 Live from London, England, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Summit London 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back to London, everybody. This is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. It's been an incredible week for theCUBE, three events this week in London. I think we had six events worldwide. We started out yesterday with a public sector session, a special mini session we did for Teresa Carlson at AWS headquarters, and we did an impact investor event last night, of course, all day here at the AWS Summit in London at Excel Center. 12,000 people, we're going to wrap up now. My good friend, Kim Myers here, he's the managing director of MCI Experience. Kim, thanks for coming on. My pleasure. First time on theCUBE. You got to give you a sticker. Thank you, mate. You know, great to see you. It's awesome. Great to be here. To have you. You are a branding expert. We've had a lot of conversations about this. You and I go way back. We do, yeah. Brand is everything. It's every touch point. I mean, you were telling me a story last night and I'll let you pick it up from here is of Apple, when you see the Apple logo. But so why is Brand is so important? What's MCI Experience and how are you helping brands? Yeah, well, Dave, I think it's really amazing. Like this event today, you know, we have a lot of technology out there today. We are really digitally enabled and that's great. I mean, it's amazing what we can do now with technology. But, you know, it also is a little distracting. And in fact, there was a recent study that said that kids haven't developed social skills because they feel more comfortable communicating online. You know, so I think the technology is really great and it's important. But that human to human connection is really the thing that makes the difference. And I think brands are starting to recognize that that actually live experiences do cut through the clutter, the digital clutter. And getting people together with common interests, getting them engaged, letting them participate, really makes a difference in terms of their affinity and loyalty and even advocacy for your brand. So MCI Experience does that? Yeah, that's, we essentially work with companies across a lot of industries, but certainly the tech industry at helping companies develop ways of engaging with their audiences in more meaningful ways. And actually, it's a very human-centric approach. So basically the way we look at it is it's not so much about logistics. That's important, of course, right? You got to register people. You got to have so many breakout rooms. You got to have all that stuff. Got to have, you know, weights and everything. But it's really more about understanding your audience and where they derive benefit and making sure that you're meeting that need. And that's really where your brand starts to benefit. So we use a design thinking methodology we're really very focused on the audience using empathy and ideation and, you know, just really, really getting to know who those guys are, like this crowd, and making sure that every touch point of the experience, how it smells, the temperature, the lighting, everything. Smells. How it smells. 70% of your memory is from smell. You know, and yet we never even think about it. It's weird. Yeah, when you're at an event. Yeah, you don't even think about how it smells. You don't even want to smell the event. I think that's like right, exactly. So it's that sort of multi-sensory engaging aspect of what we do is what MCI experience specializes in and working with clients to help them sort of look at new ways of creating experiences that really engage their audiences and really create community around those audiences in terms of loyal fans and customers. So we're here at Amazon. I mean, you see this audience, obviously a developer crowd. Yeah. What are your thoughts here, just walking around? Well, as I was saying, I think we were talking about this earlier. You know, a developer crowd doesn't like flashy marketing because they're suspicious of it, right? Yeah, not like you, Dave, that's high, right, exactly. And this is perfect tone. I think the tone created here is great. It's a little rough and ready and that's great. And that's how it should be because that's developers are more interested in the content than the show. And I think it's got the audience bang on. So how do you use data to inform this brand experience? Yeah, so data is becoming obviously really important and event technology is, you know, it's amazing today, the kinds of things we can do. I mean, we can track people and monitor them and take their temperature. I mean, if we want to, you know, you can do an amazing number of things. See how they smell. Exactly, see how they smell. And the thing about it is that data is important, of course it is, but insights even more important. And that means using data in the right way, the right analytics, asking the right questions, not just relying on demographics, but really getting to know people and building personas and understanding who your audience is. And I think that's the two things need to fit hand in hand in hand. Data is plentiful, actionable insights you're saying are not necessarily. Not necessarily, not necessarily. And that I think is really, really important. You know, we call it empathy planning, but it's kind of like walking in the shoes of your audience. Like, would you like this? Would you be happy with this? Or would you find this long queue to register annoying? You know, you have to sort of, you know, actually get in there, get in their shoes and feel it just like they're going to feel it. Well, sometimes it's hard to predict. I mean, this is a pretty large venue, but it was packed today. I don't think they could hold many more people. So I guess you have to say, sorry, we got to cut it off at this because of the experience. I mean, make hard decisions like that. Is that what you kind of recommend? Yeah, I think, well, the other thing too is, you know, our attention span, I was told me recently that our attention span is like less than a goldfish. I don't know anymore. But you know, one thing about the audience now is that they don't need to be polite and they don't need to pay attention to boring content and they don't need to do any of that because they're empowered. Right, exactly. How many events have I been to where the entire audience is like looking at their phones or their iPads or their computers and checking out on the content, you know? So if you really want to engage people, you need to make sure that the experience really resonates with them. And having said that, you need to use technology because we live in this kind of on-live world. And people say to me like, well, what's on-live? Like, you ever drive a sat-nav? You know, you're driving, but you're being instructed by an application and a lot of what we do today, whether you're finding the bank on your phone, you know, the dentist or your phone or you're doing this or that, we're connected in both ways. And so I think that's really important that we recognize that you can't tell people to turn their phones off. You can't necessarily use technology in an interruptive way. It needs to be part of how people live their lives around those things. So I've observed that we do a lot of these events and these events have become like rock concerts. And sometimes you say, wow, this is sort of over the top. Now, that's not, if I'm inferring right, that's not necessarily a bad thing if your audience is into it. If your audience is, you know, some IT guy who provisions loans, you know, every day and gets out to Las Vegas once a year. Maybe that's an okay thing. I think it is an okay. There's really understanding the audience that is the key. It is understanding the audience that is a good okay thing. And you know, you want to have your audience entertained and engaged and, you know, have fun and you want to tell people about it, like I'm in Las Vegas, you're not. You know, you want people to get really fired up about what you're doing. And by the way, they're going to give you your brand credit for that. They're going to say, you know, bam, I was at this event, it rocked. It was amazing. There was great entertainment. There was also great content. There was great networking, you know, and the beer wasn't all that cheap. So, you know, you get all that stuff together and you have a really great time. So you're now building out a team in London. I am, yeah. MCI experience. Tell me about the team and your vision. Okay, so MCI is a big company. We're in 63 countries around the world. So we're not small fry. But the truth is, you know, the big part of our business has been PCO, is PCO, professional congress organizers, a lot of association events and that sort of thing and meetings, planning and that sort of thing. And of course, today, experiences are changing and it's not about just the logistics. It's really about, again, understanding your audience, using strategy and creative to create compelling experiences. And that's what MCI experience is doing. And we're doing it here in the UK. We're getting set up and it's going really, really well and we're going to roll it out. You know, it's going to go around the world. So we're working with some fantastic brands, doing some fantastic projects. So we're all really excited about it. So follow-up question. Other than that, you're awesome and you are. I mean, you really have been an expert at this. You've worked at IDG, you've worked at GPJ, you've worked at Freeman and on and on and on. You've seen it all. You've been around too much. Yeah, exactly. But you've seen the good, the bad and the ugly. And now you've taken that experience and you're bringing it to MCI experience, no pun intended, and you're trying to build out a sort of a next generation experience platform. But other than the fact that you're awesome, why should I work with you? Well, I'll tell you, I think most of the clients that we work with come to us saying, we don't know, we don't know. And I think that's really, really important. I always tell this story. It's called The Drunkard's Paradox, where a drunk man is underneath a lamp post patting the ground and another man walks by and says, so what are you doing? And he says, I'm looking for my keys. And so the other guy gets down on his hands and knees. He's patting around and then he says, did you drop your keys right here under the lamp post? He goes, no. I dropped them across the street in the dark. Well, then why are you looking here? Because the light is much better here. And I tell you that I have a lot of experience in this business and events professionals and even some experienced agencies tend to look where the light is better, not where the breakthrough ideas are. And I think we are committed to making sure that we work really closely with clients, really understand their brand, really understand who they're trying to build relationships with and beg, borrow and steal from other disciplines in an intersectional way to create new kinds of opportunities for engagement. One of the things that the mantra inside, one of the many mantras inside of Amazon is raise the bar. I was at their UK headquarters yesterday and see raise the bar signs all over the place. It's not a rinse and repeat culture. And that's really what you're saying here. That's easy to rinse and repeat. It's easy to look for the keys where the light is better. The light is better, right? But that's not transformational. That's not transformational. It's really awesome having you. I'll give you the last word on the conference. Well, I think the conference was a great day here. And I think just testimony to that is how long people stayed. I mean, they stayed till the very end, you know? And they were engaged and lots of great conversations were going on. So fantastic, well done to AWS and to Amazon web services. And yeah, more to come. Kim, pleasure having you. Thanks for coming to theCUBE. All right, thank you for watching everybody. That's a wrap here from London. Check out siliconangle.com for all the news. Thecube.net is where all you'll find all these videos, wikibon.com for the research. This is Dave Vellante signing out from London. Thanks for watching.