The Long Version:

Despite a promising career in theatrical lighting and design, less than a year out of college he made the initial contacts that would draw him away from the theater and into hotel ballrooms around the world. Over the course of his 18 year career with metroConnections, a Minneapolis-based meeting and event production company, Brandt touched almost every aspect of a typical corporate meeting or event. From the loading dock to the “C Suite”, he’s dealt with it. Originally hired to help build (literally) their event decor fabrication shop, and to manage their growing event rental inventory, Brandt quickly moved into more technical roles, including interactive game design for team building events, and designing the company’s first website.

As the fabrication shop grew, Brandt bowed out and moved exclusively into a full time technology role. Stage management experience made him a natural for the tech table, and he became the go-to show caller “on the headset” for most of metroConnections' large-scale meetings and events, with side orders of video editing, presentation design, and other content creation.

With hundreds of productions under his belt, Brandt began to realize there was a gap in the knowledge of a lot of meeting and event planners. Their eyes would glaze over when looking at an AV bid, or they felt like they were getting “taken” by unscrupulous vendors. Around 2001 he started teaching classes and developing content for the Event Leadership Institute. He realized he had a talent for making technology accessible and easy to understand, and more importantly, he really enjoyed doing it.

In 2014 Brandt left metroConnections to devote himself full time to education and consulting in the industry, in an effort to help planners make better-educated decisions when it comes to event technology, but also to generally make corporate meetings and events “suck a little less, every day.” Through his work with the Event Leadership Institute, during the COVID-19 pandemic almost 4000 planners and others took his classes on Technical Meeting and Event Production and Virtual Event and Meetings Management. He wrote the most recent version of MPI’s Hybrid Meetings Playbook, which has been downloaded globally tens of thousands of times, and was the Event Technology correspondent for Smart Meetings Magazine.

After years of independent work, Brandt joined EideCom as Senior Production Manager in 2022, putting his expertise to work on some of the most demanding corporate events in the country. At a company known for high-caliber production, he led the technical execution of events for Fortune 500 clients. It was a return to the trenches in the best possible way, and a reminder that the fundamentals of great live events haven't changed, even as the technology around them has transformed dramatically.

That firsthand experience of decades of standing at the tech table (he doesn’t like to sit), writing the bids, teaching the classes, and running the shows is exactly what Brandt brings to his current role as Director of Industry Relations and Partnerships at EventMobi. Where most event technology advocates come from the software side, Brandt comes from the ballroom itself. His focus now is on helping the industry understand and adopt the tools that make events better, smarter, more impactful, and informed by the perspective of someone who has lived every side of the production equation.