What We're Hearing From Meeting Planners Right Now

Walk into any RFP conversation with us this quarter and you'll hear the same handful of requests, just phrased differently client to client: make the big room matter, make the content stick, and make the whole event feel less like a schedule and more like something people want to show up for. Here's what we're hearing from planners right now, and how we're designing around it.

Trend 1: The General Session Is the Connection Moment, Not a Warm-Up

For a 40,000-person conference, the opening keynote isn't a formality before the real event starts in the breakouts. It may be the only time the entire group is ever physically together.

As Julius Solaris, founder of the events consultancy Boldpush, puts it:

"The winning keynote is the one moment of universal connection before we search for our groups and microevents. That moment is as important as the welcome reception and closing party. If you attend a 40k-person event, you won't have another chance to get together in a room. We physically need that."

At Play with a Purpose, we design general session time around that reality. Rather than treat it purely as a stage for content delivery, we build it to do double duty: set the tone for a more personal conference ahead, and give thousands of people a shared reason to turn to the person next to them and talk about what they just heard. We don't waste that room. Every guest in it should feel like their presence changed something about the moment, not just that they watched it happen.

Trend 2: Hands-On Formats Are the Key to Learning That Sticks

Adults don't learn the way a slide deck assumes they do. Workshops, learning labs, masterclasses, and business games are outperforming traditional lecture-style sessions because they ask people to do something with the material, not just absorb it.

Turn a message into a playground and people remember more of it and are better prepared to use it back at work. It's a theme running through several of the programs planners are requesting most: business simulations like Synergyk and Corporate Game of Life that put strategy into participants' hands, facilitated labs like Opening Bell and Peak Performance built around a specific skill or decision, and content-delivery formats that replace the podium with a shared challenge the room solves together.

The common thread across every request: planners aren't asking us to entertain their audience between sessions anymore. They're asking us to make the content of the conference itself hands-on.

Trend 3: "Festivalization" Is Trickling Down From the Mega-Events

Some of the sharpest thinking in events today is around the concept of “Festivalization”:  borrowing the energy, layout, and audience-choice of a festival like Coachella or the Florida State Fair and applying it to a business meeting. This framework breaks a festival experience into the elements that make it feel alive — content, connection, discovery, community, participation, entertainment, and more — and maps how a well-run event balances them.

Most of our clients aren't running an 80,000-person show. They're running 80 or 800 people. You can't replicate SXSW at that scale, and you shouldn't try — but the elements are modular. A festival doesn't need to be big to feel like one; it needs choice, energy, and a reason to be there.

Here's where we fit: we play in the content, participation, community and connection layers. When you need people to share ideas, learn something, share a team experience or build stronger relationships, that's our seat at the table. 

The Thread Running Through All Three

A connected general session, hands-on learning, and a festival mindset at any scale all point at the same thing: planners are done treating time together as a schedule to replicate year after year. They want every hour of the agenda to do something — build a relationship, land an idea, make a decision stick.

That's the work we do. If your next meeting needs a moment people actually remember and use, let's talk.