Insights from the MICE Entry Blueprint June 2024 briefing

Extracted Stories highlight the moments from this appearance that carry structural meaning inside the Dias OS. These stories are not anecdotes; they are pattern signals that reveal how pressure, trust, coordination, and reputation operate in real environments. Each story captures a principle that will repeat across industries, domains, and eras, forming the narrative building blocks for future remixing.

What began as a routine keyword extraction exercise for networking content became a full-scale intelligence operation on a $658 billion global industry. The discovery of SpotMe, a leading event management software platform, pulled the research thread in an unexpected direction — and rather than redirecting back to the original task, Mike followed it. Six weeks later he had a complete ecosystem map, a buyer profile matrix, a publication subscription stack, a contact database of global event leadership, and a positioning thesis that would drive every public move for the next twelve months. The lesson is not that keyword research is powerful. The lesson is that the operator who follows the thread wherever it leads — rather than staying inside the original brief — finds the rooms that most people never knew existed.

Midway through the research, a finding emerged that most speakers would find deflating: in the event production hierarchy, speakers rank somewhere below catering and perhaps above janitorial services. Rather than dismissing or minimizing this finding, Mike treated it as the most strategically useful data point in the entire briefing. If speakers are perceived as interchangeable line items, then the speaker who thinks like a producer — who understands the DMO relationships, the venue economics, the planner's actual pressures — becomes a categorically different offering. The gap between how speakers see themselves and how the ecosystem prices them is not a problem. It is the positioning opportunity.

Having identified MPI as the association controlling over $26 billion in buying decisions, Mike joined — not as a vendor or speaker, but as an event planner. When challenged on this by the organization, his response was direct: he wasn't interested in being on the vendor side. He wanted to understand the industry from the inside. What this produced was access to the actual vocabulary, the actual pressures, and the actual unmet needs of the people who would eventually book him. The vendor pitches he heard from the participant side told him exactly what was already commoditized, what was already tired, and what was genuinely missing. That intelligence informed every positioning decision that followed, including the MPI keynote that came shortly after.

In January 2025, in New York City to judge a storytelling competition, Mike had dinner for the first time with Josh Rogosin — the recording engineer behind NPR's Tiny Desk Concerts, now building his own global sounds project independently. Over the course of one dinner, Mike was able to map Josh's entire financial model opportunity using the DMO framework decoded at IMEX seven months earlier. Destination Marketing Organizations — the invisible economic infrastructure of the global events industry — were not just relevant to Josh's project. They were, as Mike put it in the follow-up email, "your global gatekeepers and your crack pipe that they need ASAFP." The briefing that had been written for a speaking business had become a generative tool that created immediate, specific, transferable value for a world-class audio professional in a completely unrelated context. This is what methodology transfer actually looks like.

The research surfaced a parallel insight about the global nature of the opportunity that most US-based speakers never consider: the MICE industry is growing fastest in Asia Pacific, projected to reach $441 billion by 2025, and American expertise carries disproportionate weight in markets where Made in USA still commands premium positioning. The publication subscription stack — C&IT, BizBash, Convene, Skift Meetings, Trade Show Executive, Meetings Today, and a dozen others — was not assembled for content inspiration. It was assembled as a continuous vocabulary feed, ensuring that the language being used publicly always reflected what the industry was actually saying internally. The IMEX America registration, completed as part of this briefing's next steps, would later become the site of the fourth and most significant intelligence breakthrough — the realization that a trade show floor map is a complete diagnostic tool for decoding any industry's power structure, competitive dynamics, and unmet needs. That breakthrough is documented separately.