The agency hired me to be the senior digital experience lead for the Cisco Global Sales Experience (GSX) which brings just almost 19,000 people from around the world to Las Vegas in August. The GSX event serves as a premier platform for Cisco to connect with its global workforce, customers, and partners, providing a comprehensive overview of the company’s strategies, products, and innovations. It is a high-impact event that brings together thousands of Cisco employees, executives, and industry professionals from across the globe.
During the Cisco GSX event, attendees can expect to engage in a variety of activities, including keynote speeches by Cisco’s top executives, breakout sessions, hands-on product demonstrations, and networking opportunities. The event is designed to foster collaboration, knowledge sharing, and inspiration, as well as provide insights into the latest technological trends and advancements in the ever-evolving IT industry. Cisco GSX plays a crucial role in aligning Cisco’s global ecosystem, ensuring that the company remains at the forefront of technological innovation while strengthening its relationships with its partners and customers.
My role
As the Senior Director of Digital Experience and Engagement I was responsible for strategically shaping and overseeing the event’s digital initiatives. This includes crafting and executing digital strategies to enhance user engagement, overseeing the design of user-friendly digital interfaces, analyzing data for continuous improvement, implementing relevant technologies, leading cross-functional teams, ensuring compliance, collaborating with stakeholders, and fostering innovation, all with the overarching goal of optimizing the digital experience and aligning it with the company’s broader business objectives.
Specifically, I created briefs that summarizing the expansive digital landscape, the points of connection between points (email, mobile, web, onsite, etc.), how it supported detailed experience journeys based on defined personas, and how valuable metrics will be captured and shared. For this piece of the puzzle we built a team to capture and analyze real time metrics to create a feedback loop for the event producers. For example, using passive and active RFID gateways and readers we could gauge foot traffic across multiple properties and overall engagement as attendees checked into areas and shuttle buses. This provided a new level of event logistics management. While this was happening we were capturing qualitative and quantitative metrics based on a variety of touchpoints, giving us insight on what attendees were engaging with and whether they found the engagement(s) valuable.
This event is several days long the digital landscape was designed to inform, engage, immerse, and entertain. As with any high tech conference we employed a plethora of smart tech, and leading edge techniques for wayfinding, capturing dwell times based on active RFID tags, micro giving moments, and games through the event app ~the list goes on. Having done this event for three years, we were working with three to five (3-5) agency and external partners to bring the digital portion of the event together.
Our efforts on clean, and insightful metrics and reporting proved well for the event and offers clear insights as we stepped back into strategy and planning cycles after each event. As Cisco remains at the forefront of networking, security, and collaboration solutions, the GSX event will likely expand its digital presence, embracing virtual and hybrid formats to reach a wider global audience. This will enable the company to adapt to shifting market dynamics and deliver cutting-edge insights, products, and strategies to its workforce, customers, and partners. The event’s focus will likely continue to be on fostering collaboration, knowledge sharing, and innovation, ensuring that Cisco remains a leader in the technology industry.
