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Marketing Healthcare Innovation at Scale | Amanda Ciccatelli of HLTH | The Brainiac Blueprint Podcast

  • Acy Rodriguez
  • Mar 15
  • 26 min read

In this episode of The Brainiac Blueprint Podcast, we’re joined by Amanda Ciccatelli, Senior Director of Marketing, US Events at HLTH, to explore how AI is reshaping healthcare conferences, event marketing, and attendee experiences.

Amanda breaks down how HLTH and VIVE have scaled into industry-defining healthcare events, how AI is used behind the scenes to streamline marketing and creative workflows, and how on-site tools like AI chatbots are changing the way attendees navigate massive conferences. She also shares her journey from journalism to healthcare events, why immersive experiences matter, and how responsible AI use is becoming a competitive advantage.


Full transcript below.


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⏱ In this episode, we discuss: 

00:00 | Intro

01:01 | Amanda’s role at HLTH and overview of the events

01:42 | HLTH vs VIVE: audiences, scale, and focus

04:37 | Why AI is woven into every HLTH event

06:24 | “I think AI is…”

10:17 | Prompting, communication, and AI as an “intern”

12:05 | Amanda’s career path from journalism to events

17:34 | What drives HLTH’s growth and industry leadership

21:07 | The HLTH Connect program and one-to-one matchmaking

27:24 | Inside HLTH’s marketing team and workflows

31:54 | Using AI for email, personalization, and efficiency

36:13 | Responsible AI use and internal guardrails

41:48 | Clara: the AI chatbot used onsite at HLTH

44:04 | The future of AI in live events

46:07 | Rapid fire: automation, career moments, and favorites

51:18 | Why women’s health remains a core focus


🔗 Amanda Ciccatelli


HLTH

Website → https://hlth.com/


📲 Connect with Left Brain AI


📣 Subscribe & Share If this episode inspired you, taught you something new, or gave you a different lens on AI in healthcare, share it, leave a comment, or tag us.


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Episode Full Transcript:


Kyle: Okay, welcome back everybody to another episode of the Brainiac Blueprint, where we discuss the intersection of AI and how it impacts business and the world around us with our esteemed guests. I'm your host, Kyle Lambert, founder of Left Brain AI and Action Hero Marketing.


In today's episode, we discuss how even in-person events and conferences are able to use AI. With that being said, today's Brainiac is Amanda Ciccatelli. Amanda, welcome to the show.


Amanda: Thanks for having me, Kyle. Happy to be here.


Kyle: I practiced your last name over and over for the last five minutes to make sure I said it right. Did I get it right? Ciccatelli?


Amanda: You did. You did. Thank you.


Kyle: Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So Amanda, when we met, you had mentioned that you're the Senior Director of Marketing US Events at Health. It's a very large conference in the healthcare industry. Some of my other guests have actually mentioned being there and even winning awards and stuff like that. So it was very cool to get a little cross-pollination there. But if you don't mind, tell everybody a little bit about you, your role, and who Health is, Health Conferences.


Amanda: Sure. So I, like you said, I am the senior director for our US events and I run marketing across health, which many of you may know if you're in the healthcare industry, HLTH, but we actually pronounce it health, and Vive.


Health is our large flagship event that covers healthcare innovation across the board. We have 13,000 attendees attend that every year. And then Vive is our digital health event, which is slightly smaller, around 9,000 attendees, which is actually coming up February 22nd to the 25th in LA, if anyone's interested.

Health Inc. actually owns those events. We also have a Health Europe that we launched a few years ago in Amsterdam. And then we also have something called our Health Platform, which is a content hub. All of our articles, webinars, long form interviews, really reports, trend pieces, anything more extensive live on there.


So that's health in a nutshell: three events, one platform of content.

I work on the US events side, basically working on every marketing channel you can think of: email, website, ads, social media, partnerships. That's definitely become a bigger part of my role lately, trying to find new marketing partners to expand our reach a bit more. I had started at health actually focused on content marketing and social specifically three and a half years ago, and then expanded into a more marketing generalist role. So that's where I'm at now.


Kyle: Very cool. So you mentioned there was the Europe and then there was the U.S. and then was it Vive?


Amanda: Vive is part of the U.S. It's a more specific event around digital health, health IT.


Kyle: That's what I was going to ask, if there was a differentiation between, is it for a specific audience or is there specific content?


Amanda: Yeah. So health is more for executives that are interested in healthcare innovation, just moving the industry forward across all different aspects of healthcare. Again, we target senior leadership, so a lot of C-suite, pretty much vice president and above for all of our events.


VIVE is more directed to CIOs, Chief Information Officers, CTOs, Chief Technology Officers—the people that are making decisions about the technology systems that really make the hospitals and healthcare providers and insurance organizations run smoothly.


Without those important technology platforms, it can't run. All the data security and cybersecurity along with that is a big part of our event. And of course, AI is across everything. It's woven within every piece of the event now, of all of the events now.


Kyle: We're certainly going to dive into that. That's interesting stuff. I'm kind of surprised that you... I've never obviously sat down and thought about it, but it's crazy that there's that many executives that fill out your conference. I'm sure you guys have gotten big, but I'm sure that's not 100% of the executives out there, right? So it's interesting to think about.


Amanda: Yeah. Healthcare as an industry is huge. And there's a lot of business to be done, deals to be done. That's really what we do. We help startups and investors find each other. We help providers find the right technology solutions for their hospital systems to run better.


It's a lot of creating these moments of networking and all these different people that are parts of the industry meet, whether it's an executive at a huge healthcare system that's very well known in the country or a tiny startup with a CEO that's a single employee that's just kind of starting to grow it. It's a wide range, but it's still that executive level of those people that are making the decisions for their companies.


Kyle: Absolutely. Absolutely. Interesting stuff. That's very cool. Well, cool. So you teed me up a little bit earlier saying that a lot of AI is involved in what you guys are doing. So as you know, I had you do a little brainstorming. If you wouldn't mind finishing the prompt, I think AI is...


Amanda: Changing the world. I mean, that's pretty obvious, but I was going to say the future, but it's not, it's here. It's changing the world and it's changing. I think about my daughter and how she'll grow up with AI as part of her normal life.

I grew up with AOL and signing on in my parents' computer room. It's just going to be such a different world for her as she goes to school and becomes a professional. It's changing jobs. I think about what's going to happen to the future of marketing jobs. There's already obviously been an impact on engineering jobs, software developers.


I think marketing will always have to be the orchestrator of AI. You'll still need marketers to be project managing AI. AI is going to take a lot of the creative aspect of the job, but it also allows us to do the job in some ways better and faster. We noticed that in our team, we can get things done so much faster because of it.


Kyle: It's very interesting to see all the different applications. I myself am not great in terms of building assets and creative and things like that. Literally just today, my team and I were working on making a fun little movie trailer for our business. It's a brand new window and avenue that's opened up to me that I never would have been able to do previously, or at least not without investing hundreds of thousands of dollars. So, yeah, that's very cool.


Amanda: What tool? I'm curious. What tool are you using for that?

Kyle: It's a combination of Google VEO and Flow and all of those AI studio tools that they have. I've been diving into that a lot.


Amanda: Okay. Very cool. Have you been using any of those? Not yet, but I'm curious about exploring tools that create video content because we definitely need more of that in our socials. It can be a heavy lift for our creative team to do the editing.


On the social side right now, I'm doing most of it and I'd love to be able to quickly replicate trending content without having to necessarily do the edits myself. I was exploring that the other day in ChatGPT and it does amazing memes. If you just upload what you want done in the meme form, it does it. But in the video form, it's not possible from what I can see. So that's definitely something I want to explore.


Kyle: Every new update that comes out, it gets better and better. We've been playing around with it probably since June or something. We were getting words that are just random letters or a random person or movement where they're walking backwards. And now, like I said, we have a full-on video. So it's getting better and better. You have to learn how to prompt and use the tools, but it's getting very interesting very quickly.


Amanda: I feel like AI makes the user have to be a very good communicator. You have to be able to clearly articulate what you want and be very specific. I feel like that takes a skill. Not everyone can really articulate themselves and their projects and their work exactly what they want.


It's like a skill as a manager talking to your team about clear deliverables and the scope of a project. I feel like that's what you have to do with AI to be successful at it. Otherwise, it's going to spit back the wrong thing and it doesn't fit what you're trying to accomplish.


Kyle: I'm going to shout out a previous guest that I had, his name is Adam Pivko. He's a Chief Marketing Officer at Direct Meds and he had said that he views AI like an intern.


I think that's the perfect way to think about it because if you go to an intern and say, "Make me an ad with a smiling person and this product," it's not going to go well. But if you give them detail and say, "I want this tone and I want this style and I want it to accomplish X, Y, and Z," then you're going to get a much better look and feel and much closer to what you're trying to accomplish.


Amanda: That's a good comparison. I agree with that. I wonder if he was at health. He sounds like a health attendee.


Kyle: He might be a sponsoring attendee. Well, awesome. We can obviously go down this AI rabbit hole and we're going to, but I want to take a quick step back and just learn a little bit more about you. Do you have a healthcare background or are you just marketing and this is a cool company that you want to help out and work with?


Amanda: I do not have a healthcare background. I actually come from a long career in events and conferences. I went to college for journalism and public relations. I was the news editor of my school paper. I graduated doing a bunch of freelance gigs. Really, my goal was to be a magazine journalist, like in all the rom-coms. That was what I envisioned for myself.


I graduated in 2010 when that was not really a way to pay bills anymore. The opportunities were very limited anyway. I kind of fell into social media as an alternative career. It was not a plan; it just happened because at that time it was just becoming a job, like a social media strategist or manager.


I ended up landing an entry-level strategist job at what is now Informa. I had worked at one of their acquisition companies they had just bought. I was there in one of their very first social media teams ever created and kind of fell into working on events. Ever since then, I have stayed in the industry.


I had a brief stint in software for about six months just to try something new, and it just didn't work and didn't feel right. I've always had a passion for the events industry. I love working on a product you work on all year and then you get to go and experience it, which is pretty cool because a lot of products are not that way.

If you're marketing toothpaste, you're not going to get to go experience it.


A social media campaign isn't necessarily tangible, but when you walk into a convention center, it's like, "Wow, this is what I've been doing all year." You're promoting the speakers and the testimonials from attendees and all the photos and the videos that come out of that event every year. That's a big part of our marketing. It's real, it's tangible, it's an experience you can literally touch and smell. So I love that about events. I'm definitely here to stay.


I've worked across a lot of industries and I love healthcare. It's actually been my favorite of the industries I've worked in. It's just really cool. I feel like we who work on Health and VIVE are working towards a better future for healthcare. Obviously, in America, we have some issues that we have to work through. Having all the most important people in the country that are doing the work to improve health equity and improve access is so inspiring.


I've also worked in the innovation industry, which was pretty cool at Informa, talking about new technology innovation across any industry that's bettering the future. I've worked in the food service events industry and in catering and large-scale party planning events, sustainability.


I worked on this amazing event at Informa called Green Build. I actually met our former president, Barack Obama, at that event in 2019. It was one of the most memorable moments of my career. I have a picture of him in my office right next to me that I look at every day.


I've also worked a little bit in content marketing. If you're familiar with Content Marketing World, it's the biggest content marketing event in the US. It's very well known in Cleveland, Ohio every year. I feel like I know a lot of random information about all these different industries.


Now I'm much deeper into healthcare and learning about how the payers, providers, investors, and startups all work together and why they would want to attend. They all have very different reasons. That's a big part of our marketing strategy: talking to them and why each of them would want to come.


Kyle: Very cool. I definitely want to dive into the marketing stuff as a marketing nerd myself. I love to get under the hood there. But before we do, I want to talk about the event itself. You've worked on a lot of different events. When we met originally, you talked about the incredible growth that has happened and the expansions. What is it that you think, if you compare this event or this organization to others, that it does so well that has led to this growth and this trajectory?


Amanda: I think it's a mixture of two really powerful things at our company: our content team and what we call our Connect program. Our content team organizes and recruits all the speakers and creates the agenda. That's the main part of any conference. The agenda is really important: who the speakers are and what they're talking about. The topics need to be extremely timely, trending, and important to the people that are attending and sponsoring. They're not going to come to listen to old news and topics that aren't relevant in 2025 and in the future past that.


Our content team does an amazing job of doing that for all of our events. Without their agenda and the speakers that they put together, we wouldn't have a lot to promote and market. That's a really important part. That's why people come back year after year. That's why we get new customers. They're looking at the website and they're seeing this incredible speaker lineup and these topics that they can connect with. If they're having challenges, they know they can come and learn how to solve them through these conversations.


For example, we've also had some really big celebrity names that attract a lot of attendees. The last few years at Health, we've had Halle Berry talking about menopause, Nick Jonas talking about diabetes, the former First Lady of the United States talking about women's health, as well as Maria Shriver talking about women's health. Lenny Kravitz spoke about oral healthcare and the importance well beyond your teeth and your mouth and his organization in the Bahamas. Howie Mandel spoke about OCD and his struggle and journey with that.


Kyle: We've had a lot of famous germaphobes.


Amanda: Yes. It almost broke up his marriage. It goes into his whole story. It's really interesting to hear from these people that have such a presence online and with the public about their personal stories with healthcare struggles and what they've done with their means to be able to help people in the world, creating organizations that can help fund innovation or access to healthcare. That's pretty cool and inspiring and obviously not hard to market.


We also have our Connect program, which goes across all of our events. For Health, it's called Market Connect. For VIVE, it's called Provider and Payer Connect. The purpose of this program is to have one-on-one double opt-in matchmaking between providers, healthcare systems like your doctor or hospital, and payers, which means insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies.

We match those three areas with technology providers. They get set up in these speed dating situations through an app and they sit down for a 10-minute conversation. The provider or the payer learns about the technology from the startup or the technology solution provider.


From these conversations, a lot of partnerships are made. A lot have come out of Health, VIVE, and Health Europe from those one-on-one conversations. That's an extremely valuable part of our events. It's a big part of our marketing. I think we're pretty well known for the success of those Connect programs. I would say between that and the content, that really makes us a leader in the events industry and the healthcare industry.


Kyle: That's very cool. Things like healthcare are not necessarily the most sexy or don't necessarily get out of the way, if you will. But to hear that it's harnessing the power of celebrity and trying something like this speed dating thing is very cool. It shows why you have been so successful. There are some risks being taken. It's very cool to hear people thinking out of the box.


Amanda: Something else worth mentioning is our creative team. We have a really talented in-house creative team. They're not just graphic designers. These guys are next-level creative minds that do animation and stage design. Our head of design actually created our mascot, Petunia, who is a unicorn.


If you go to our website or any of our social media for Health, you will see her. He crafted this whole idea and he created her. She's immersed in all of our marketing for Health. VIVE doesn't have a mascot like Petunia. The reason behind Petunia as a unicorn is because Health started really focused on unicorn startups. That was a big attendee base for Health when they first launched. It made a lot of sense and it still makes sense because a part of our attendees are startups and investors.


Kyle: Is there a difference between unicorn startups and startups? Or is this just a term that you guys like to use?


Amanda: A unicorn startup is a specific amount of money raised in a short time to make them a unicorn. It's an uber-successful startup very early on. Investors really look to invest in unicorns and then they come to Health for healthcare. That's where that came from.


She's very much across all of our marketing. We have fun with her on social media. She actually comes to the event in costume. We hire an actor who dresses up in this giant unicorn costume. This year I wasn't there because I was on maternity leave, but we had this blow-up Petunia over the top of the show floor, floating like a Macy's parade kind of vibe.


Kyle: Nice. I love that.


Amanda: So that's really fun. That's all of our creative team. Our stages are just amazingly designed. Every stage has its own theme. You feel like you're in this whole experience when you go to Health. It's not just a stale expo floor. You immerse yourself into the Health universe. It's very cool.


My first time going, my mind was blown. I couldn't believe what I was experiencing compared to my experiences in the past. It was very different and very creative. It makes a huge difference. People remember that. Attendees find it really fun and different. They come to Health not just to network and learn and take back new ideas and innovations to their jobs, but they also come and have fun and let loose.


See the creativity that we're trying to create this space for them to feel that they can do anything they put their minds to at Health. I think our creative team makes that possible with all the colors and designs and experience that they create. It's really fun.


Kyle: As a marketer, I'm buzzing with all these shareable moments. There are so many pictures and videos you can send on social media, which is huge to help it grow. It's very cool to hear that the effort and the investment is being put into it and there's a real ROI to it.


Well, let's keep leaning into marketing but throw in that AI lens. You mentioned that you handle a lot of different channels and workflows. Can you summarize what your day looks like, what you're trying to accomplish each month, and where you're seeing the biggest impact from a marketing standpoint to help get people more exposure? And then layering in any AI tools that have been helping you become more efficient.


Amanda: A typical day—I'll share a little bit of our team dynamic because it's definitely not just me on the team. We have a pretty big marketing team now. When I started at Health, there were three of us. I was the third marketer. Now we have about eight globally.


Kyle: It's a solid team.


Amanda: Yeah, it's solid. Now we're all more specialized in our roles. We have a digital team that's based out of London and they manage our HubSpot and our email operations. Really the operations side, like all the segmentations we want to do with our emails and building those emails and keeping on top of the analytics and open rates. We have the event marketers, myself and my colleague in New York, who work across the US events doing all the different things that we need to do.


We have our head of global marketing who's across the entire business: events, digital, and our platform. We have a person that runs marketing just for the platform. Like I mentioned with the articles and the webinars, that's a different kind of strategy. There's actually nine of us.


Then we have a head of media who manages the media relationships and partnerships and then getting media to attend, which is really important. We had a big presence through the New York Stock Exchange this year at Health because of him and just getting placed into the right hands of media to get promotions before the event, during the event, and after the event.


My day-to-day is really planning out campaigns through email and social through Asana and planning ahead. Looking at our marketing strategy, which we do a year in advance for every new year, and thinking, "Okay, in the next month, here are our email campaigns and our social campaigns and our ads and how it's all going to connect." What copy is going to be written for those, what assets we need in terms of creative, whether we do it in Canva or we have our creative team do some original stuff themselves. Sometimes they create things and they put them in Canva for us to then make edits to copy and small changes. I'm planning that out pretty much every day and then executing on it.


Whether I'm writing copy for next week, that then goes into the hands of the digital marketer running HubSpot for that week. She'll want to get the email copy and the creative at least a week in advance to then be able to test it and get it scheduled as far in advance as we can. We used to work in a way that was not as organized and ahead as we are now, and it caused problems. We would sometimes have mistakes that weren't caught. Now we're in a better place partially because of AI and just planning ahead to be able to be more polished and ready.


Some of the planning and weekly work involves working with our content team regarding the speakers and the agenda. For example, right now for VIVE, we just released the "agenda at a glance." Next week, we release the preliminary agenda, which is the big agenda. It's almost the final agenda, but not quite. Working with them on what we are going to feature. We suggest we feature these sessions and these speakers. Do you guys agree? Here's the copy. Can you share edits by end of day Friday? A lot of that back and forth.


If we're wanting to feature a specific keynote next week, for example, we often have to work with not only the content team but the keynote team because they can be very strict about what is written and what the graphic looks like. They have to approve everything. Sometimes government speakers, for example—we have a lot of government for both US events—cannot be mentioned registering in their promotion. We have to literally lead people to just view the agenda or view the website because they cannot say we're promoting any sort of registration.


Kyle: Right.


Amanda: The copy for social had to be approved and edited before we left for the event. Anything we talked about for him had to be approved. Stuff like that comes up and it's very tricky. We do caricatures for our speakers. It's a really fun brand thing that our events—Shop Talk and Money 20/20, all founded by our CEO, John Weiner—do. That's another thing that has to be approved by speakers and sometimes it has to be adjusted. Can't have the nose too big or something.


Kyle: Oh, yeah.


Amanda: We had that with Ashanti. Ashanti was one of our performers a couple of years ago and we had to keep adjusting her face, like her nose and her jawline. It was a whole thing.


Kyle: Oh my god. You're just losing the point of it all at that point.


Amanda: I know. It's crazy, but that's marketing sometimes. AI really helps us. We can do stuff like that. We can plug in, "Okay, we need a variety of emails over the next two weeks targeting providers, investors, startups, pharmaceuticals, employers," and the list goes on.


We can come up with a series of targeted emails to the audiences that we want to reach and a schedule for those, making them customizable with the help of AI. If we were doing that manually, it would take us hours upon hours upon hours. That helps so much.


Teaching ChatGPT or another AI tool what Health is, what VIVE is, and our target audiences—we've been doing that now for many months. Now we plug things in and it already knows who we're targeting, the tone of voice that we use in email and social, the brand colors, and the fonts. If we need creative done or copy written, it saves so much time with AI now. We can focus our efforts on other things that are high priority and everything else is just plug and play with the help of AI.


Kyle: That's the whole point, right? Getting the time back to work on the needle-moving projects, the things that are really impactful. Does Health have an official stance on AI? And what I mean by that is how you can or can't use it, or maybe specific tools that you can or can't use? Or are they just trusting you to be responsible and not tarnish the brand?


Amanda: Right now, they trust the employees to be responsible with AI. Our CEO is very much pro-AI in terms of, "It's changing the world; you better learn it or you're going to be left behind." He said that years ago to us, and he's right.

We were recently acquired by Hive. They're a large conference company based out of London, and they also are very pro-AI. We have a company account with ChatGPT through Hive. Every team uses it in different ways, but they trust that we would use it responsibly. So far, we haven't had any issues.


There's always that risk that you can't rely on AI fully to know everything. You can't just blindly say, "Write me an article about Medicare," and then just post it. You have to do your due diligence to do your research and run it by thought leader experts that know that area of healthcare.


I think our content team uses AI to build the agenda because the agenda is ginormous. We have 600 speakers, so you can imagine how many sessions that equals out to. They've been writing the agenda for the whole time that Health has been in business. It's a big part of what they do, and they do a really good job of being creative with the names of the sessions. With the help of AI, it makes their jobs a lot easier, but they also run it by their employees in the industry to know that it's factual. All other parts of the business are using AI, but I would say marketing and content probably use it the most.


\Kyle: Very cool. So you are actively working—or when I say you, Health is actively using—a lot of different channels to grow. I'm curious if you've plugged any of the data into an AI or an analytics tool. Have you received any interesting insights that maybe you hadn't thought about or even couldn't have thought about just because a human can't process what AI can? Have you guys been tapping into that yet?


Amanda: What do you mean exactly? Like putting data around marketing?


Kyle: Like pulling in email data and using it to inspire a Facebook campaign, or Google search queries to say, "Hey, we should be using this in our agenda." Any kind of cross-channel...


Amanda: As far as I know, we have not, but we really should do more of that. I feel like we probably haven't tapped into that enough.


Kyle: That's a whole other ball of wax.


Amanda: Other members of the team have used it for creating apps to make workflows better and faster. I know our head of global marketing has done that for the sales team—a workflow for them to make things a little bit easier. Just trying to find solutions to make things that feel clunky less clunky has been our thing lately.


Tapping into sharing data and asking for recommendations of new ways to improve our marketing strategy would be the next step. We'll probably do that in 2026. Also, the idea of GEO instead of SEO—I think we're going to explore that. I feel like that could be a new part of 2026 marketing spend. So there's a lot I think that we're going to be looking into in the new year.


Kyle: Very cool. The last very specific question I wanted to ask is: how about the day of the event? Have you seen anything change in terms of how you guys operate or staff? Has AI been introduced? Maybe there's a demo done on the floor. Is it being used at all real-time the day of the event?


Amanda: It is. We actually introduced a chatbot at Health 2025 called Clara. She has a name: Clara. She was on our website and would literally pop up. It's not there anymore because the event's over, but her face would pop up. She looks like a human and she would talk, and you could ask her questions about the event.


Marketing spent months feeding her all the information about every little detail about the event so that she could answer any question. It was really fun. On-site, there was an actual Clara digital screen of her, and attendees could go up to her on the show floor and ask her questions like, "Where is this stage? Where is this speaker speaking? Where is this booth?" She would direct them if they were curious about what Market Connect is or when the industry night reception is tonight.


She was our AI chatbot. That was the first time we ever did anything like that, and it was very cool. It was very well received by attendees and it was helpful. The show floor can be so overwhelming. The whole event is on a show floor at the Venetian. It's the largest show floor probably in the country, and you walk 25,000 steps a day just to get around the event. This customer service helps a lot with that. People are confused and they need help, and there she is to help them. We're doing the same thing for VIVE; we're going to launch it pretty soon. So it's an exciting way to use AI.


Kyle: That's a perfect application. The first time you do it is probably difficult and stressful, but now you can just iterate and improve from here. My final question before we go into rapid fire—I always ask everybody this. I'm curious if you see anything in the future, how you see AI integrating into events even more. Maybe it's next year or five years down the road.


Amanda: I feel like we'll come to a time where we won't use our phones as much and we'll literally be thinking something and AI somehow gives us the answer or leads us to the right place. I don't know if that's something we have to wear on ourselves, but I just feel like we won't be relying on our phones as much in the future.


Maybe this is 20 or 30 years away. I did see something Elon Musk mentioned about that, that far in the future we won't really need our phones. We're all obsessed with our phones; we have "tech neck" from looking at our phones. I feel like it's going to become even easier and we're going to think something and AI will be the thing that gets us what we're thinking or what we need in that moment. That's just my opinion.


Kyle: That can be useful at a huge event. There's a part of me that's like, "Let's do it, that's awesome," and then I'm just like, "Man, that's so weird."


Amanda: I know. If our kids are growing up in this stuff, they're not going to be as worried about it. It'll be normal for them.


Kyle: Exactly. All right, awesome. I'm going to jump into our five rapid-fire questions. Are you ready? Buckle up. Professional life, personal life, or otherwise: if you could just snap your finger and have a beautiful, perfect, fully built-out automation installed into your life, what would it be?


Amanda: Something to cook and serve food. That's probably the best answer. Either that or laundry. Definitely food. I would love to just magically have a meal or a smoothie every time I want it and have it automated. I have this list of what I call my "Sunday tasks" to prep for the week ahead. It's so time-consuming. If I could automate those, it'd be great.


Kyle: Question two: what is your favorite moment, either at Health or another event, in terms of prepping or at the event? Is there a favorite moment from any of these events?


Amanda: That's a hard one. I feel like I've had so many. Meeting Barack Obama was a highlight of my career in events, shaking his hand and taking a picture with him and hearing that deep voice. That was definitely a highlight in my over 15 years working in events.


Also, I met Martha Stewart. I think she's so cool. I loved her documentary; she's a real badass. She spoke a few years after she got out of jail and talked about that experience and her comeback tour. That was very cool.


Kyle: All right. Number three: if Health pivoted and started to give out non-health-related awards to individuals, what award would you win?


Amanda: I feel like I would get "Most Flexible." I try to be easy to work with and flexible. We always have urgent things in marketing; everything's a fire. But at the end of the day, I try to remember that we're all just trying to do our jobs and get through the day. I try to be flexible and understanding and share that energy with my team.


I think that's probably what people would say about me. I won an award last year, "Women to Watch" for the industry. Ten of us were nominated by Trade Show Executive magazine and we all got interviewed about our strengths. I think I mentioned something like flexibility then.


Kyle: Well, congrats on that. That's awesome. Question number four: whether it's your own opinion or others, do you have a celebrity lookalike or doppelganger?


Amanda: I don't think I've really ever been compared to anyone. It's funny, one time about 10 years ago, somebody stopped me in a coffee shop and said I looked like Jennifer Lawrence. I think it was the way my hair was. That was the one time a stranger stopped me and said, "Oh my god, you look like a celebrity." So, Jennifer Lawrence.


Kyle: There are worse people to be compared to.


Amanda: Exactly. I was flattered.


Kyle: All right. Last one. Number five: are you a salty, savory, or sweet person?


Amanda: It's hard because I've always been a sweet person. But then when I was pregnant, I was into salty and savory. Now that I'm postpartum, I'm still kind of that way. Maybe I'm changing, but I was always a sweet person until I got pregnant.


Kyle: I'm right there with you. I still have my sweet tooth to this day. Last thing: we've approached the open forum section. Is there anything that you're just passionate about that maybe we didn't discuss that you just want to bring up and share?


Amanda: Women's health is very top of mind for me as a new mom. It's a big topic at our events, both Health and VIVE and Health Europe, and in our articles and content on our platform. I think women's health needs to be a focus across the industry and we need to keep talking about it.


Kyle: That's awesome. It's great to have people like you leading the charge. Well, Amanda, I appreciate you so much for joining. Everybody can check you out as Amanda Ciccatelli on LinkedIn. Is there any other social that you want to throw out there?


Amanda: I think that's the best one.


Kyle: That's perfect. Health is hlth.com if they want to learn more about the events or the content. Amanda, thank you again for joining the Brainiac Blueprint today. Please look at the camera and say, "Stay brilliant, Brainiacs."


Amanda: Stay brilliant, Brainiacs.


Kyle: Awesome. Thank you so much, Amanda. I appreciate it.


Amanda: Thank you. Appreciate it. It was fun.


 
 
 

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