Storycraft Lab’s key insights from IMEX America 2024: And what they mean for 2025 trends

By Storycraft Lab

3 mins

IMEX America 2024 brought together industry leaders, innovators and professionals to explore the latest trends and insights in both meetings and experience design. This year's show used the Experience Profiles™ again, and the year-on-year insights returned were fascinating, showing how interactive formats, storytelling, leadership preferences and personalization will shape events in the year ahead.

What makes a workshop work

Transforming a content strategy from standard to extraordinary requires a deep understanding of engagement techniques, participant feedback and effective formats. At IMEX America 2024, a strong preference for interactive and interaction-centered formats was revealed. However, many events still rely on panels and traditional speaker presentations, more passive ways to deliver information.

A significant number of respondents (56.7%) expressed that they learn best through hands-on workshops where they can collaborate with others. (1) When you combine this with the group who preferred interaction, this is close to a 70% block of attendees, indicating a clear interest in more dynamic and participatory formats.

In 2025, we expect to see event organizers bringing the spirit of the workshop into sessions—and other experience touchpoints too—with short participatory exercises or conversation prompts that support content interpretation. Alternatively, offering content in parts—an info presentation followed by a dynamic facilitator delivering a companion session—can also enhance engagement and ensure continued impact.

Experience profiles 'How do you learn best?'

The rise of the story

Storytelling has become a pivotal component in creating emotionally connective and memorable experiences. Storycraft Lab’s insights show that 75.6% prefer learning the story behind a work of art and understanding the meaning it has for the artist. (1) This preference highlights the importance of incorporating brand narratives and demos that tell a story.

However, Storycraft Lab sees it as crucial to extend beyond storytelling in broadcast mode to Story-Sharing™, where participants are included in the dialogue. Through their broader body of research, Storycraft Lab has identified the sharing of stories as an aspect of belonging that is crucial for fostering deeper connections and enhancing audience retention.

By creating opportunities for the audience to learn from innovators and reflect on their learnings, businesses can foster a sense of belonging and community, while increasing awareness and positive sentiment for their products (and the humans the business represents, serves and supports). How will experience designers create spaces for audiences to share and align their stories with brands’ narrative arcs?

Experience profiles 'What would you consider more meaningful?'

Shifting leadership preferences

Leadership preferences are evolving and are important for experience designers to consider. By considering the human attributes and values that people admire or aspire toward, organizations can humanize their brand and understand how to message and engage groups of people, fostering an affinity with their leadership in both the marketplace and the workplace.

At IMEX America 2024, there was a notable shift in the traits and approaches that are gaining traction. The audience showed a 14% increase in preference for leaders who lead by example and through reflection. (1) This shift indicates a growing appreciation for empathetic leadership personas. Publicly available data supports this trend, showing that empathetic leaders are more effective in fostering trust and collaboration in their teams.

Experience profiles 'What leadership quality resonates with you?'

In 2025, experience designers should incorporate opportunities for attendees to engage with leaders who exemplify these traits and values, creating an environment that encourages open dialogue and personal growth. From a marketing perspective, the authentic human tone of voice (not robotic AI) will be important—people will want to hear from and interact with leaders they can relate to.

We've got to talk

Personalization, using tools like Storycraft Lab’s Experience Profiles preferences, can support better networking, sponsorship, productive conversations and driving behavioral outcomes. To engage each of the profiles’ preferences, we designed personalized Trail Guides that correlated to each Experience Profile. These helped attendees navigate the show according to their preferences - focused on ‘education, networking and well-being.’ From using the Experience Profiles at IMEX this year, Storycraft Lab has shown that this audience is highly collaborative, values innovation and seeks experiences that offer spontaneity and delight. (1) Consumer desires for personalization are also evident in sales conversations and team performance. (4)

The ways in which we interact, experience, and work together will be a focus in 2025, and we’ll see designs that carefully balance moments that are unique, intimate scale or even solo, with moments that are crafted for one to few and one to many interactions. Indeed, our ability to converse with and create bridges to others outside our immediate circles of friendship is becoming ever more important.

Experience profiles 'Which of these two conversation scenarios would you find most rewarding?'

At IMEX, offering Experience Profiles-specific networking sessions and a first-timer orientation helped attendees connect with like-minded people and find a sense of belonging right from the start. (1) We observed that the activity of networking benefits from dedicated time within the program, and is especially impactful when balancing the large and small scales of community: connected to the broader activities of the show, but with curated activities to empower and enable meaningful connection through intimate conversation.

Understanding your audience’s preferences is key to intentional design that creates a sense of Belonging. In 2025, Storycraft Lab is rolling out an Experience Profiles for teams expansion pack, as well as a new audience advocacy dashboard, where quiz data and insights can be seen real time by event planners, incorporating data collected through the Wheel of Belonging app. In addition to the newly released Belonging Playbook, these tools allow users to maximize insights, impact and applications and we cannot wait to see how the industry puts them to use.