The challenge: from virtual to hybrid, and from anecdotes to hard data

REFRAME is Vimeo’s flagship customer event, born from an earlier fully virtual experience called Outside the Frame and now delivered as a one-day hybrid experience.

Outside the Frame proved Vimeo could deliver a polished virtual experience. REFRAME 2024 proved that a hybrid flagship event could attract the right attendees and generate strong feedback.

What the team did not have was trustworthy data on on-site behavior.

“REFRAME 2024 was a big success, but we knew we were missing something: real data. We wanted to see dwell time, which sessions people actually attended, and how they moved through the event space. Instead, we were relying on anecdotes when what we really needed were hard numbers” - Maya Sykes, Director, Integrated Marketing, Vimeo

At the same time, REFRAME needed to serve a very wide customer base in a single day. Creators, marketers, internal comms leaders, streamers, filmmakers, L&D professionals, and enterprise buyers all needed to see themselves in the content and feel the value of attending in person.

“When creating a program for this type of event, you need to satisfy a little bit of everything. We also want it to be inspirational. We want people to leave excited about what is next for the future of video and with new connections.” - Dani Daubaras, Senior Events Experience Manager, Vimeo

There was also the internal side of the challenge. REFRAME is not a “marketing only” initiative. It is a company brand event.

“With the flagship event, it is not just Dani’s event and not just my event,” Maya said. “It is a full company event, representing the Vimeo brand.”

That meant:

  • Strong internal buy-in before the event
  • Clear ROI reporting after the event
  • A tech stack that could support both

Yet the core events team consisted of only two people, supported by wider marketing, production, revenue, and product teams. They needed a platform that could scale with their ambitions without requiring a large dedicated operations team, and they wanted a way to capture dwell time and networking data that would inform a multi-year testing roadmap.

The solution: a hybrid flagship event powered by Bizzabo and Klik

Consolidating on Bizzabo as the “Ferrari” of the stack

Vimeo had already utilized Bizzabo for Outside the Frame and REFRAME 2024, so the platform was the natural backbone for REFRAME 2025.

Bizzabo powered registration, ticket types, communications, and key onsite workflows. The team also partnered with Smyle to build a custom-branded website on top of Bizzabo, which drew praise from attendees and internal stakeholders alike.

“I have used a lot of platforms,” Dani said. “The Bizzabo one is very intuitive. You can accomplish a lot more with Bizzabo than with other platforms. It feels like a Ferrari versus a Honda vibe. You get the basics, but you also get some bells and whistles.”

Behind the scenes, Bizzabo connected to Vimeo’s Marketo and Salesforce instance, which allowed Maya and Dani to build dashboards in Tableau that combined:

  • Registration and attendance
  • Customer versus prospect mix
  • Pipeline and revenue influence over time

This integrated data foundation aligned with what Bizzabo’s State of Events and Industry Benchmarks report shows across the market: event leaders are moving away from fragmented systems toward more unified, ROI-focused stacks.

Deepening the investment in data with Klik SmartBadges™

For REFRAME 2025, Maya intentionally reallocated budget toward measurement.

“This year we had a different level of investment,” she said. “We wanted to have the data we did not have from 2024’s event. Last year was our proof of concept year.”

Vimeo chose to roll out Klik SmartBadges™, Bizzabo’s wearable networking and analytics solution, to every in-person attendee.

Klik helped the team:

  • Track check-in and dwell time across the three stages
  • Understand traffic patterns in the networking village and demo areas
  • Capture contact exchanges as attendees tapped badges together
  • Free staff from manually scanning badges at every door

“It is an investment,” Dani acknowledged. “But it offers a lot more data points than we would ever have without them. We used it quite a bit for the first year, so we have a decent understanding of what worked really well or where we could improve or even what we would hope to see Klik or Bizzabo transform into.”

Although Klik is often used for multi-day conferences, Vimeo deployed it for a single-day flagship. Even so, their Bizzabo account team confirmed that the number of connections made in that one day was on par with multi-day programs.

The experience mapped closely to what Bizzabo’s Event Networking Report finds across the industry: networking is now the core driver of event value, and tech-enabled formats unlock more and better connections when they are thoughtfully designed.

Designing a format that respects attention and fuels insights

Programming was intentionally designed around modern attention spans and the desire for more breathing room, as highlighted in Bizzabo’s research.

Maya and her colleagues capped each session at 30 minutes, with about 20-25 minutes of content and 5-10 minutes for Q&A. The morning focused on main stage content; in the afternoon, attendees could choose from two additional stages tailored to different interests, plus an experiential zone.

“We had an experiential zone in the main area that featured our demos, support tables, the launch of our new Vimeo Champions program that customers could register for, our third stage using a silent disco style for sound, and a very cool bullet rig set-up for a unique photo opp.” Dani explained.

Because Klik captured attendance and dwell time across all of those spaces, the team knew they were not just designing an experience; they were instrumenting it for learning. The data captured will help Vimeo in developing an even better REFRAME in 2026.

The results: clear data, stronger buy-in, and a roadmap to test what is next

A concrete dwell time baseline and content strategy

For the first time, Vimeo had hard numbers on how long people actually stayed in sessions and where they spent their time.

“What we found from the data was that the dwell time for our afternoon breakout sessions was just over 20 minutes, which we found to be our average across all three stages,” Dani said.

This validated their decision to keep sessions tight and focused. It also opened up new possibilities.

“We are still in the testing phase,” Dani said. “We are seeing what works really well for us, where we drive the most business, and where we build the best community and brand reputation.”

Now that they have a baseline, Maya and Dani can experiment with formats like extended workshops or more hands-on activities, informed by real behavioral data rather than guesswork.

Hybrid networking that actually works

Although the team lacked the resources to train every attendee on Klik in detail, the numbers showed strong networking outcomes.

“Our event is only a one-day event, and other people have used Klik for multi-day,” Maya recalled from a conversation with their Bizzabo partner. “When we looked at the data, though, we were still on par with the number of connections our attendees made in our one day versus a two or three-day. People figured it out. They clicked, they connected. They wanted to stay in touch.”

The networking village layout amplified that engagement, especially during lunch and the reception, where proximity made it easier to start conversations and tap badges.

This combination of thoughtful space design and intuitive tech aligns with broader trends in the Event Networking Report, which shows that attendees are prioritizing events that make it easy to connect with the right people, not just attend content.

A “campaign within a campaign” that built culture and proved ROI

From the beginning, Maya and Dani treated REFRAME as both an external campaign and an internal one.

“The company was already bought in, in the power of this event, because of all those internal communications touch points,” Maya said.

Their internal playbook included:

  • Updates at the monthly company all-hands meeting to share progress, tease content, and show early metrics
  • Briefings with the C-Suite to align on goals and expectations
  • A built-in retro process, with internal surveys, a cross-functional retro deck, and a formal readout to the CMO
  • A CEO thank you note to celebrate results and highlight key metrics

Maya described it as “a campaign within the campaign” that helped build culture as much as sales pipeline.

“And that culture is built by the internal comms campaign that we did,” she added. “When you are doing a very large campaign or event, you need that campaign within the campaign.”

On the measurement side, they leaned on integrated data rather than manual spreadsheets. Bizzabo fed registration and engagement data directly into Marketo and Salesforce, which then rolled into Tableau dashboards that leadership could view on their own terms.

They also used Bizzabo’s automatic reports, allowing executives to download and pivot event data themselves, instead of waiting for one-off reports.

For Vimeo, the challenge was not convincing leaders that REFRAME mattered. The real work was, in Maya’s words, “being very, very clear on what our data narrative is, what data points we are pulling versus what we are not pulling, and what we are comparing it to.”

This mirrors what Bizzabo sees across the industry in its ROI research: the organizers who succeed are those who define their objectives early, integrate their tech, and treat ROI as a planning lens, not just a post-event report.

Extending value with on-demand content

REFRAME’s impact did not end on the event date.

A robust on-demand experience with multilingual transcription allowed Vimeo to:

  • Serve a wider global audience
  • Support revenue and customer success teams with relevant, reusable content
  • Keep generating engagement long after the doors closed

“Even though the day of the event is October 23rd, we actually get the benefit of marketing this event way before and way after,” Maya said. “We did a call for speakers all the way in May, and now it is December, and we are still able to reuse the content in different ways.”

Content from REFRAME 2024 also helped promote the 2025 edition, creating a flywheel of assets and insight that aligns with Bizzabo’s guidance on building year-round event ecosystems.

The future: scaling experimentation with a trusted partner

Looking ahead, Vimeo plans to use the data and learnings from REFRAME 2025 to keep iterating.

There is interest in:

  • Testing workshops and hands-on sessions where dwell time and feedback suggest a deeper appetite
  • Expanding how Klik is used for activations, content delivery, and gamified experiences
  • Continuing to refine the internal campaign model that got the whole company invested in REFRAME’s success

“Vimeo is very committed to this event in a way that I think is unique,” Dani said. “Because of that, the entire company wants to make it a very successful event. That is really the power of REFRAME at Vimeo.”

Bizzabo and Klik have become integral to how that power shows up in the numbers. For a lean core team, Bizzabo is not just another tool. As Dani put it, it feels more like a high-performance engine that lets them design, measure, and improve without sacrificing creativity.

See how Bizzabo and Klik can power your next flagship

If you’re planning a flagship conference or hybrid experience and want to move from anecdotal feedback to hard data, Vimeo’s journey offers a useful blueprint.

With Bizzabo’s Event Experience OS, integrated CRM and marketing automation connections, and Klik SmartBadges, you can:

  • Consolidate your event tech
  • Capture dwell time and networking data
  • Build internal confidence with clear ROI reporting
  • Create a roadmap to test new formats year after year

Ready to see what that could look like for your team?
Request a personalized demo of Bizzabo and Klik SmartBadges to explore how we can support your next in-person or hybrid flagship.