What Happened:
On a recent Event Marketing Redefined episode with host Matt Kleinrock, Labcorp's Jody Hall (Director of Global Event Management) and Argen's Michelle Khair (Event Coordinator) detailed where event personalization has moved past customization, and where AI is letting the practice scale at trade-show size.
Hall's frame is intentional design: map the key stakeholders whose behavior you actually need to change at the event, write the objectives down, and use them as the north star every downstream decision runs through. Her Labcorp team gamified a tier-one booth with a branded racing video game that doubled as a knowledge-gap diagnostic, then drove personalized follow-up content based on which questions attendees got wrong.
Khair's frame is architecting moments: at Argen's tier-one show in Chicago, she moved the top-customer party from a product showroom to Wrigley Field's batting cages, which read as a "bucket list check-off" for guests and pulled new business in behind the loyalty lift. She also built a packed education session by bringing in a social media expert to teach dental-lab owners how to grow their accounts.
More Insight:
Hall says there’s a distinction between customization and personalization. Customization is when you let attendees pick the color of the swag or the size of the shirt. Personalization uses data, preferences, and behavior to design an experience that was clearly built for the individual. Most teams that say "we personalize" are still customizing.
Hall's methodology comes from the Event Canvas, which forces planners to identify the stakeholders they're designing for and the behavior change they need to drive. "You've really got to zone in on those key stakeholders that you need to change their behavior in some way," she said. Booth layout, swag, food, and follow-up all run through that filter, which keeps personalization from collapsing into a million unconnected micro-touches.
Khair's craft is building moments that stick. "I look at personalization as basically leaving your fingerprint on their memory," she said. The Wrigley Field move worked because it intersected an emotional bucket-list moment with the business relationship. The social media session worked because it taught dental-lab owners something Argen doesn't sell, signaling the brand cared about their success beyond the next purchase.
AI is the scale layer underneath both methodologies. Khair uses Manus AI for per-lead email curation, ChatGPT and Claude for ICP research, and is piloting RFID-based persona detection at the booth so reps get talking points based on whether the attendee is a lab owner or a technician. Hall uses AI to pull stakeholder context and competitor framing into planning. Both flagged the limit: AI scales the data work, but the "what's going to move the needle" call still sits with the practitioner.
"We're competing for people's time, and how when you personalize, that's how you win," Khair said. The implication for budget defense lands in the same place: event teams that move from customization to outcome design earn the right to point at behavior change as the ROI metric.
Listen to the full episode here.