Brand strategy.
Found, not invented.

Every event agency promises an unforgettable experience. Almost none can explain why one works, or prove the next one will.

At Ansera, the answer was scattered across two places that had never been connected. One was decades of producer instinct, held in the heads of people who had run thousands of general sessions. The other was a growing body of research on awe, attention and memory that nobody in the building had time to read.

Clients don't buy awe. They buy confidence that their agenda will work.

Instinct can't be audited. Evidence can. If our creative judgment could be traced back to research, every recommendation would carry its own proof, and the conversation with a client would move from taste to outcomes.

Build a system that reads the research so producers don't have to.

AweBot pairs academic rigor with practitioner wisdom. It distills both into a ledger of defensible claims, then puts those claims to work inside the tools producers already need at each stage of a project, from the first sales call to the post-event review.

Three layers, one shared vocabulary.

Research engine. A crawler pulls studies from academic databases on awe, neuroscience, learning theory and experiential design. Interviews with Ansera staff capture what veteran producers know from the floor. Both streams feed one knowledge base.

Claims ledger. The most actionable findings are distilled into rated claims, each tagged to its source. The ledger exports as a CSV and feeds back into the system. At last count: 56 source studies and 59 rated claims.

Production tools. Five tools live and a sixth in build, mapped from the first client conversation through the live show. Each stage hands its output to the next: diagnostic findings shape the creative brief, and the brief becomes the peak moment plan. All of them speak the language of the Engagement Framework: curiosity as the baseline, deep engagement in bursts, awe saved for the peaks.

The flagship tool turns an agenda into a scored, cited report a client can hold.

The Run of Show Diagnostic takes a client's show flow and supporting materials and grades them across four domains: attention, participation, flow and emotional impact. Every score carries a confidence range. Every finding cites the research behind it. The output is packaged as a client-facing document.

For one 1,300-attendee international conference, it scored the agenda 57 out of 100. The open was purposeful and the close was exceptional. But the middle day ran 97 percent passive, with no time built in anywhere for people to absorb what they'd heard. The report ranked six fixes by impact and effort, starting with the cheapest: one pause per session.

A point of view on awe became something a salesperson can hand a client and a producer can act on.

Building the system was the easier part. Changing how a team works is harder, and adoption inside Ansera is still uneven. That's by design: these are living tools, built to evolve as producers push back on them.

The next step closes the loop. Live Audit, anchored by Immersion Neuro wearables that track heart-rate engagement in the room, will test the plan against the rated claims and against what attendees actually felt.

Before there was a method, there was a point of view.

Iacono Productions spent more than three decades producing corporate events out of Cincinnati, with strategy, design, media, fabrication and staging under one roof. What it lacked was a clear statement of why its work was different. I wrote one: five beliefs that still shape how I think about live experience.

• We believe in the power of live events.
• We believe in taking audiences on a journey.
• We believe in creating immersive experiences.
• We believe in participants, not attendees.
• We believe in making events sharable.

In 2019 Iacono merged with Live Technologies and became L!VE. As brand guardian, I carried those beliefs into the new identity and its guidelines.

Every agenda is already a story. Usually nobody has written it.

Most multi-day meetings are built as a stack of sessions, each owned by a different speaker. Audiences don't remember the stack. They remember a shape: where it started, where it rose and where it landed. The beliefs would only matter if a creative team could turn them into that shape on every pitch, not just the inspired ones.

Give every event a thematic journey.

Joseph Campbell's hero's journey shows how a story moves from a call to adventure to a return, changed. In Resonate, Nancy Duarte finds a similar pattern in great presentations and calls it the sparkline. I applied the same thinking to events that run over several days. Each general session becomes a chapter with its own job, and the theme carries the audience from a call to adventure to a call to action. On the Shire SHP555 launch, the three sessions were named for the arc itself: Lead, Learn, Liftoff.

One structure under every pitch.

The journey set the spine. Around it, every creative response followed the same sequence, so a team could build something ambitious on a proposal deadline.

Theme narrative

A single idea drawn from the client's own language, with alternatives on the table.

Identity

A logo family, palette and type system so the theme reads at every scale.

Attendee journey

Touchpoints from the first email to the airport to the badge, so the story starts before anyone reaches the room.

Staging

Two complete scenic concepts, each shown in its walk-in, presenter and awards looks.

Engagement

Ideas that turn attendees into participants: learning zones, team games, photo moments, service projects.

The same method, tested in three very different rooms.

L!VE won the three-year Rotary contract, extending a partnership that had already run nine years.

The method made the agency's best thinking repeatable. Beliefs written as a positioning statement became a structure a team could run on deadline, for a 250-seat product launch or a 12,000-seat arena.

The method also raised a question I couldn't answer at the time. Do participants really remember more than attendees? Does the shape of an agenda change what people keep? That question is what AweBot was built to answer.

Then I turned the method on L!VE itself.

In 2023 I led Trends Troop, a new L!VE service that packaged megatrends, event production trends and design trends into a report for clients and planners.

A year later the agency still had no single line that said why to choose it.

So I led the USP project.

It ran on the same three moves I use for clients. Context: an audit of 16 competitors' messaging, which found that none of them used a discernible unique selling proposition. That was open territory. Excavation: interviews with clients from Lane Bryant to Rotary International, which surfaced five themes: reputation, brand focus, fearlessness, creativity and service. One client put the first theme simply: they produce a better version of ourselves. Expression: each theme was written as a candidate line and scored against five criteria: trust, difference, concise and conversational, inclusive and on brand.

The recommendation built on reputation: We make moments matter, and this moment is yours. L!VE adopted it. It became the agency's positioning, and it closes the Rotary response itself.

Three companies, more than a century of experience, and no shared language.

In 2025, L!VE merged with High Output and Sardis. Together they brought 220+ event professionals, offices in Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati and Columbus, and more than 100 years of combined experience. They also brought three names, three sets of loyal clients and three different ways of describing the same work. I led the brand consolidation.

A merger brand can't be the sum of its parts. It needs a reason to exist that none of the parts had alone.

The obvious move was to lead with scale: more people, more gear, more cities. Every production company makes that claim. None of the three had claimed the outcome clients actually hire them for: the moment a room stops watching and starts feeling, when someone sets down their phone and leans in.

Build the brand around awe.

The mission became crafting moments of awe: emotionally charged encounters that inspire presence, move people and deepen human connection. The vision is a world where awe is the true currency of experiences. The mark follows the idea. Six ovals grow outward like a sound wave, a metaphor for an experience that keeps resonating after the moment has passed.

The voice compresses it into phrases a team can rally around: Awe beats distraction. Experiences felt first. And one word, always lowercase, for the feeling itself: chills.

A promise of awe needs a model behind it.

I wrote the Engagement Framework so the brand would mean the same thing to a salesperson, a producer and a client. It describes three states. Curiosity is the sustained baseline, and people have to feel safe before they'll lean in. Deep engagement is the activated state, switched on in bursts. Awe is the peak: rare, brief and big enough to shift how people see. Awe is the top of the arc, not its baseline. The rule that falls out of it is simple: design the baseline, schedule the peaks.

A complete system, from mission statement to road case.

Story

Mission, vision and four values written as commands: Find a way. Do what's right. Keep your edge. Remember why.

Identity

A lowercase geometric wordmark with the echo mark, in light, dark and one-color versions. High Output's mark was redrawn into the system, keeping its iconic H to hold its equity in the region.

Color and type

Eclipse, Aurora and Mist as the primary palette, with Spark, Halo and Gravity as accents. Proxima Nova for headlines, Roboto Slab for reading.

Voice

Four pillars (visionary not vague, human not mechanical, bold not brash, purposeful not ornamental), a shared lexicon and a stand-alone writing guide.

Photography and motion

Direction for capturing real reactions, including a burst treatment that shows the rising action and peak of a single moment. Motion built on the same metaphor as the mark: energy echoing outward.

Applications

Business communications, creative decks, apparel, road cases, the intranet, and six sales personas, from the Prestige Orchestrator to the Strategist.

One company, one voice and one model of what it delivers.

Ansera launched in 2026 with a single identity across all three legacy teams. The Engagement Framework ended up doing the most work. It anchors the capabilities story, where Ansera describes itself as grounded in the science of awe, and it gives every AweBot tool the same vocabulary.

The guidelines are labeled version 1.0, and I treat them that way. A merged company keeps learning who it is, and the brand has to keep up.

Sales had a list. What it didn't have was an order.

ZoomInfo delivered companies that matched Ansera's filters, but nothing ranked them. Every rep decided alone which ones to chase, or didn't. Leadership couldn't see which leads were active, and there was no baseline to show whether the ZoomInfo spend was producing pipeline at all. Sales leadership asked me to fix it.

Reps don't need more leads. They need a reason to call this one first.

The bottleneck was research. The best reps did it in their heads, inconsistently, and only when they had time. If the research arrived finished, with a grade and a reason attached, the first call would start from something specific instead of a cold guess.

Let AI do the research, and let the grade carry the reason.

I built a crawler with Claude that researches every company against a lead scoring rubric I wrote: 22 signal questions about public events, internal events and overall fit. Does the company run a recurring flagship event? Is it hiring an events director? Is there a named senior stakeholder who owns the program? Is an outside agency already in place? Every answer comes back with its source. The results roll up into a Lead Signal Report: a grade, an estimated production budget tier and a short narrative of the opportunity, written so a rep can use it in the first sentence of an email.

Two archetypes, three grades, and one rule that keeps people in charge.

Ansera wins two kinds of clients: companies that produce several high-production events a year, and companies that stake everything on one flagship. The rubric tags each lead by archetype and routes the questions by vertical, so a closed-door life sciences meeting isn't marked down for having no public registration page. It also screens for red flags, including "RFP fodder": companies that issue RFPs to satisfy procurement rather than to find a new partner.

A · Strong

A clear archetype match, no red flags, an identifiable senior stakeholder and a strong showing on the signals that apply.

B · Moderate

An archetype match with one gap, such as an unclear stakeholder or partial signal coverage.

C · Deferred

A red flag, or no resemblance to either archetype. Set aside and revisited later.

The rule: a C doesn't automatically mean exclude. If a salesperson knows more than the research shows, that knowledge wins. The AI does the research. People make the call.

A system, a sales program and the case for scaling it.

The rollout. 400 leads have been researched and graded so far. In the first round, four account executives each received 50: of those 200, 10 earned an A, 92 went straight to reps as B leads, and 98 were deferred instead of wasting a first call. AEs work every qualified lead with one of two three-email tracks. Qualification leads with capability. Differentiation opens with the hook from the Lead Signal Report, then offers to run a Run of Show Diagnostic on the prospect's own event as the reason to meet. That ties Pipeline directly to AweBot.

The report. For one rep's list of 23 leads, the crawler returned 8 A, 12 B and 3 C. Each company gets a full profile: every signal answered with its source, the named stakeholder where one exists, any incumbent agency (a chance to displace or complement it), and an estimated production tier. It also catches bad data. One lead that ZoomInfo listed as a steel company turned out to be a small disability-services nonprofit, and it was graded C before anyone spent a call on it.

The proposal. I also wrote the case for scaling it: three build paths (a no-code enrichment pipeline, a zero-cost upload tool, and a full API integration in Salesforce) with their costs, setup time and honest caveats. AI flags a brand in transition; a human confirms it. Scoring takes a few rounds of tuning against real leads. And if the list is weak, automation only makes the weakness faster.

Adoption by design. Salespeople don't love Salesforce, so the plan brings the leads to them: a ranked morning queue with a score and a one-line reason, delivered where they already work.

Every rep now starts with a ranked list and a reason to call.

400 leads are graded and in reps' hands, each with a report they can quote from. Reply rates are still coming in. The measure that matters is whether graded leads turn into meetings, and the grades now logged in Salesforce give sales the baseline to show it.

Pipeline is a smaller system than AweBot, and that's the point. The same approach works at any scale: find the real bottleneck, build the narrowest tool that removes it, and keep the judgment with the people closest to the customer.

A respected firm that needed to look as good as its buildings.

BHDP is an architecture and interior design firm whose work runs from higher education science buildings to corporate campuses, for clients like Merck, Boston Scientific and CareSource. It wanted to update its identity and brand to compete harder for new work. Most of that competition happened on paper: qualification forms, RFP responses and presentations, stacked next to every other firm's.

For an architecture firm, the proposal is the first building a client walks through.

A selection committee meets a firm through its forms, its org chart and its presentation long before it sees a finished space. If those pieces feel considered, the firm feels considered. The identity had to work hardest in the least glamorous documents.

A neutral umbrella, and a spectrum that carries the energy.

The logotype stays clean and quiet: BHDP set in DIN, in grey, silver or black only, because it sits over every discipline in the firm. The energy comes from a spectrum of cool and warm color bands that progress like a project timeline. It expresses disciplines cross-pollinating across the firm and the excitement that builds as a project moves forward. The line underneath says what it's all for: Design for People.

Rules strict enough to hold, simple enough to follow.

Logo

DIN, chosen for legibility and neutrality. Three colors only: Pantone Cool Grey 8, Metallic Silver 877, or black. The letter B is the unit of clearspace.

Color

Warm, middle and cool steps of grey, blue, green and orange, each specified for spot, process and screen.

Spectrum

Two fixed ratios, two-thirds grey to one-third color and the reverse. The color order can't be changed, and nothing can be added or swapped in.

Specifications

Every application documented down to size, typeface, point size and paper stock, so any office could produce it.

One system across every piece that wins work.

I wrote and designed the standards, then designed the applications. On the federal 330 qualification form, Section H opens with the graphic continuum and color photography, the one place in a rigid form where BHDP can show how it's different. The project org chart sits inside an "exploded" segment of the spectrum. In the marketing presentation, the spectrum becomes the navigation itself: About, Team, Projects, Process. The same system carried the letterhead, the brochure and the website.

Seventeen years later, BHDP still largely uses it.

Few identities last that long. This one did because it was built on a real idea, a firm of many disciplines under one neutral umbrella, and because the rules were clear enough to follow without the designer in the room.