Episode 5 | Your Sponsors Found the Message Button. Good Luck.

It's like you don't know what you don't know. Like you think, oh, engagement is great. You start seeing the numbers climb and you're like, yeah, people are using it, and then it sort of hits a tipping point. You're like, oh, people are using it. Yeah.

Hey everyone, I'm Jen Santos. And this is Mayhem and Method, where event pros tell the real story of what happened and what it reveals about how events actually work. Welcome back to another episode of Mayhem and Method, and I'm here today with two very special longtime colleagues, Marty Choate and Josh Vander Krol, who are now two of the co-founders of Intrivium.

Thank you guys so much for being here with me today. Oh, it's our pleasure. I appreciate the invite. What is one of your favorite venues to work and why? I think my favorite venue is probably the Tobacco Docks — the Stockyards in London, the Tobacco Docks. I like that quite a bit.

It's not a very large venue. Tableau was one of the first places that did the Tobacco Docks. You're not gonna get a large Fortune 50 event space in there, but I think it was able to host up to, I think, like 20,000 people still. So that was kind of nice. And it was unique. It was kind of one of a kind — it didn't feel like a conference space. It was all of the things that had people running into their meetings instead of just walking slowly. So I think it helped kind of build up the raving fans that Tableau had back in the day.

That's cool. Marty, do you have a favorite? I'm not gonna go as unique. I'm gonna go for the general conference one — the old San Diego Conference Center. I have some fond memories. It was one of my first venues that I went to, and I love the city around there and how you could walk and the restaurants. So it has fond memories for me of being one of my first places that I went to when I started in events.

That's awesome. Okay, so let's get into the meat of the conversation. As a quick recap, you're gonna tell me kind of what your disaster story is, where things had gone wrong onsite. Kind of wrap it up in a couple of minutes and then we'll walk through what happened before what happened — talking about human behavior, 'cause people are weird — and we're just gonna walk through that process. So who would like to tell the story? I'm gonna let Josh tell the story because it's exactly the same experience that you and I had on a totally different show.

Well, I think at that particular show we had not introduced any sort of gates or permissions — that sort of thing. And when we opened up meetings and messages, which was a brand new feature to this particular venue and this particular client, they went crazy. And the people that went crazy are the ones that normally go crazy for that type of feature, which are the sponsors and the exhibitors. And the sponsors and the exhibitors loved that feature so much — and this was pre-bot days, but you wouldn't know it by the amount of meeting requests and messages that went out. The number of attendees, I think, was like 80 to a hundred thousand or so, and they were sending multiple messages to every single one of those attendees over the course of the event.

To the point where attendees didn't want to use the app anymore because they were just getting inundated with notifications. Their calendar was getting full of invites to the point where they couldn't even see some of their more normal business meetings. And the complaints came in like crazy.

So the sponsors and exhibitors were really abusing the system to the point where attendees were shutting things off, turning things out. Our host was coming over and saying, hey, we need to do something about this. And up until that point, we were almost oblivious to it, because in the background it was nearly catastrophic to us. It wasn't as bad as 2014 when the servers in Texas called us up saying, hey, you are shutting the whole server farm down — but it was near to that point and we were sweating whether or not it was gonna tip the system over.

And I had a very similar event, I think roughly in the same timeframe, where we had exhibitors that would hire temps that would come in, literally log in, put them at their computer, logged in as the attendee, and their whole job was to message the entire attendee directory. Yeah. So multiple times — they would send messages every day, get to the end of the list, and then start over again and start sending messages to attendees. Yeah. That's crazy.

And then the attendees start not using the app, which — I'm assuming, like the events I work on — it's always like, let's send out these push notifications, which then nobody is getting because nobody's using the app anymore. So you didn't know, right? Because it takes a while for these things to filter to the event tech team. But do you know what the attendee impact was of all this? Besides people just being annoyed — did you see a noticeable drop? Were people not getting to the right places because they weren't getting notifications? What was the onsite impact other than annoyance?

So prior to this happening, we probably had like 80 or so percent of the people attending the event logged in and using the mobile app, which was pretty good. At that time, 60% of people using the mobile app was, hey, we're succeeding. Now it's 90, 95% or more. But at that point it had dropped down to less than 40% of people using the app. And it seemed like almost a hundred percent of them were asking for paper guides so they could get to where they needed to go for sessions, because they refused to use the app altogether — let alone the networking and interaction capabilities that the app had.

So that was kind of interesting. And it definitely resulted in another one of those 5:00 AM mornings where we had to introduce some measures to right the ship, so to speak.

And how far into the event were you when this happened? Was this like day one? It was day zero. Yeah, day zero, which bled into day one. And by 5:00 AM after day one — which technically is day two — is when we introduced the fix. Fortunately it was a five day event, not a two day event. Good, good — but kind of the damage is done. Yeah. You've created this feeling of, oh, I'm just gonna get spam. And so even when you do fix it after the fact, you've lost half of those people. They're not coming back. They opted out. They're like, this app stinks. The experience is not good. I'm never gonna come back and use that.

And I think it's more than just the next event — people just remember that. Oh yeah, bad experience here. Why would I turn on notifications? There's no value in this. It's partly why we encourage people to change the look and feel of their app on year two. Year one you're surviving. Year two you're thriving. But if it looks the same as year one, people aren't gonna pick it up again — especially if they've had those kinds of issues.

Yeah, totally. I saw on LinkedIn this morning an article about somebody saying that most apps only have a 20% adoption rate. And my first response was, my apps have way higher adoption rate than that. It's a strategy problem, not an app problem. But in some cases it actually is an app problem, right? When you have features that people don't want — I mean, you went from 80 down to less than 40%. I can imagine a drop from 80 to 20% because people were like, I'm not here to just be abused. And they started looking for alternate ways to navigate the event.

Yep, that's exactly right. It did create a pretty new feature that we hadn't thought about. And the way that we introduced the feature, we were able to use it again for a lot of our future clients. The feature we introduced was a pretty cool one. We said, basically, we're gonna issue tickets to the sponsors and exhibitors, and they'll have the ability to message 10 times — and if anyone joins or responds, they get one of those tickets back. But if they use all 10, they're done. They cannot message any attendees. Which I think is better than not being able to message at all. Hey, this is a valuable resource, use it sparingly, make sure you're targeting who you wanna speak with, and then go from there.

Wait — were they physical tickets? Not physical tickets, just tickets that said, hey, you have 10 messages, 10 meeting requests that you can use. And that showed as an account in the system, and it restored if people responded. So on meeting requests, if someone accepted their meeting or sent a meeting request to the sponsor or exhibitor, they get one of those tickets back.

Yeah, I've seen different organizations starting to handle this differently. So it's like, well, exhibitors can be in, but they can't initiate any messaging — they can only be on the recipient end. Yep. And then I've seen other organizations put a cap in place, so they have so many messages an hour and then so many messages a day. And we're like, okay, how many thoughtful messages — or even semi-thoughtful messages — can somebody do in an hour or a day? And we put the cap at that, because it stops the bots, which is a very real problem in 2026. And it also just keeps people from doing what we've seen in the past, which is just logging in and copy-paste.

And now there's so many automations you can even do with phones. I see this a lot on my mobile app projects where they do some sort of screen record with a bot, and the bot just goes in and does automation right on somebody's device. So that really slows things down, and I've found that it has worked extremely well. We've even had some customers exploring not just the possibility, but using it as an add-on. So if you want to be a premium sponsor with the ability to have 10 additional messages, you just add it to your package. Which is nice — it doesn't make the mobile app a purely overhead product at the event.

So when we think about the attendee experience and how people stop using apps because nobody wants to be spammed all day long — talk to me now about your client's reaction to this, and whether this was something that had been discussed ahead of time. Walk me through that whole part of it.

Well, I think it was a perfect storm, because it was a new feature for them — and it wasn't a new feature for us. But we hadn't had the experience of bad players coming in to take advantage of the system. So that was the first time for us — someone taking advantage of the system — and it was the first time for them having the feature.

I think that actually happens a lot more now, or certainly more prevalent, because most of the folks we work with currently really don't have the years of experience and the pain that you encounter that introduces these sorts of features, possibilities, and updates. So I think that's where it was a perfect storm back then — and I think it's a regular occurrence currently.

I'm just thinking about this — it's interesting. One of our customers has just said, we want our exhibitors not to be able to message attendees. We want attendees to be able to message exhibitors. But then the exhibitor can only message the attendee after the attendee has messaged them first. And we want exhibitors to be able to message exhibitors. And I'm like, oh my gosh, this is all left over from back in the day of all the spam. Instead of just putting in limits for everyone — not just exhibitors, but for all — we've now gotten to the point where even our customers are like, oh, remember the days when the exhibitors were doing these bad behaviors? And so we're still dealing with it today.

No, we totally are. I think sometimes we're doing it ourselves, because in this particular instance it was us coming back to them saying, hey, I think you want to put in some measures. We introduced the idea of a ticketing system, because that was our experience before. And they're like, well, I don't think we need anything that complicated. So this is the sort of system that we want because we recognize the possibility of bad players. So it came as a recommendation from us — could this happen at your events? And they're like, well, I don't know, we haven't done it before.

I've got a client right now, and I was talking about, oh, we have this new feature — it's messaging moderation, and this is how it works. And they're like, well, why? Why would we want to stop people? And I'm like, okay, we need to accept this — this is exactly why you would want this to happen. And they're like, oh yeah — but it's like you don't know what you don't know. Like you think, oh, engagement is great. You start seeing the numbers climb and you're like, yeah, people are using it. And then it sort of hits a tipping point and you're like, oh, people are using it. For everything. Yeah, exactly.

So what was the client's reaction afterwards? It depended on who was on the team. The executives were furious. Our hosts were understanding. They booked us for the next year and we had a much better system — everything worked well, we had the features in there, the gates and the permissions and that sort of thing. So I appreciated their level of understanding. And the fact that they were able to see, hey, here's a team that's willing to work with us, and when they do have problems, they're gonna be responsive. And I think that's kind of key there — fortunately, the folks we work with have been in events. They know that something's gonna fail at some point in the event, and we just have to work our way around it.

Yeah. And that communication piece is absolutely critical. We've seen that not work with vendors and we've seen that work with vendors, and it really makes all the difference in whether somebody's gonna get a contract the next year or not. I think people underestimate how important it is to explain, hey, yeah, we saw this, we screwed up — or something went unplanned. Not even necessarily screwing up, because a lot of times you just don't know what you don't know. And then you come in and say, okay, this is how we're gonna fix it. Your team was there till 5:00 AM fixing it. And suddenly it's like, okay, these guys are really willing to work with us — let's give them a better shot.

So then the hundred-thousand-dollar question is, the next year — what did your app adoption rates look like? Did it bounce back up? Yeah, it was back up to 80%, and it didn't go down. So that was the great part about that second year.

And I think the other interesting thing — this is the only industry I know where you're providing a solution and a software platform to folks, and I've been in six different industries providing software for different industries. But in the event industry, you have a problem like this, and your answer cannot be — although some people do use this as an answer, and they don't last for very long — but it cannot be, we're not scoped for this. It's just, you need to make sure that everyone's there for the event's success. And it wasn't just us — it was every other connecting system that had to make an update to how they were receiving the information. So I think that's the other difference: everyone's working together and everyone has to recognize that if they don't, the event won't be successful.

Yeah. And I think a big piece of bringing it back up to 82% was really addressing what the attendees were feeling. Hey, we heard you. Don't try to hide it, don't pretend like nothing happened. It's like, hey, we've put some things in place to better your experience — be communicative with your attendees on the good, the bad, whatever it is. As long as you've addressed it, they understand and they're willing to try it again. And attendees are open to that.

Yeah, and I've seen that too — on events you and I worked on in the past, Marty, as well. We had people saying, no, we're not gonna use it 'cause we don't want spam. We put spam controls in place and the attendees we wanted to be using it actually flocked back to the tool, because they wanted what the tool had to offer. It's just that this one uncontrolled feature was weighing down the rest of the good that came with the rest of the toolset.

Yep. And we did change the layout of the app so that no one recognized it as the app from the year before. In fact, I had an attendee come up and say, I love the app this year. It's so much better — you should have seen the app from last year, it was crazy. And they described all the problems they had, and I said, boy, that sounds like a really rough year. I'm glad you had a much better experience this year. I didn't tell them it was the same app. Same app. Yeah.

And I experienced that too. They're like, this app stinks, this is the worst. And we just did a refresh on the design — exact same app — and all of our stakeholders were like, this is the most amazing app ever. Last year was horrible. I'm like, you know it was the same app. Yep. Exactly.

So last question. For that same event, after nobody wanted to use it — because it was a five day event — was there a communication that happened during the course of the event to say, hey, we've addressed this issue, we've heard your feedback? You did that with the client, but did you — or did the client — also do that with their attendees? Hey, we invite you back in because we've resolved some issues. Did that happen?

It didn't. And I don't understand why they didn't send out the notifications. We definitely didn't see much of an improvement over the course — I think maybe a 10% bump at most over the next three days.

I think a lot of folks don't use those notifications. I was just at an event this last week — the entire hotel, the entire venue, the power was shut off. Elevators weren't working. No power in any of the rooms, everything was shut off. We were on backup generators. Not a single notification was sent out to the attendees. And I'm thinking, this is 9/11, we're getting attacked — we were near DC and I had no idea. So I was creating all kinds of stories about what might be happening in the venue. And all they had to do was send out a notification through the app.

They ended up sending an email, which of course you're not gonna get because who checks email while they're onsite. But that's one thing — take advantage of notifications. Sending out more information is better. Don't have people create stories, because I think it's always gonna be worse than anything you could ever actually share. Yeah. Well, but the challenge is if nobody's in the app, they're not gonna get their notifications. Well, they do with toast notifications — unless they uninstall the app, they'll still get the notification. Fair. Yeah, okay. Which I suspect a few did uninstall. But yeah, I probably would have been one of those too.

I want to thank you both so much for taking your time to come and share your mayhem story with me — one that I know everybody in event land can relate to. I'd love to have you both take a minute and tell my audience where they can learn more about you, your work at Intrivium, any socials or sites you want to share. I hand the platform over to you to wrap up.

Sure. You're welcome to check us out at intrivium.com — that's probably the easiest place to reach us. We are publishing a new community here soon. You're welcome to reach out to us directly at josh@intrivium.com or marty@intrivium.com. And that is Intrivium. But intrivium.com — Josh and Marty — we're happy to take any emails or just hop on over to our website and reach out to us there.

Awesome. And by the way, can I just say that I love the name Mayhem and Method? Because I really think that method oftentimes doesn't come through before the mayhem. It really is the mayhem first that generates the method. You can what-if things to death, but usually it's the mayhem that generates the method. So I love the name.

And in this case it definitely was true. Yeah. Well, that's how we learn. This industry — that is how we learn it all. It's almost all by — I'm not gonna say failing — but by having mayhem episodes that we then put the method behind to make it work in the future. And that's what makes a great event pro. Yeah, I agree. Thank you guys so much. You're welcome. Thank you. Thanks for having us, Jen.

Thanks for listening in to another rollercoaster someone else rode so you don't have to. If you enjoyed this conversation, please take a moment to rate, review, subscribe, and share, so other event pros can find the show. Until next time, tame the mayhem.

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