For 10 years, EM has been championing b-to-b all-stars, delving into their career journeys, portfolios, best practices and industry forecasts. Meet this year’s crew: The 2026 B-to-B Dream Team.
Tom Flynn, VP-Global Events & Experiences, B-to-B, American Express
Across 16 years of experience, Tom Flynn has touched nearly every facet of event marketing, and he can trace his career back to a single college assignment.
It was a competitive group project for a sports marketing class that tasked students with creating a mock sponsorship activation strategy to enhance KeyBank’s partnership with Syracuse University Athletics. Flynn’s team ended up winning. And somewhere between developing audience insights and building an execution strategy, the industry reeled him in.
Flynn jumped straight from campus life to a career in events, taking on a role at Octagon directly after college. There, he represented a brand that launched the first-ever 4G network, which came to life across grassroots efforts spanning 5K races, street teams, pop-ups and local sponsorships.
One boutique guerrilla marketing firm, where he learned about the value of attention, and one global experiential agency, where he managed high-profile accounts for major sports properties, later, Flynn landed at American Express, where he now serves as vp of global b-to-b events and experiences.
Over the last decade, he’s been busy managing and evolving Amex’s b-to-b experiential efforts, and currently oversees 15 marketers operating across the U.S., APAC and EMEA. The team sits within the brand’s enterprise events center of excellence, alongside consumer and internal experiences, and together, produces more than 300 events per year—all executed through a curated, customer-centric lens.
“It’s about, how do we become surgical and intentional with how we package these experiences up for the right moments and the right audiences to facilitate the right relationships?” Flynn says.
Case in point: the brand’s proprietary Leading Edge event series, a flagship program within American Express’ global b-to-b portfolio. The three-part series is hosted annually across New York, London and Sydney (rotating with Singapore for APAC), and convenes approximately 200 of Amex’s top corporate customers—think: Fortune 500 decision-makers—for two and a half days of content, networking and entertainment.
“The caliber of speakers we attract is a real point of pride, including our ceo,” says Flynn.
But Leading Edge wasn’t always the cohesive package it is today. When Flynn inherited it in 2021, the brand was running two event programs in parallel, one in New York and one in APAC, that essentially served the same customer base, but had no unifying factors. So he burned the playbook and built Leading Edge. Since taking over, he’s elevated the caliber of audience from roughly 30 percent of attendees at vp-level titles or above, to today, 80 percent at the vp level or higher.
Flynn is also game for taking creative risks. To mark the brand refresh of the Business Platinum Card, which provides members with access to premium dining experiences, he delved beyond a traditional dinner and aimed to deliver “benefit reinforcement” in a big way for a select group of high-value cardmembers.
Partnering with four James Beard Award-winning chefs from the Global Dining Access program, his team executed three intimate, multisensory culinary experiences featuring a four-course meal designed to reinforce the Platinum value proposition. As each course was served, floor-to-ceiling projection-mapping sequences visually brought the story behind each dish to life. Across the events totaling roughly 100 attendees, social posts generated roughly 250,000 impressions, which is exponentially more than the average cardmember event program yields, Flynn says.
“By engaging all five senses, we were able to drive stronger brand recall and genuine emotional resonance,” he explains. “It’s the kind of experience that’s hard to replicate anywhere else, which is exactly the point.”
The rise of micro-communities is also on Flynn’s radar, and his team is honing a hyper-local event strategy in key markets across the U.S., and globally, in response to people’s increasing desire to spend time with their tribe exchanging ideas and swapping war stories. Of late, Amex has been curating 12- to 15-person roundtables, including an intimate dinner for 13 cfos hosted in Paris earlier this month.
“The shift we’re making across the board is placing the guest list at the center of the design process. Who’s in the room is often more important than who’s on stage,” Flynn says. “I’m paying close attention to the rise of niche communities… People want to connect with like-minded peers in intimate settings, so my team has been investing heavily in local events. The appetite for that kind of gathering is real and growing.”
Photos: Courtesy of Tom Flynn
