By There are tons of marketing conferences. Most follow a familiar formula: slick slide decks, broad-strokes keynotes, case studies you’ve seen before, and maybe a tote bag to take home.
But when you’re deciding where to spend your budget, time, and energy, the real question is: Which event will actually make an impact on me?
That’s the question we asked ourselves when designing SparkTogether. Not because we think other events are doing it wrong — but because we saw a gap. Marketers wanted something deeper. More honest. More useful.
Below, I explain what made last year’s event so powerful, and why it’s become a can’t-miss experience for marketers who are tired of the same old playbook.
Transcript
Howdy, folks. I I wanna talk about SparkTogether. Amanda sent me an email, and she asked me, “Hey, Rand. Can you tell people a little bit about Spark together from last year and what’s coming up this year?”
“What’s one thing you wish every attendee knew or realized before showing up?” This is a photo, by the way, of the event. In fact, I got I got a whole bunch of them. And, you know, I wish that when people came into it, I think it’s hard to describe to you how transparent and vulnerable people were on this stage.
Like, incredibly impressive people who built extraordinary businesses, done phenomenal marketing campaigns, had incredible amounts of success, you know, from the outside.
Just how challenging and painful and heartache filled their ups and downs were. And that some of that is super tactical. You know? I I had this failure with this type of a campaign, and it wasn’t until we realized that we had to change the campaign and do these tactics this other way that, you know, it improved. And for other people, it was very high level. You know, it was emotional or or super strategic or deeply personal.
And I think that I think that knowledge might might help you when you come to SparkTogether. Second, Amanda asked me to share a moment or an interaction from last year’s event that stuck with you. So I have one that’s very particular. I’m not sure if I can find the photo here, but, you know, I’m I’m chatting with a a friend of mine, Scott Heimendinger, who who runs Seattle Ultrasonics, which is a company here in Seattle.
And Scott is thinking about their big launch, and he’s listening to all the speakers. And at lunch, we go outside. You can’t quite see it in this photo, but, like, basically, there’s there’s doors out to the other side where there’s a bunch of food trucks, which is surprisingly delicious. And Scott, you know, kinda grabs me after that, and he goes, Rand, I think I think my marketing plan to put all my eggs in the launch basket is wrong.
I’m listening to all these speakers, and they’re talking about how, you know, marketing and brand building and sales, like, it it’s this long slow process and you iterate and you find things and learn things about your customers.
I don’t think I should be putting he was putting a huge amount of money into a big event.
I think it was CES.
And and he changed his mind right there on the spot. And, actually, I think he left the event early and went and changed his plans and, like, canceled the thousands of dollars he was gonna spend there, and I think very, very wisely. So, yeah, that interaction really stands out to me.
“What kind of marketer do you think gets the most from SparkTogether?” Oh, Amanda, what a great question.
Honestly, there were a lot of people from agencies and consultants, who who showed up there and a ton of people who are in house, and I saw a lot of the connections between those people being deeply powerful. Right? So if your agency or consultant side, you’ve seen lots and lots of campaigns and businesses and and, marketing investments from a wide diverse group of companies. And if you’re in house, you’ve gotten to focus.
Right? And you’ve gotten to really concentrate on what works for this one company. And the interactions and engagements tween those two groups, both on stage, right, folks like Laval here who’s who’s speaking was, consultancy agency side, bunch of people who were speaking were in house side, and those interactions were deeply powerful. I think it actually helped both, groups find kind of their partner, as well.
I know a lot of people who emailed me and said, like, hey. We we got some business from this or we found a great a great agency to work with, or, you know, we ended up working with this person, not not necessarily even speakers.
So that was that was quite quite fulfilling as well.
I hope that you consider joining SparkTogether, this year. It’s it’s in October. It’s in Seattle. Great time to visit the city.
And, also, it’s a really special, small, intimate, powerful, vulnerable, transparent event. If the content that you read on SparkToro resonates with you, if the emails you get from Amanda resonate with you, this we are your people. Right? And you should you should come check this out.