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Intel didn’t just wow attendees at this year’s Event Marketing Summit once; it did it twice. Victor Torregroza, events program manager-corporate event marketing at Intel, was the first to impress audiences on April 30, the opening day of the event, with a table lined with champagne-filled flutes that attendees could grab on their way in. It was his homage to the event’s 10th anniversary (thanks Victor!). On the last day of the event (May 2), Joe English, creative director-corporate events at Intel, did it again.

Men love beer more than women love chocolate, Lesya Lysyj, cmo at Heineken and closing keynoter at the Event Marketing Summit on May 2, told the nearly 500 marketers in the room as she opened her discussion of the Heineken brand’s attack on the sinking beer category in 2011. The brand saw that, although the category in general was flat or declining, the specialty and craft beer markets represented all the growth. The brand set out to position itself as part of that growing demo and “challenge the norms” of the big beer brewers, Lysyj said.

The second day of the Event Marketing Summit (May 1) opened up with a keynote by Scott Schenker, vp-global events at SAP, who spoke not only as a marketer but also a visionary forecasting the future of the event marketing industry (sponsored by ewi Worldwide). With the WikiLeaks releases still fresh on folks’ minds, Schenker focused on disruption and change forged by the new trend of “people to people marketing.” He said, “Face-to-face marketing is no longer enough.

Michelle Klein, vp-content, digital and communications at Diageo, whose Smirnoff brand received an Ex Award at the 10th annual Event Marketing Summit’s awards gala on April 30 for its Nightlife Exchange Project, wowed the crowd earlier in the day as the opening keynote speaker at the Sheraton Hotel and Towers in Chicago (sponsored by Fish Technologies).
Describing the Nightlife Exchange Project as the “sweetspot” between digital and physical, Klein explained how she harnessed the online community to create an event that on Nov. 27 took place in 50 countries.