Two layers: your meeting and your room
The easiest way to understand BrandedRooms is to picture two layers stacked on top of each other. The bottom layer is your video meeting. It runs on the meeting account you already pay for, with your settings, your licence, your participant limit and your recordings. Nothing about that changes, and BrandedRooms never resells meeting licences.
The top layer is the room: a web page with your name on it that holds the meeting inside it. The room decides what guests see before you arrive, how they get in, what sits beside the meeting while you talk, what plays on screen when the big moment lands, and where everyone goes afterwards. Think of the meeting as the stage and the room as the venue around it: the lobby, the signage, the merchandise table and the door staff.
Because the two layers are separate, you keep the meeting tools your team already knows. Hosts start the meeting the way they always do. The room simply gives guests a better front door and gives you a record of who walked through it.
Setting up a room, in order
Setup happens once for each room, and the order matters. Each step below prevents a problem we hit while building the first real room.
- Connect your meeting account. You create a small developer app inside the same account that hosts your meetings, switch on its embedding feature and paste its two keys into your room settings.
- Choose the meeting. Paste the meeting link or number and the short passcode people type. The room passes the passcode for guests, so nobody has to type it.
- Turn the platform's own waiting room off. Your branded lobby does the waiting, and with both switched on, guests would wait twice.
- Dress the room. Add the room name, the waiting-room message and, on a Branded Room, your logo, colours, fonts, domain and the offers you want beside the meeting.
- Set capacity to your licence's participant limit, so the room can warn you as you approach it.
- Test on a second device or a private browser window, joining as a pretend guest, before any real guest arrives.
What your guests experience
From the guest's side, the whole thing feels like visiting a website rather than launching software. They click the link in your invitation and land on your room page. At the door they give a first name and email, or skip that step if they are already signed in, and the room tags them with the event they came for.
Next comes the branded waiting room. It says you will be joining shortly, shows a countdown, and offers an add-to-calendar button for anyone who arrived a day early. There is nothing to download: guests join in the browser on your page. Anyone who prefers their desktop meeting app can still use the regular meeting link, though they will not see your page, your offers or your effects.
When you press Start the room, every waiting guest's page switches to the live meeting by itself, joined muted, with no reload and no second click. During the meeting, a Branded Room keeps your featured offers in a rail beside the call, opening programmes, products and forms in a slide-over so nobody has to leave. When the meeting ends, guests flow into the follow-up you chose.
What you do as host on the day
Your control panel is a single screen for running the room. Here is a simple run of show that works for most events, from a team all-hands to a launch party.
- An hour before: open the room so early arrivals can register and wait. Check the waiting-room message reads correctly for today.
- Thirty minutes before: join from a second device as a guest and confirm the lobby, the countdown and the offers rail look right.
- Ten minutes before: start the meeting in your meeting app as host, with your co-host and any speakers.
- Start time: press Start the room. Every guest in the lobby moves into the meeting together, which makes the opening feel like a curtain going up.
- During the meeting: watch the attendee list and capacity warning (on the Generic Room and up), see any join problems, and fire effects with keys 1–5 when a moment deserves confetti, sparkles, rockets, applause or a sound.
- Afterwards: close the room, then export your guest list or let it flow to your CRM or email tool.
After the meeting ends
Most meetings leave nothing behind except a recording and a vague sense of who showed up. A room leaves a guest list. From the Generic Room up, every name and email captured at the door is tagged by event and ready to download as a CSV; on a Branded Room it can also flow to your CRM or email tool. On a Branded Room, those guests are sent to your CRM or email tool with tags, and a follow-up funnel can send them to the replay, the offer or the next event you choose.
That is the quiet reason many hosts move to a room. The live moment is wonderful, but the list is what lets you say thank you, share the slides, invite people back and know which guests came to which event. Your guests' details belong to you and the tools you connect.
Where it started, and the limits worth knowing
BrandedRooms started as one room, built for Krystalore Crews' 9-Year Business Birthday: her brand around the meeting, her programmes in a rail beside it, a lobby that said she would be joining shortly, and effects she could fire for everyone at once. Everything on this page comes from building and running that room.
Building it also taught us the honest limits. Your meeting licence is the capacity cap, and everyone inside the room counts toward it. Effects play on the room page, so they are not in the meeting platform's recording; screen-record the page if you want them in a replay. Guests who join through the desktop app see the meeting but not your page. And the meeting itself must be started in your meeting app as host before Start the room can bring guests in. Knowing these in advance is what makes the day feel easy.