Rodney Hart: Hello and welcome to Event Perspectives. Another episode, and another one I’m really excited about. I’m joined by Brent Turner, EVP of Strategy and Solutions at Opus Agency. Brent, you’ve been on some of our stages and we’ve been talking together in different places. There are so many interesting things you have to say. How are you feeling about being on Event Perspectives?
Brent Turner: I’m questioning your taste and judgment, but I’m well — and I’m happy to be here. I’m not so sure how you or your audience will feel at the end, but I’m here for it.
Rodney Hart: I’m confident they’re going to get a ton out of this. On this show, we go over people’s journeys into events, because they’re almost never linear. Before we get going, let’s do an icebreaker. Brent, what is something you are obsessed with right now — and it does not have to be work-related?
Brent Turner: Mine are both tangentially work-related, so I’ve got two. First, I’m obsessed with self-driving cars. Earlier this year in Vegas, I got to ride in a ZOOX — the first time ever. Now they’re in San Francisco and coming to Austin, similar to Waymo. The difference between ZOOX and Waymo is that a Waymo is basically a car — you can see where the steering wheel would be. A ZOOX is like a meeting pod on wheels. Up to four people can sit two-and-two facing each other. I’ve been obsessed with the idea of turning those into mobile meeting pods — autonomous cars driving people all over a city for events. It feels like something out of sci-fi.
Rodney Hart: I’ve seen the Waymos, obviously — the proliferation of them especially in San Francisco. I have not seen a ZOOX. But I can already see the event plays there.
Brent Turner: They’re purpose-built little boxes on wheels with no steering wheel at all. Worth a Google — they’re kind of cute, they’re fun.
Rodney Hart: It’s interesting, right? We decided to make the first self-driving cars look like cars. But if there was never going to be a driver, why does it need to look like one? Someone from the future would look at us and say, “What was that space for?” Well, we used to have drivers, so we couldn’t envision a model without one.
Brent Turner: Exactly. And that’s what ZOOX shows you — the visioning.
Rodney Hart: You hinted at a second obsession?
Brent Turner: We made it maybe two or three minutes without saying AI, which is impressive. The second one is in the AI space — specifically, this concept that’s risen in Q2 of 2026: context as a service.
Anyone who’s used multiple AI agents knows the problem it’s trying to solve. When you have multiple agents, the hardest thing is switching between them. The lock-in happens because the AI starts to know you — your business, your preferences. The idea of context as a service is about portability. If I’m working in one system today and I switch employers or move into a different platform, I could port my full context into that new system so it already knows my background, my preferences, everything. The bigger players are all racing into this space, along with a lot of startups. I’ve become obsessed with it.
Rodney Hart: That resonates. Here at RainFocus, we’ve been doing a big push on Claude for a variety of reasons. But I do feel a bit of lock-in with the tools I started with early on — they know my voice, my topics, from fitness and diet to work language. So is context as a service basically a layer into these other tools? What does that look like?
Brent Turner: That’s partly why it’s an obsession — because they’re still figuring it out. One direction people are exploring is almost creating a knowledge repository of yourself — like a Wikipedia of your life. Movies you’ve liked, websites you’ve visited, emails you’ve sent. If you can build this massive personal context and then drop it into whatever AI system comes next, you eliminate the lock-in.
But then there’s the “bring yourself to work” problem — how do I bring everything about me into the model I use professionally, without having to retrain it every time I switch? And then imagine stacking that at the company level — all the events you’ve done, all the insights captured. How do you make that portable? That’s the concept of context as a service, and it’s fascinating to me.
Rodney Hart: I was actually just doing something like this for myself on a plane ride. I’ve always been a logger — I track my movies, my finances, my books — and I was thinking it would be interesting to do an annual summary, an annual letter, just for myself. But the data safeguard question is real too. When you change jobs, a lot of that knowledge and work — how do you carry that ethically? It reminds me of those Black Mirror episodes about uploading consciousness. I didn’t fully get it then, but now it’s starting to make a lot of sense.
Brent Turner: I could do another hour on it. So let’s move on.
Rodney Hart: You’re in strategy, and you’ve been at Opus Agency for — remind me — how many years?
Brent Turner: A little over seven.
Rodney Hart: Let’s talk about how you got here. How did you get into events? I’m always waiting for the person with a straight linear path.
Brent Turner: My career has always lived in this Venn diagram of content, technology, and experience. I’ve worked in publishing, advertising, marketing, and digital — in different spots. But here’s the story: I was working at MIT, in the Office of the President. We had a media company called MIT Technology Review, and I led all things digital. I went to one of our events — MTech, at the MIT Media Lab — and I was helping with marketing, butts in seats, all of that. Just another campaign.
But then I was sitting there watching the journalism come to life on stage, watching an audience laugh and react to a speaker — and I thought, this is cool. Because when I launched a digital campaign, the best I could do was watch analytics. With a Super Bowl campaign, I’d see Twitter reactions. But this? I was actually watching people in the room respond in real time.
And this was fifteen or so years ago, when emerging tech was starting to move into the physical world — the beginning of AR/VR, robotics, IoT. I thought: you can use emerging tech, be tight to content, and create an experience where you’re actually seeing how your choices in event design impact humans in a real, human way. I was hooked.
I found my way from MIT to an agency called Kramer, and then eventually to Opus.
Rodney Hart: Did you go into strategy right away?
Brent Turner: I work really well with Venn diagrams, so if you can put things in groups of three and put it on a slide, people assume you know strategy. But honestly, my career started in the late nineties where if you could spell HTML, you were a developer.
I eventually created a small company with a buddy, and it turned out we were an agency. We got acquired by a much larger advertising agency. That was the era when advertising agencies were just starting to use the word “strategist.” Before that, you had planners — account planners, media planners, connection planners. Planning and strategy meant the same thing. And as I’ve learned in the event space, there is so much strategic thinking in event planning. It’s the same heritage.
I don’t think I had the word “strategy” in my title until I was twenty years into my career — even though I was doing the same work. I just made better Venn diagrams.
Rodney Hart: You came from a role defined by data — digital, analytics. I’ve always seen myself as the data person in the room. When people would say “everyone loved it,” I’d say, show me the numbers. What’s your take on measurement in events? Should everything be measured? Are there things that shouldn’t be?
Brent Turner: Measurement rolls up into my team here at Opus, so we’ve done plenty of work in this space. Here’s the challenge with measurement, across any field: you are what you measure. If you measure everything in one area, you’re going to see a corner cut somewhere else. KPIs and dashboards and targets are important, but they have to be set in balance — or they’ll expose weaknesses that quickly offset everything else.
The second thing is that measurement is just a form of storytelling. If I told you event X got a hundred and event Y got a hundred — forget what the unit is, NPS or anything else — is that a good hundred or a bad hundred? You need context, benchmarks, comparison. One of my favorite metrics is the growth of the growth rate. When you’ve been growing 20% a year for three years, it starts to look flat. So you start talking about the rate of growth itself — and that is a storytelling mechanism.
Anything you want to measure: put it in balance, know the story you’re going to tell, and then have fun figuring out how to put those two things together.
Rodney Hart: Tell us what led you to your current role after Kramer.
Brent Turner: The short answer is our clients. Opus works with AWS, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce — on and on. If you’re a nerd who wants to be at the forefront of the world, you want to be working with the companies that are creating the technology. I snuck into the back door at MIT for years — that halo of people and ideas is something I gravitate toward.
And on the growth side, when I joined Opus, they were already on a high-scale trajectory. They had taken AWS re:Invent from zero to tens of thousands of attendees — the largest tech-centric event in the industry. There was a magnetism to that. The pandemic slowed everyone down a little, but now it’s back. It’s a simple three-circle Venn diagram: great clients, great work, great people. This agency has been built on that for four decades. I just hung on to the side of the rocket ship and have been riding along.
Rodney Hart: From a day-to-day perspective — what are clients coming to you for right now? Has that changed in this era?
Brent Turner: The hot thing of 2026, far and away, has been executive experiences. Every year there’s almost a theme that emerges across the client base — it’s very strange to watch. You’ll get six conversations on the same topic in a two-month window and think, are you all having secret meetings? Last year it was portfolio evolution — five years post-COVID, brands were rethinking their go-to-market motions. This year it’s exec experiences.
But what I think doesn’t get enough attention — and I’ve been on this soapbox since around Christmas — is that too many events today are running the same playbook they ran ten years ago. The keynote, the expo, the networking, maybe an AR/VR headset in a booth. Facial recognition for check-in. Projection mapping. All things we were doing a decade ago.
In those ten years, A/V costs have gone up, agency costs have gone up, the world has changed. And the things that used to be experimental add-ons — CSR, social give-back, now ESG — have filled the cup. The barnacles on the ship have grown. Every event has more things. But the core playbook? It lives on. So we have this interesting moment where it’s as hard to do events today as it was ten years ago, but we’re still working from a decade-old template.
Partially why exec experiences are such a hot topic is that they’re forcing brands to rethink. They need to reach executives. The future of marketing is face-to-face. And exec experiences are where the innovation is happening because it’s a harder, more prestigious audience that gets a little more investment. That’s what clients are bringing to us.
What we’re saying as an agency — and trying to rally the industry around — is: let’s demand innovation everywhere. Not just exec experiences. Everywhere.
Rodney Hart: I’m curious — is innovation also a requirement just to get butts in seats? The competition for people’s time and attention has never been higher.
Brent Turner: It’s a requirement. Here’s the paradox: there are more events than ever, but Freeman recently did a study showing that the number of events people are actually attending is declining. More events, fewer attendees. We’re also seeing social trends where people are just staying home more — even for things they want to do.
So in yet another Venn diagram: more events than ever, harder to get people to come than ever. The idea that “if we build it, they will come” is getting very clear to clients — that just isn’t true anymore.
The number one challenge in corporate events today is designing events from the inside out. Not budgets, not tech — it’s designing the event your boss wants, that you want, but not what your audience wants. If you take a page from product development, there’s always an obsession about your ICP, your persona. We’re starting to see that same obsession applied to events — especially at the executive level — because it’s simply so hard to attract them.
Saying something is exclusive isn’t exclusive anymore. You have to actually obsess over what will make it feel exclusive, interesting, worth choosing over the eighty-five other things competing for their time.
Rodney Hart: And with all of this AI proliferation — are events even winning the content argument anymore?
Brent Turner: We did a study with clients post-COVID on why people come to events. Before the pandemic, number one was always content, number two was networking. Post-COVID, content dropped all the way to number six. Because if we don’t make the live experience interesting, someone’s just going to hit their AI and get a summary. They’ll copy the transcript and put it into a corpus of knowledge they can reference later. That’s what we’re up against.
So we have to be a little entertaining. We’ve got to make it worth being live and together. But also, if someone’s trying to make the case to their boss to send them for four days and four hotel nights, and the whole argument is learning — in the age of AI summaries and instantaneous content everywhere — why go? That argument needs to change.
Rodney Hart: You’ve talked before about designing from the inside out. What’s the solution? If a client came to you and said they want to flip that — what would you guide them through?
Brent Turner: My personal soapbox: marketing, as a discipline, treats events like a channel — a go-to-market channel, a broadcast channel. And that framing fits all the challenges we just talked about.
Events are actually products. And we don’t treat them that way — unless you’re on the association side or the publisher side, like the Forresters and Gartners of the world.
Once you open the aperture and start thinking “I’m creating a product,” everything changes. I’ve used the magazine comparison before: sponsors and advertisers, subscribers, single-issue buyers — you can work down a full operating stack that maps perfectly to an event. Once you unlock the idea that we’re actually product developers and product designers, it changes how you think about every decision.
IDEO coined design thinking twenty years ago — human-centered design. Learn who your people are. Be empathetic to them. See what they want. If I were a head of events running a team right now, I would send my number two not to a PCMA or SEMA to learn how to do events better. I’d send them to a product management or product design class at Stanford’s D.School. There’s more to be learned out of that discipline about connecting with your customer and designing for humans than about managing costs and travel budgets.
If this industry can embrace the ideas and ideals of product development — management, marketing, design — you would see the whole profession elevate.
Rodney Hart: What does that mindset unlock practically? For someone listening who’s head-nodding but thinking, help me see it?
Brent Turner: On the tactical side: books like The Power of Moments talk about the ideas of peak-end theory and transition moments — the moments between the big things. In product design, when you close a menu, there’s an animation, a flow, a sound. They obsess over that. In event design, when the doors open after keynote and you walk into the expo — that is a design moment. Do we obsess over it? Usually not.
It’s not about saying the industry is missing things. It’s about figuring out where you could push a lever or deprioritize something because you’re thinking obsessively about your audience first.
On the more esoteric side: it starts to open up the language of brand. I worked on brands like New Balance and TomTom at different points in my career. There’s a famous Google and Corporate Executive Board study from years ago that compared consumer brand love for Apple and Target versus PwC and Cisco. Everybody assumed Apple and Target would win by a mile. The exact opposite was true. Because if you’re a CFO deciding to bring in RainFocus — that decision has career stakes attached to it. You’re not just choosing software. You are wearing that decision. You can’t just return it if you don’t like it.
So in B2B, when you start thinking like a product designer, you start to think about how the thing you’re making becomes part of somebody’s identity. How do I create something at this event that people want to be part of — that they want imprinted on them, and that imprints the brand on them?
One of our clients had a permanent tattoo parlor at their user conference. There’s a photo of an attendee with the company’s branded icon — from the icon library — permanently tattooed on his wrist. That is fandom. That is belonging in its most human, purpose-driven sense. We often forget to ask: how am I creating a space for belonging?
Rodney Hart: Where are we in the AI implementation journey for events — early stages, further along? And what does AI actually mean for this industry?
Brent Turner: There are three buckets that help make AI tangible, because it can mean everything and nothing at the same time.
The first is AI for productivity — what you and I use in our day jobs. Claude, better emails, better documents, better prep.
The second is AI in how we deliver events. Venue sourcing tools, collaborative AI platforms, production tools that are starting to get AI-infused.
The third — and the most exciting — is AI for the attendee experience. Personalization is the headline, but once you get into that bucket you can start stacking: AI for hospitality and making lives easier on-site; AI for surprise and delight; AI for content and learning — co-pilots, session recommendations, real-time summaries.
As an industry, we’re getting better across all three. Individual productivity is the most mature. AI-infused delivery tools are growing. The next frontier is the attendee experience side — moving from photo booths and AI matchmaking to capital-P personalization, improved hospitality, and the full unlock that’s coming in the next two years. It’s going to be a very exciting period for event design.
Brent Turner: One of the axes I’d put on a quadrant right now is AI as answers vs. AI as action. We are saturated in AI for answers. The next unlock is agentic AI — AI that actually does things.
Microsoft, AWS, Google — in Q2 of this year, a lot of personal-use agents got dropped into everyday tools. Companies have been sprinkling the word “agent” for three years without people really feeling what it means. But now, the average event professional is about to experience the difference between answers and action. That maturity curve is where the next wave of innovation lives.
Rodney Hart: And what I love about this moment is that the companies we serve are building these things themselves. So the expectation is that the event reflects the technology. If you’re doing all this cool tech for your customers, your event should feel like that too. That’s the exciting part — figuring out what that looks like brought to life.
Brent Turner: We’re probably going to be embarrassed watching this recording in two years, because how dated our logic and thinking will seem. A new rocket ship is coming into event design and experience design — rooted in those promises of personalization, agentic action, and human connection. The next two to three years should be a real unlock phase.
Rodney Hart: One of the questions we ask all guests: the event industry is famously not for the faint of heart. Fires to put out, hard deadlines, no kicking the date back. What’s the best piece of advice you’d give — or that was given to you — for aspiring event professionals?
Brent Turner: I have two. The first is something I learned from a mentor: you’re always creating two experiences. The experience of working together — with your team, your vendors, your partners — and the experience for your attendees. It doesn’t matter if you’re brand side, agency side, or event tech. We are all creating these moments of coming together because it is an experience. And if you over-index on one and neglect the other, something fails. Remember your job is to obsess over both experiences, in balance.
The second is a quadrant — for anyone early in their career. On one axis: brand side or agency/professional services side. On the other axis: do you want to be a manager and leader of people, or do you want to deep-dive into your craft as an individual contributor?
Now you have four boxes. Too often, early in careers, people chase titles or perceived prestige without understanding their own intrinsic motivation. What actually makes you happy? There’s opportunity and success in every quadrant. But it’s hard to switch between quadrants once you’re on a trajectory. The best advice is: obsess early. Find which quadrant resonates with your intrinsic motivation, double down, and build there. You’ll find your happiness and you’ll find your success.
Rodney Hart: Alright, lightning round — fastest answer you can think of. TikTok or LinkedIn?
Brent Turner: LinkedIn.
Rodney Hart: One book everyone should read?
Brent Turner: The Power of Moments by the Heath Brothers.
Rodney Hart: Best airline?
Brent Turner: Delta.
Rodney Hart: Window seat or aisle?
Brent Turner: Red-eye, window. Everything else, aisle.
Rodney Hart: Networking sessions or educational workshops?
Brent Turner: Educational workshops.
Rodney Hart: True or false — networking is your favorite part of attending events?
Brent Turner: False.
Rodney Hart: Favorite RainFocus feature?
Brent Turner: The MCP and connectors you’re about to launch — or have just launched, depending on when this goes live. Our teams are vibe coding, agentic engineering, and there’s some cool stuff coming on top of the new admin MCP. Stay tuned. Or maybe it’s out now.
Rodney Hart: True or false — you’ve hosted an event in more than three countries?
Brent Turner: True. And a quick plug — a couple of weeks ago, Event Marketer published our 2026 Grand X Award-winning program done for Google: London, LA, and Singapore. It’s the first pure B2B program to win the Grand X in almost three decades of Event Marketer awards. The first B2B to win the ultimate prize. We’re incredibly proud of it.
Rodney Hart: Three countries for one event. Amazing — congratulations. Keynote speaker or panel discussion?
Brent Turner: Speaker — with the twist of our friends at Projectory. You’ve got to give some interactivity. A great speaker plus a format like Projectory beats a panel every time.
Rodney Hart: True or false — you pack gym clothes when attending an event you’re planning?
Brent Turner: True. You’ve got to look like you’re trying to work out, even if it’s just wearing them to get coffee in the morning.
Rodney Hart: Brent, thank you so much. This was a really fun conversation. What’s the best place for people to follow up with you?
Brent Turner: Our agency website is opusagency.com — you can see our work and connect there. If you want to get into the depth of nerding, my personal site is brentturner.is. Come find me.
Rodney Hart: Brent, thank you so much for your time.
Brent Turner: Thank you. It’s a pleasure.