's ADHD or just what working in events does to a person.Megan went into this one expecting an either/or. She came out with a different answer: yes, both.Maddie Morris spent a decade professionally being somebody else's brain before she got diagnosed herself, and she's never worked an event in her life. That's exactly why this conversation goes somewhere the industry's usual burnout talk doesn't. It also gets specific fast, because the back half is 20 minutes of tactics built for people who don't control their own calendars.In this one:Why time blocking keeps failing you, and the two things to change before you schedule that block againWhat to do the week you get back from show site, before re-entry wipes out every system you hadWhether working in events can actually cause ADHD symptoms, and what the research does and does not supportThe habits you drop first when work gets hard, and why those are the exact ones keeping you functionalWhy “I do my best thinking at 11pm the night before” is a wiring problem, not a willpower problemPlus a vent about the statistic this industry keeps wearing like a badge of honor, and what it's quietly costing us in recruiting.Send this to the person on your team who apologizes for their own brain in every single meeting.Neither Megan nor Maddie is a doctor, and nothing in this episode is medical advice.About the GuestMaddie Morris is a time and energy management consultant and speaker who helps leaders and teams train their calendars to focus on what matters most. She believes that when pressure rises, your calendar will rapidly either enhance your resilience or compound your stress. Drawing on a decade as an executive assistant and Chief of Staff to top Canadian founders, including leaders from Dragon's Den and the Entrepreneurs' Organization, plus her own experience with burnout and ADHD, she teaches people how to build momentum with less wasted effort.Connect with Maddie:Website: wisdomstreak.caLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/maddiemorrisInstagram: @itsmaddiemorrisNewsletter (weekly time and energy tips): Sign up hereFree 30-minute Time Audit: wisdomstreak.ca/timeauditAbout Your HostMegan Martin is the founder of M Squared Dynamics, a consulting, facilitation, and content strategy firm helping event leaders, marketers, and sales teams turn live experiences into measurable business growth. She's the host and executive producer of Event About It, co-founder of Opportunity Hunters, and a two-time PCMA Visionary Award nominee (2022 winner). With nearly 20 years in the industry, Megan operates at the intersection of event strategy, marketing alignment, and behavioral intent signals, turning events from line items into pipeline drivers.Connect with Megan and M Squared Dynamics:Podcast: EventAboutItPodcast.comNewsletter (Step and Repeat): msquareddynamics.com/stepandrepeatsignupConsulting and strategy: msquareddynamics.comLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/meganmartincmpInstagram: @m2dynamics and @eventaboutitTikTok: @eventaboutitKeep the Conversation GoingThe best conversations start after the show ends, and the best ones keep going in your inbox. Subscribe to Event About It wherever you get your podcasts and sign up for the Step and Repeat newsletter at msquareddynamics.com/stepandrepeatsignup.Until next time, stay curious.

October 2026 event industry news, in one problem: the show recaps say demand is booming, while the deal news says the ownership map is being redrawn. Your 2027 plan has to survive both.Megan was at IMEX America and Cvent CONNECT Europe, then spent two weeks reading everything else. The takeaway: IMEX had about 96,000 scheduled meetings, but a meeting isn’t a result. And when Informa agreed to buy Clarion Events for £2.24 billion, it changed something your sponsorship budget depends on: whoever owns the show sets the packages, the prices and who gets the attendee list.In this one:How to trace one show meeting to a real outcome, so you stop quoting attendance and start proving pipeline influence.What to ask your rep before you renew, now that Informa is buying Clarion and CloserStill bought 5 events from ROAR, including B2B Marketing Live.How to get your event recap found in AI search: Bain says 89% of citations for unbranded prompts come from third-party sources, and the 2X AI Visibility Index says 96% of B2B companies are largely invisible in early-stage AI discovery.How do you fix the cost of students attending IMEX America? Sponsor a seat, publish a line-item budget, give a student a job on your booth for an hour, and talk to the students you see.Are panels dead? Megan’s test for your next one, based on what Bravo Fan Fest got right.If your 2027 plan was written before October, listen before you sign another sponsorship. Subscribe to Event About It, and send this episode to the event marketer who still reports attendance as a result.Mentioned in this episodeIMEX America 2026 (Oct 13 to 15, Las Vegas)Cvent CONNECT Europe 2026 (Oct 20 to 22, London)Listen: my episode with Charlene Liu on IMEX, [title and link]Watch: my Cvent CONNECT US recap, [link]Coverage of Cvent’s keynote: CIT: “Events now one of the ‘highest-performing’ marketing channels”About Your HostMegan Martin is the founder of M Squared Dynamics, a consulting, facilitation, and content strategy firm helping event leaders, marketers, and sales teams turn live experiences into measurable business growth. She’s the host and executive producer of Event About It, co-founder of Opportunity Hunters, and a two-time PCMA Visionary Award nominee (2022 winner). With nearly 20 years in the industry, Megan operates at the intersection of event strategy, marketing alignment, and behavioral intent signals, turning events from line items into pipeline drivers.Connect with Megan and M Squared Dynamics:Podcast: EventAboutItPodcast.comNewsletter (Step and Repeat): msquareddynamics.com/stepandrepeatsignupConsulting and strategy: msquareddynamics.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meganmartincmp/Instagram: @m2dynamics and @eventaboutitTikTok: @eventaboutitKeep the Conversation GoingSubscribe to Event About It so you don't miss what's coming next. Send this episode to the marketing leader who just signed off on a creator or influencer program and still isn't sure what they're actually getting for it.

68% of US Google searches now end without a single click, which means event SEO as you learned it is quietly breaking. If your discovery plan still depends on getting somebody onto your website, that is a problem nobody has budgeted for.Laura Davidson ran a search agency for a decade and she is blunt about what is happening: the touchpoints have collapsed. Someone asks an AI, gets one answer, believes they have done thorough research, and registers. Her argument is that this is not new marketing at all. It is a return to something much older, and the event brands that already invested in being known are the ones it rewards.In this one:What zero-click search actually means for event marketing, and the two metrics her team watches now that attribution is breakingWhy a B2B buyer is only in market roughly 5% of the year, and what to do during the other 95%The one question that decides whether your event gets funded, and why a well-known bad event beats an unknown good oneWhat connected TV and ChatGPT ads really cost, and whether an event marketing budget can actually reach themThe ambassador program setup that cut cost per acquisition by 49% on a single creator video, and the contract clause that makes it workIf you are heading into budget season with a number you are not sure you can defend, start here.Mentioned in this episodeZero-click search study, SparkToro via Similarweb clickstream data: Search Engine Land coverageAbout the guestLaura Davidson spent 14 years running paid search and paid media for global trade shows before selling her agency to Freeman, which means she is watching the collapse of click-based measurement from inside the discipline it disrupts. She now leads digital at mdg. She has also produced her own events, which is why her advice sounds like someone who has been on both sides of the invoice.Connect with Laura Davidson and Tag Digital:LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lauratagdigitalmdg, a Freeman company: mdg.agencyInstagram: @tagdigitalglobalAbout Your HostMegan Martin is the founder of M Squared Dynamics, a consulting, facilitation, and content strategy firm helping event leaders, marketers, and sales teams turn live experiences into measurable business growth. She’s the host and executive producer of Event About It, co-founder of Opportunity Hunters, and a two-time PCMA Visionary Award nominee (2022 winner). With nearly 20 years in the industry, Megan operates at the intersection of event strategy, marketing alignment, and behavioral intent signals, turning events from line items into pipeline drivers.Connect with Megan and M Squared Dynamics:Podcast: EventAboutItPodcast.comNewsletter (Step and Repeat): msquareddynamics.com/stepandrepeatsignupConsulting and strategy: msquareddynamics.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meganmartincmp/Instagram: @m2dynamics and @eventaboutitTikTok: @eventaboutitKeep the Conversation GoingThe best conversations start after the show ends, and the best ones keep going in your inbox. Subscribe to Event About It wherever you get your podcasts and sign up for the Step and Repeat newsletter at msquareddynamics.com/stepandrepeatsignup.Until next time, stay curious.

Gating your agenda is one of the most common moves in B2B event strategy. According to today’s guest, it is also click bait.Laura Davidson has run more than 2,000 event campaigns a year across more than 40 countries, which means she has watched this exact decision play out at a scale almost nobody in this industry has access to. Her argument is that your agenda is the single most discoverable asset your event owns, and locking it behind a form costs you far more than the email addresses it collects. Especially now that buyers are asking an AI before they ask Google. Then we made her rule on seven more event marketing tactics most teams run on autopilot.In this one:Why gating your event agenda works against you in AI search, and what to publish insteadThe one paid channel she says event marketers should stop buying entirely, and where that budget belongsHow many brand touches it actually takes before somebody registers for a B2B event, and why your campaign plan assumes a smaller numberWhy the "last chance to register" email should go out four separate times, and the one thing that has to change in each sendThe reason every trade show ad looks identical, and what the events pulling ahead are doing insteadIf you are building next year’s campaign plan right now, this is the 18 minutes that will change two line items in it.About the guestLaura Davidson has spent 14 years running paid media for some of the largest trade shows and conferences in the world, at a volume that means she has watched the same mistakes repeat across more than 40 countries. She built Tag Digital out of Glasgow with her husband, sold it to Freeman, and now leads digital at mdg. She is unusually willing to tell you which of your tactics are wasting money.Connect with Laura Davidson and Tag Digital:LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lauratagdigitalmdg, a Freeman company: mdg.agencyInstagram: @tagdigitalglobalAbout Your HostMegan Martin is the founder of M Squared Dynamics, a consulting, facilitation, and content strategy firm helping event leaders, marketers, and sales teams turn live experiences into measurable business growth. She’s the host and executive producer of Event About It, co-founder of Opportunity Hunters, and a two-time PCMA Visionary Award nominee (2022 winner). With nearly 20 years in the industry, Megan operates at the intersection of event strategy, marketing alignment, and behavioral intent signals, turning events from line items into pipeline drivers.Connect with Megan and M Squared Dynamics:Podcast: EventAboutItPodcast.comNewsletter (Step and Repeat): msquareddynamics.com/stepandrepeatsignupConsulting and strategy: msquareddynamics.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meganmartincmp/Instagram: @m2dynamics and @eventaboutitTikTok: @eventaboutitKeep the Conversation GoingSubscribe to Event About It so the Aftershow lands in your feed the second it drops. In it, Laura breaks down what replaces the click now that 68% of searches end without one, and what actually decides whether your event gets funded.Send this episode to the demand gen lead who still thinks the agenda is a lead magnet.

The honest answer is no. And the person telling you that actually built it.Huong Nguyen spent 13 years running a multi-million dollar events agency before she started building Aletheia, an AI platform for event operations. She tried the vibe coding route first. She knows exactly where it breaks, what it costs when it does, and what the real gap is between a one-time AI workflow and a scalable event tech product. Her advice: do it for fun. Just do not do it for your actual program.That's one of six conversations in this Aftershow. We also got into how she built a seven-figure client roster for 10 years without a LinkedIn presence, a $500K contract she landed at 24 by working for free first, and what she now understands about event tech vendors that she didn't before she became one.In this one:Why vibe coding gets you a prototype and leaves you with a maintenance problem — and what it actually takes to scale event technology across different program types and budgetsHow 10 years of building an agency without a personal brand generated more client retention and referrals than most visible founders ever seeWhat a non-technical founder with no coding background actually does when she decides to build event tech — and what breaks firstThe one question every event planner should ask in a vendor demo that almost nobody thinks to ask until they're already locked into a contractIf you are currently evaluating event tech, thinking about building your own, or wondering whether being less visible is costing you business — this is the one.The best conversations start after the show ends, and the best ones keep going in your inbox. Subscribe to Event About It wherever you get your podcasts and sign up for the Step and Repeat newsletter at msquareddynamics.com/stepandrepeatsignup.Until next time, stay curious.About Huong NguyenHuong Nguyen is the 2x CEO and founder of Shiloh Events and Aletheia, an AI-powered intelligence platform for event operations. She co-founded Zoomtopia and spent 13 years producing enterprise tech events for Zoom, Microsoft, Samsung, LG, Uber, and Google without ever building a personal brand. In 2023 she surfaced, started climbing, and started building. She is still doing all three.Connect with Huong:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mshuongnguyen/Aletheia: https://aletheia.events/Shiloh Events: https://shiloh-events.com/About Your HostMegan Martin is the founder of M Squared Dynamics, a consulting, facilitation, and content strategy firm helping event leaders, marketers, and sales teams turn live experiences into measurable business growth. She's the host and executive producer of Event About It, co-founder of Opportunity Hunters, and a two-time PCMA Visionary Award nominee (2022 winner). With nearly 20 years in the industry, Megan operates at the intersection of event strategy, marketing alignment, and behavioral intent signals, turning events from line items into pipeline drivers.Connect with Megan and M Squared Dynamics:Podcast: EventAboutItPodcast.comNewsletter (Step and Repeat): https://msquareddynamics.com/stepandrepeatsignupConsulting and strategy: https://msquareddynamics.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meganmartincmp/Instagram: @m2dynamics and @eventaboutitTikTok: @eventaboutitThe best conversations start after the show ends, and the best ones keep going in your inbox. Subscribe to Event About It wherever you get your podcasts and sign up for the Step and Repeat newsletter at msquareddynamics.com/stepandrepeatsignup.Until next time, stay curious.

Most event teams are filed under marketing and measured on attendance. That's not a strategy problem. That's a reporting structure problem — and it's costing you pipeline.Huong Nguyen has produced enterprise tech events for 13 years: NASA to ServiceNow to co-founding Zoomtopia. She knows what events look like when they're treated as a logistics function, and she knows what they look like when they're wired into demand gen. The difference is not effort. It's where the team sits and what they're held accountable for.Plus: the vent nobody in the industry talks about out loud — what happens to your F&B and room block when your client has surprise layoffs and the hotel won't budge. And yes, she's the one who moved an entire conference to a parking lot overnight after the pipes burst mid-keynote.In this one:Why demand gen — not marketing — is the right home for your event team, and the one game answer that makes the case in under 10 secondsHow to negotiate hotel contracts that protect you when your client's headcount gets cut without warning (the clause most planners skip until the F&B bill lands)The event insurance line item most planners overlook until it's too late — and the AV equipment bill that proves itWhy designing for emotion first and logistics second isn't a soft strategy. It's the pipeline strategy B2B event teams are still missing.If your event team is still reporting into a marketing org that measures success in badge scans, this is the conversation to send up the chain. Subscribe so the Aftershow lands in your feed the second it drops — that's where Huong gets into what it actually cost to build Aletheia and what every planner thinking about vibe coding their own event tech needs to hear first.Send this to the event leader who's still trying to prove ROI in a marketing meeting instead of a demand gen one.About Huong NguyenHuong Nguyen is the 2x CEO and founder of Shiloh Events — 13 years producing large-scale enterprise tech events for Zoom, Microsoft, Samsung, LG, Uber, and Google — and Aletheia, an AI-powered intelligence platform for event operations. She co-founded Zoomtopia, produced events for NASA, and grew Shiloh from zero to multi-million dollar revenue in three years. She named her company Shiloh, Hebrew for peace. She is now building the technology to deliver it.Connect with Huong:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mshuongnguyen/Aletheia: https://aletheia.events/Shiloh Events: https://shiloh-events.com/About Your HostMegan Martin is the founder of M Squared Dynamics, a consulting, facilitation, and content strategy firm helping event leaders, marketers, and sales teams turn live experiences into measurable business growth. She's the host and executive producer of Event About It, co-founder of Opportunity Hunters, and a two-time PCMA Visionary Award nominee (2022 winner). With nearly 20 years in the industry, Megan operates at the intersection of event strategy, marketing alignment, and behavioral intent signals, turning events from line items into pipeline drivers.Connect with Megan and M Squared Dynamics:Podcast: EventAboutItPodcast.comNewsletter (Step and Repeat): https://msquareddynamics.com/stepandrepeatsignupConsulting and strategy: https://msquareddynamics.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meganmartincmp/Instagram: @m2dynamics and @eventaboutitTikTok: @eventaboutitSubscribe to Event About It so the Aftershow lands in your feed the second it drops. Next week Huong and Megan get into what it actually costs to build event tech from scratch — and why vibe coding isn't the shortcut planners think it is.Send this to the event leader who's still trying to prove ROI in a marketing meeting instead of a demand gen one.

Six hundred registrations is not an answer. The first thing a CRO wants to know is which logos are in the room, and most event leaders cannot answer that without asking for time to go look.This is not a recap of the main episode. This is the meeting that rewrote our guest's entire career, told in full. Sara Ann Straw walked in with a binder, a highlighter, and a registration count. She walked out with an $80 million pipeline target attached to her event and no idea how to hit it. What she did in the weeks after that meeting is the actual lesson, and it is more repeatable than it sounds.In this one:Bring the four data points executives consistently ask for: who is in the room by account tier, what percentage have open opportunities, which accounts are up for renewal in the next six months, and how many attendees are repeats from last yearFind out why one event leader lost a director role after three flawless product launches, and what the person who got the job did insteadGet the Strategy, Alignment, Scale framework, including why scale means consistency rather than running more eventsSee the real math on pulling a fragmented event org under one roof, including the $130,000 a year one team stopped spending on an agencySit in on an honest conversation about pricing anxiety, discounting people you like, and what nearly 20 years of experience is actually worth per hourThere is also a Bravo break, a Bethenny Frankel story that got someone's father genuinely concerned, and a real debate about whether Montana deserves a Housewives franchise.If your next executive review is on the calendar and you are still building the deck around attendance, listen to the first ten minutes before you touch another slide.About the guest: Sara Ann Straw has spent nearly two decades building and rebuilding global event organizations at high-growth tech companies, usually by pulling field, partner, webinar, and corporate events under one roof. She learned to speak executive the hard way, in a meeting where she could not answer why her own company was investing in its own event. Her book, The Experienced Executive, is the version of that lesson she wishes someone had handed her at the start.Find Sara:Website: saraannstraw.comBook: The Experienced Executive — https://a.co/d/07Rit5wGPodcast: Solo Travel Woman, on SpotifyLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saras23/About Your Host: Megan Martin is the founder of M Squared Dynamics, a consulting, facilitation, and content strategy firm helping event leaders, marketers, and sales teams turn live experiences into measurable business growth. She's the host and executive producer of Event About It, and a two-time PCMA Visionary Award nominee (2022 winner). With nearly 20 years in the industry, Megan operates at the intersection of event strategy, marketing alignment, and behavioral intent signals, turning events from line items into pipeline drivers.Connect with Megan and M Squared Dynamics:Podcast: EventAboutItPodcast.comNewsletter (Step and Repeat): msquareddynamics.com/stepandrepeatsignupConsulting and strategy: msquareddynamics.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meganmartincmp/Instagram: @m2dynamics and @eventaboutitTikTok: @eventaboutitKeep the Conversation Going: The best conversations start after the show ends, and the best ones keep going in your inbox. Subscribe to Event About It wherever you get your podcasts and sign up for the Step and Repeat newsletter at msquareddynamics.com/stepandrepeatsignup.Until next time, stay curious.

Most event teams are not badly run. They are badly wired. Three teams doing the same job in three different directions, and the event ROI conversation never actually happens because nobody owns it.This episode runs a live diagnostic on that wiring. Ten real decisions event teams make every week, sorted in real time into executor thinking or executive thinking, with a guest, Sara Ann Straw, who has walked into fractured global event organizations and rebuilt them from the inside. One of her calls is going to annoy you. She is also right about it.In this one:Run your own week through ten real scenarios and see which side of the executor and executive line you are actually operating onStop carrying a contingency line you have not questioned in five years, and know exactly what to interrogate insteadLearn what executives actually want from registration pacing, which is not the registration number and not the segment breakdownUnderstand why a lead that sits longer than 24 hours loses roughly a third of its conversion rate, and what that does to the marketing and sales blame cycleHear what happens when your production partner walks six weeks before a 2,000-person sales kickoff, and why "vendor" versus "partner" is a budget decision, not a vocabulary preferenceIf you are walking into budget season with a number you cannot defend, this is the one to start with. The diagnostic takes ten minutes and it will tell you something uncomfortable.About the guest: Sara Ann Straw has spent nearly two decades building and rebuilding global event organizations at high-growth tech companies, usually by pulling field, partner, webinar, and corporate events under one roof. She learned to speak executive the hard way, in a meeting where she could not answer why her own company was investing in its own event. Her book, The Experienced Executive, is the version of that lesson she wishes someone had handed her at the start.Find Sara:Website: www.saraannstraw.comBook: The Experienced Executive — https://a.co/d/07Rit5wGPodcast: Solo Travel Woman, on SpotifyLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saras23/About Your HostMegan Martin is the founder of M Squared Dynamics, a consulting, facilitation, and content strategy firm helping event leaders, marketers, and sales teams turn live experiences into measurable business growth. She's the host and executive producer of Event About It, and a two-time PCMA Visionary Award nominee (2022 winner). With nearly 20 years in the industry, Megan operates at the intersection of event strategy, marketing alignment, and behavioral intent signals, turning events from line items into pipeline drivers.Connect with Megan and M Squared Dynamics:Podcast: EventAboutItPodcast.comNewsletter (Step and Repeat): msquareddynamics.com/stepandrepeatsignupConsulting and strategy: msquareddynamics.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meganmartincmp/Instagram: @m2dynamics and @eventaboutitTikTok: @eventaboutitKeep the Conversation GoingSubscribe to Event About It so the Aftershow lands in your feed the second it drops. That one is the full story of the meeting where a CRO asked why the company was investing in its own event, and the answer was "because I was told to."Send this episode to the event leader on your team who is excellent at the wrong thing and has not been told yet.

Every event on the circuit is running some version of the same program right now. Comp the badge, comp the flight, comp the hotel, get content in return. Suddenly the registration list has "creators" on it, and almost nobody in the room agreed on what that word actually means, or what they're paying for when they use it.The quick answer: a content creator asks what to post this week. A thought leader asks what only they can say. An influencer asks whether their audience will buy what's being shared. Three different jobs, three different payoffs. Most hosted creator programs in the events industry never decide which one they're actually hiring for, and that's the expensive mistake this episode is built to fix. This is a solo episode, no guest this time, built around a distinction Megan couldn't stop thinking about after her own turn inside Cvent CONNECT's first hosted creator program. It pulls in growth executive Elena Verna's writing on the "operator" path versus borrowed authority, breaks down where creators, thought leaders, and influencers genuinely overlap, and then puts Megan's own campaign data on the table, including the one post that outperformed everything else in her lineup for reasons that had nothing to do with strategy.What you'll learn:Why "content creator," "thought leader," and "influencer" are three different jobs with three different goals, and why most event budgets quietly default to the easiest one to measure instead of the one that actually moves the businessThe three questions to ask before you build or join an event creator program, so you know whether you're buying reach, content, or influenceWhat happened when Megan's own Cvent CONNECT wifi failed and accidentally proved the entire thesis of this episode, with the real numbers: her best post pulled six times her next-best result and roughly a third of all her campaign engagementWhy a niche, relevant audience routinely outperforms a massive, unengaged one, and what that means for how you evaluate who to bring into your event's creator programThe honest goal nobody wants to say out loud when they build one of these programs, and why saying it plainly beats dressing it up as "community" or "creator partnerships"This episode connects directly back to event-led growth: how event budget decisions, event marketing ROI, and B2B event strategy actually hold up once real campaign data gets put next to the pitch. If you've ever approved, built, or been comped into an event creator program, this is the episode that tells you what you were really buying.About Your HostMegan Martin is the founder of M Squared Dynamics, a consulting, facilitation, and content strategy firm helping event leaders, marketers, and sales teams turn live experiences into measurable business growth. She's the host and executive producer of Event About It and a two-time PCMA Visionary Award nominee (2022 winner). With nearly 20 years in the industry, Megan operates at the intersection of event strategy, marketing alignment, and behavioral intent signals, turning events from line items into pipeline drivers.Connect with Megan and M Squared Dynamics:Podcast: EventAboutItPodcast.comNewsletter (Step and Repeat): msquareddynamics.com/stepandrepeatsignupConsulting and strategy: msquareddynamics.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meganmartincmp/Instagram: @m2dynamics and @eventaboutitTikTok: @eventaboutitKeep the Conversation GoingSubscribe to Event About It so you don't miss what's coming next. Send this episode to the marketing leader who just signed off on a creator or influencer program and still isn't sure what they're actually getting for it.