CEMA Summit Poll Results Are Surprising

If you walked into the opening main stage presentation at the CEMA Summit, held Aug. 4-6 in the Seattle Convention Center’s Summit Building, you might have thought the corporate event marketers in attendance were celebrating a colleague’s birthday. They smiled and watched as dozens of balloons floated from the ceiling, perched above a round table.

A person at each table used a crank mechanism to move helium balloons suspended from fishing lines up and down to represent responses to multiple-choice questions posed by Jeffrey Rogers, a host at Projectory, an event experience company whose mission is to inject excitement and fun into events through uplifting formats.

Projectory co-founder Oren Berkovich said the “floating opinion” format is an interesting way to solve business problems ConveningCEMA audiences were treated to balloon voting – an analog alternative to gauging the mood of the room, typically achieved through standard online voting tools, where responses were aggregated and posted on a large screen in real time. Additionally, this novel approach livened up the atmosphere and helped foster meaningful discussion about the ups and downs of event industry trends.

Curt Wagner is digital editor at Convene.