Webinars & Events Insights & Trends

What I learned from a year of virtual and in-person events

Zoom CMO Kimberly Storin shares lessons from a year of virtual, hybrid, and in-person events and why virtual experiences should stand on their own.

4 min read

Updated on January 06, 2026

Published on January 06, 2026

In this blog

01 Turning audiences into revenue - Jumplink to Turning audiences into revenue
02 Company-wide and campus-wide - Jumplink to Company-wide and campus-wide
03 Building customer and industry communities - Jumplink to Building customer and industry communities
04 Training that actually scales - Jumplink to Training that actually scales
05 When hybrid gets it right - Jumplink to When hybrid gets it right
06 The unexpected ones - Jumplink to The unexpected ones
07 What the last year has taught me - Jumplink to What the last year has taught me

Kimberly Storin

Chief Marketing Officer

Kimberly Storin is a marketing and communications leader known for transforming brands and driving sustainable growth. She serves as Zoom’s chief marketing officer and oversees the brand, communications, product marketing, enterprise marketing, and regional marketing teams.

Kim joined Zoom in 2025 from Zayo. She was the chief marketing and communications officer and built the company’s first-ever marketing function, elevated its brand reputation, integrated three acquisitions, and contributed to three consecutive years of bookings and revenue growth. Prior to Zayo, Kim held marketing leadership roles at a variety of tech companies, from a SaaS start-up to a Fortune 50, and was an M&A consultant at Deloitte earlier in her career. Kimberly serves as Chair of the Women’s Fund for the Austin Community Foundation and is also a founding member of the Austin chapter of Women in Revenue.

She earned a Bachelor of Business Administration in Management Information Systems from the University of Texas at Austin and an MBA from the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business.

In the last year I did a lot of both: in-person events like HubSpot Inbound and virtual summits from my home office. Each has its place.

But here's what I keep coming back to: virtual events aren't trying to replicate in-person events. And they shouldn't.

Virtual events do something different. They reach people who can't be in that room. They scale in ways physical venues can't. They create access where access didn't exist before.

That's what I care deeply about. Not the technology itself, but what it makes possible.

In 2025, I watched organizations figure that out. Here's what stood out.

For marketing teams, the question isn’t “should we do virtual events?", it's “how do we make virtual events drive real results?"

GENFLOW, a creator monetization company, ran a webinar with 50,000 attendees. Within three days, they generated $1 million in revenue.

Their clients (digital creators, coaches, influencers) use these events to sell courses and memberships. Virtual isn’t their backup plan. It’s their entire business model.

Darren Hardy, the business author and speaker, runs masterclasses on Zoom using pre-recorded sessions delivered as live events. One AI-focused class pulled in over 5,000 attendees.

He gets the polish of a produced video with the urgency of a live experience. No venue rental, no travel logistics. Just content that reaches the people who need it.

Some messages need to reach everyone. Not a department. Not a region. Everyone.

The University of Miami hosted a hybrid town hall for 30,000 faculty and students.

That's not a webinar. That's a stadium.

They manage both in-person and virtual attendees at scale, making sure critical updates reach their entire community regardless of where people are tuning in from.

Morgan Stanley uses webinars to educate client employees about stock purchase plans. Compliance-heavy content that needs to be delivered consistently to thousands of people. Virtual makes that repeatable without flying trainers around the country.

Not every event is about capturing leads. Some are about keeping a community engaged over time.

Thumbtack hosted its Pro Summit, a free event for the service professionals who use its platform. Training sessions, product previews, breakout rooms for networking.

Their audience is made up of plumbers, electricians, and photographers. Busy people who aren't flying to a conference. Virtual brought them together anyway.

Cloud Security Alliance runs themed events throughout the year for IT and security professionals. Whether SECtember or an AI-focused summit, each one targets a specific topic and keeps its community coming back.

It's not a single event. It's an ongoing relationship.

Training programs have a math problem. You need to reach a lot of people, often across locations and time zones, without the budget to fly everyone to one place.

GE Healthcare runs professional development webinars for radiologic technologists during National Radiologic Technologist Week. Attendees earn CEU credits. They offer two time slots per session so people can fit it into their schedules.

Education that meets people where they are.

Ministry of Agriculture, Indonesia. This one's worth pausing on.

They used Zoom to train 80,000 farmer coaches across the country. Those coaches then trained 600,000 farmer group representatives in person. Those reps reached 3 million farmers total.

Virtual didn't replace in-person training. It made the whole thing possible.

Hybrid is hard. Most attempts feel like two separate events awkwardly stitched together. But when it works, it works.

We hosted Zoomtopia this year, our annual customer conference. Thousands joined in person, thousands more virtually. We're still learning what makes hybrid feel like one event instead of two. But seeing customers connect across both audiences reminded me why we keep investing in this space.

The Next Verse, a hunger initiative tied to Tony Robbins, pulled off something ambitious in December. A celebrity event at iHeart's LA stage with curved LED walls, an "in the round" design, and 50-plus musicians performing on-site. Another dozen musicians joined remotely via Zoom. Virtual audiences watched live, some through ticketed access, some free.

The production team used Liminal (ZoomISO, Tiles for Zoom, and Zoom Graphics Toolkit) to power the stage visuals. The event culminated in a recorded song that premiered on Christmas Day.

This wasn't "hybrid" as a compromise. Hybrid was the whole point.

Some people needed to be on that stage. Others could join from anywhere. The event brought them together.

Some of the most interesting events this year weren't marketing plays or corporate townhalls.

They were virtual because virtual was the only option.

ISACS runs a year-long parent education series for independent school families. Six webinars spread across the year, covering different stages of childhood. Parents don't have to take time off work or arrange childcare to attend.

Lorenzo's House hosts virtual support events for families dealing with early-onset dementia. The caregivers in this community often can't leave home. Virtual isn't convenient for them. It's necessary.

Christian Alliance for Orphans (CAFO) connected 1,400 leaders across 60 countries for a child welfare initiative. Twenty-nine remote locations hosted local gatherings across Africa, India, and Latin America. Over 1,000 people attended in groups. Another hundred joined individually from home.

In-person events aren't going anywhere. I'll be at conferences in 2026, shaking hands and having those hallway conversations. There's value in being present that I don't want to dismiss.

But virtual events aren't a substitute for in-person. They're something else entirely.

They reach farmers in Indonesia. They bring together caregivers who can't leave home. They let a creator generate a million dollars in revenue from a single webinar.

The organizations above figured that out. They stopped asking "how do we make virtual feel like in-person?" and started asking "what can virtual do that in-person can't?"

That's the better question.

What's one virtual event that surprised you in the past year?