Prefer to glance? The Culture Dashboard puts the month’s calendar on one screen. What it costs to get your people there has its own story: [link to the cost story goes here].

Why we run this: if you produce events, you live inside your own, and the rest of the world arrives as a surprise, a hotel that is suddenly sold out or a speaker who is suddenly in Lisbon. The Culture Drop is your look up.

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The month in one breath. New York runs on the 1st, the country votes on the 3rd, Lisbon and Antalya each fill up on the 9th, Las Vegas turns into a racetrack on the 21st, a parade turns 100 on the 26th, and Amazon arrives in Las Vegas on the 30th with some 60,000 guests. The week to watch is the second, when two very large rooms open on the same Monday and compete for the same flights. Everything else in this issue is arranged around that collision, week by week, so you can find your own dates and see who is standing next to them.

THE WEEK OF THE 1ST: A MARATHON, A BALLOT AND A CAR SHOW

Sunday is for runners. The TCS New York City Marathon sends more than fifty thousand people over the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge on the 1st, in a year that race listings call the 50th anniversary of the five-borough course, while Formula 1 is in Mexico City the same morning for the Gran Premio de México. Two more stops follow, São Paulo on the 8th and then the Las Vegas Strip, where the race is scheduled for the weekend of the 21st. The Strip is busy first with cars: the SEMA Show fills the Las Vegas Convention Center from the 3rd through the 6th and opens to the public on the 6th, on a floor its own news desk describes as nearly sold out.

Tuesday is for ballots. The 3rd is Election Day, with all 435 House seats and 35 Senate seats up. For anyone planning a gathering that touches Washington, the week is a scheduling hazard, and in our reading sponsors and speakers tend to hold announcements until the count settles, so the decision you control is which deadlines to put before the 3rd and which after it. The same week, ElasticON stops in San Francisco on the 4th, the same day Estée Lauder holds an investor day in Shanghai.

THE WEEK OF THE 8TH: TWO ROOMS, ONE MONDAY

Lisbon against Antalya. Web Summit runs the 9th through the 12th in Lisbon, with more than seventy thousand attendees expected, and the COP31 climate conference runs the 9th through the 20th at the Antalya Expo Center, with its World Leaders’ Summit on the 11th and 12th, squarely inside Web Summit’s main days. COP31 is the first climate conference to split its presidency, with Türkiye as logistical host and Australia presiding over the negotiations. Two huge rooms on the same dates will compete for flights, ground transport, interpreters and security staff, which is our inference and not a reported fact, but anyone moving people around Iberia and the eastern Mediterranean that week should book earlier than feels necessary.

Meanwhile, the corporate pilgrimage begins. Adobe MAX opens in Miami Beach on the 10th, TwitchCon in San Diego on the 13th, and on the 14th the League of Legends World Championship ends in Brooklyn, in an arena that holds about 19,000, after a 2025 final that peaked at 6.7 million viewers outside China. Each of these is a company renting a city for a week so that its customers, its staff and its shareholders can be counted in the same room, which is what we would say turns a product announcement into an annual rite.

THE WEEK OF THE 15TH: THE INDUSTRY’S OWN ROOM

You are here. Expo! Expo!, the annual meeting of the International Association of Exhibitions and Events, runs the 16th through the 18th at Milwaukee’s newly expanded Baird Center. Last December in Houston it drew more than eighteen hundred professionals, a figure the association noted was pending a verified audit, and the number it posts this time will be read as a rough weather report for the whole trade-show business. Around it, Rockwell Automation’s Automation Fairopens in Boston on the 16th and Microsoft Ignite in San Francisco on the 17th, each drawing crowds in the five figures, depending on whom you believe.

Abu Dhabi plays the long game. Frieze Abu Dhabi makes its debut from the 19th through the 22nd, with NOMAD Abu Dhabi from the 18th, the start of a run of consecutive weekends that ends with the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi on December 11 and Formula 1 on December 3 through 6. The lesson for organizers elsewhere is sequence: each event feeds hotel inventory to the next, which a market of competing promoters rarely manages.

THE WEEK OF THE 22ND: A GRAND PRIX, A PARADE AND A HOLIDAY

Thursday turns 100. On the 26th the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade marches for the 100th time, a milestone that arrives later than 1924 plus a century because the parade was dark from 1942 through 1944. Macy’s has announced a record 100 inflatable elements, including the return of Underdog for the first time since 1984 and the Blue Hippopotamus, missing since 1931, and says more than 3.5 million people attend in a typical year, which is the number any Midtown hotel, caterer or corporate host should assume when pricing the week. The Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree arrives on the 7th and lights on December 2, so a December gathering near Fifth Avenue has two peak weeks to avoid.

Then the Strip, again. After the Grand Prix weekend, AWS re:Invent opens in Las Vegas on the 30th, expecting more than 60,000 after roughly 63,000 last year. Between the car show, the Grand Prix and re:Invent, the month is, for anyone who sells hotel rooms in Nevada, a sustained demonstration of why a city that never strikes the set can afford to be indifferent to what is on it.

AFTER HOURS: WHERE TO TAKE A GUEST

The stage. Broadway’s middle of the month is crowded: Wanted opens on the 8th, Here There Are Blueberries on the 9th, Downstate on the 15th, The Fantasticks on the 16th, and then the holiday trio, Blue Man Group: A New Holiday Surprise on the 17th, It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play on the 18th and Hayley Atwell and Tom Hiddleston in Much Ado About Nothing on the 19th.

The screen. Warner Bros.’ The Cat in the Hat opens on the 6th and Lionsgate’s The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping on the 20th. Thanksgiving week brings Focker-in-Law and Disney’s Hexed on the 25th, and Greta Gerwig’s Narnia is reported to open in IMAX on the 26th for a two-week window before it streams on Netflix on Christmas Day. That date comes from an earlier report, so confirm it before building anything on it, but if it holds, a block of seats would make a scarce client gift, which is our inference and not the studio’s pitch.

The walls. London has the densest run of museum openings, led by Van Eyck: The Portraits at the National Gallery and Peggy Guggenheim in London at the Royal Academy, both opening on the 21st, and Nan Goldin: You Never Did Anything Wrong at the Hayward Gallery on the 24th. In New York the Met opens A Long Shadow: Postwar Japan Through the Lens on the 12th, and in Paris the Louvre opens Louvre Photo on the 4th. A blockbuster with a line down the block tells you where visitors, and therefore hotel rooms and tables, will concentrate through January, and a museum with a hit on its walls is in our reading a candidate for a private evening, though availability is for its events team to say.

The new keys and tables. The month’s biggest American hotel ribbon is the Fairmont New Orleans, opening on the 2nd with 250 keys in the former Bank of New Orleans Building, and the St. Regis Dubai, The Palm returns on the 1st. Hotel dates slip more than any other date in this business and most of these come from a single roundup, so read them as targets, and in our reading a property that is new or freshly reopened is usually hungry for group business. In London, The Nudgegives firm dates for openings including SUMI in Marylebone on the 1st, Edmondo in the City on the 6th and Mariah Carey’s Holiday Bar in Mayfair on the 19th. A client dinner in a restaurant’s first week is a bet on someone else’s soft opening, and the safer reservation is the one made a month later.

Before you lock a date. A ballot, a marathon bib, a parade balloon, an art-fair ticket and a conference badge are all ways of getting a number written down in public, and each draws on the same pool of rooms, flights, sponsors and attention that you do. The habit we would suggest is a short one: before you lock a date, a rate or a headline speaker for next fall, check what else will be in the city that week.

GatheringPoint covers the people who build the gatherings. Subscribe at GatheringPoint.news.

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Why we write these long.

When someone is about to hire, pitch or meet you, a title and a quote is all they find. We write these profiles long so the fuller portrait is there to be found, by a planner, a client or an AI tool. We are betting that the fuller portrait is the one that gets found.

Bonus Section: In case you missed it- Check out GatheringArchitecture.com ( not yet officially launched)

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Introducing Small Bite Architecture

https://smallbitearchitecture.lovable.app/people

Small Bite Architecture: food and drink that tell your story.

If you had company tonight, what would you serve? Small Bite Architecture starts with that question. Every bite fits in one inch, so it has to say who someone is in one bite, two chews. For each leader we profile, we design the small bites and sips we would serve if we threw a party in their honor, and give them a page of their own. The same idea now scales up to events, from COLLECTIBLE New York to the LA Auto Show and WXO London. Watch the two-minute explainer above, then meet the people.

The people with edible profiles

Brian Feit, Stacy Wyatt, Robyn Davis, Greg Hitchen, Wayne Fernandez, Jaclyn Bernstein, Robin Leeds, Ben Erwin, Ken Holsinger, Lea Karam, Don Welsh, Joyce Leveston, Martha Donato, Amy Calvert, Andrew Garcia, Colja Dams, Michelle Mason, Matt Johnson, Julius Solaris, Howard Givner, Mark Brewster, Jacob Cohen Donnelly, Ryan Simonetti, Nicola Kastner, Andrew Roby, Tim Groot, Iain Morrison, Bryan Rafanelli, Terrence O’Dwyer, Victoria Isley, Sasha Frieze, Paul Miller, Jennifer Collins, James Lancaster, David Landgraf, Liz Irving, Richard Attias, Sam Lippman, Doug Emslie, Adrian Segar, Janet Dell, Michelle Metter, Erick Weiss, Philip Dufour, Nicole Peck, Michelle Russell, Derek Pacqué, Lee Brian Schrager, David Allison, Monique Ruff-Bell, Adam Parry, Tahira Endean, Carl Winston, Michael Barnett, Walter Charnizon, Cindy Y. Lo, Marco Giberti, Femi Oke, Hervé Sedky, Dahlia El Gazzar, Greg Topalian, Laurie Kirby, Heather Holst-Knudsen, Miguel Neves, Liz Lathan, J.B. Miller, Holly Peterson

Meet them all

Robyn Davis would like to correct a common assumption about what she does, and the correction turns out to be the most interesting thing about her. She does not work with exhibitors directly anymore. What she does is narrower and, in its way, more ambitious: she builds exhibitor-success programming — speaking, training, consulting — that show organizers commission and gift to their exhibitors, so that the companies filling a hall with their hopes and their budgets have someone teaching them how to do it well. The exhibitors are her subject. The organizers are her clients. She works the whole floor at once, through the people who own it.

That distinction matters to her for a reason that is not pedantic. The organizations that contract her are not obscure, and the shows they run are among the largest in the country: NSSF, which produces the SHOT Show; AEM, behind CONEXPO-CON/AGG; MHI, which runs MODEX; the Association for Manufacturing Technology’s IMTS; plus RE+ and RSNA, the radiology giant. These are organizers buying something they cannot easily build in-house: a single trusted practitioner who can empower a thousand exhibitors without the organizer having to, in her words, hand-hold every one through the process. Her services arrive as a gift to the exhibitor, the organizer’s treat, which is an unusual economic arrangement and a deliberate one. It means the help reaches the startups and small businesses and corporate marketers who would never have found their way to a consultant on their own. That reach is the point. By her own citation of industry data, only about thirty percent of organizers provide any exhibitor education at all, and the exhibitors who most need it are precisely the ones least equipped to go looking.

She did not set out to do any of this. By her own account she fell into events — the industry found her before she found it — and what kept her there was less a passion for trade shows than a compulsion to figure out why they worked when they worked and failed when they failed. Her earliest exposure came through temporary work on the experiential side, the kind of on-the-ground assignments a young person takes without imagining they add up to a career. But Davis has the engineer’s reflex of treating a messy situation as a system with a solution hiding in it, and she started keeping track — noticing what moved people through a space and what left a booth stranded, cataloging the patterns until the patterns became frameworks. The frameworks became a company. The temp job became a calling she backed into, which is its own kind of answer to anyone who thinks a career has to be planned to be real.

She teaches, in other words, the most overlooked constituency in the gathering economy, and she teaches them on a philosophy that is worth stating plainly because it is the opposite of the usual expert’s posture. Davis does not believe in her way or the highway. The through-line of her training, and of her book, is that exhibiting is an iterative process — that there are better and worse ways to do things, yes, but that the glass is half full rather than half empty, because there is always another show, another chance to improve, more room to grow for anyone who wants it. She works hard to make the material approachable, to meet exhibitors where they actually are rather than where a checklist says they should be. The last thing she wants is for someone to conclude that because they cannot do everything perfectly today, it isn’t worth doing anything at all. Accessibility, she will tell you, is close to a core value. It is the rare trade-show expert whose central message is permission.

The credentials behind the philosophy are not soft. She holds the CEM, the Certified in Exhibition Management designation from the International Association of Exhibitions and Events, earned in October 2023, and the CPTD, the Certified Professional in Talent Development, which is the training profession’s serious credential rather than a weekend certificate. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, with minors in Adolescent Health and Psychology — a combination that, read in hindsight, looks like a blueprint for the teacher she became: systems, human development, behavior. A person who studied how complex things hold together, how people learn, and why they act as they do, and then aimed all three at a discipline almost nobody teaches.

Her standing in the field is a matter of record. In December 2025, at Expo! Expo! in Houston, IAEE awarded her its Distinguished Service Award, presented by awards committee past chair Bob O’Connell — recognition reserved for members who have given extraordinarily to the association and the industry. She came to it by showing up: one hundred and thirteen IAEE events by the association’s count, cross-country travel to support chapters from the Southeast to the Rocky Mountains, service as South Carolina’s State Captain for the Exhibitions & Conferences Alliance Legislative Action Day. As the inaugural chair of IAEE’s Community, Engagement, and Belonging Committee in 2024, she ran the committee’s founding year in the open — a #BuildInPublic approach, in her shorthand — leading more than forty members and setting a transparency standard IAEE later presented nationwide. She does not build behind a curtain, which is itself a form of the accessibility she preaches.

The people who have worked with her tend to describe the same person twice. Her mentor Janet Sperstad, a foundational thinker on event design as a cognitive discipline, calls Davis’s gift for designing a workshop that creates safe, open space while still delivering hard technique unparalleled. Tommy Goodwin of the Exhibitions & Conferences Alliance, who met her at IMEX Las Vegas in 2019, calls her simply a superstar of the business events industry. The recommendations run long and they rhyme: she tailors, she follows up, she makes the room feel welcome without lowering the bar. One former client, asked for a single word, chose phenomenal.

Buy Book on Amazon

Which brings us to the book, which is the occasion for all of this and, as of this week, a real object in the world.

Exhibit Smarter: A Step-by-Step Guide to Trade Show Success is out now, published by Astro Bunny Press, her own imprint. It is the distillation of nearly seventeen years of advising exhibitors at some of the largest shows in the country — the SHOT Show, CONEXPO-CON/AGG, IMTS among them — and it is built around the framework she has taught for years: five essential steps, running Event Selection, Initial Planning, General Preparations, On-Site Efforts, Follow-Up, and Evaluation. Around that spine she arranges the questions she wants every exhibitor to sit with, the bluntest of them being why anyone should visit your booth instead of doing literally anything else, and the measurement discipline most exhibitors skip entirely — return on investment, return on objectives, net impact, a balanced scorecard. Kirkus, reviewing it, singled out the pencil drawings as engaging and the language as clear and digestible, which is the accessibility she preaches showing up on the page.

The origin detail is the one worth keeping. The first stranger to read the book — the first person who was neither a friend nor someone she was paying — was Gary Shapiro of the Consumer Technology Association, the organization that produces CES, and his encouragement, she says, mattered. She debuted the print edition at Trade Show Executive’s Gold 100 Summit, kept proof copy number one for herself, and handed copies two through two hundred and one to the attendees. For a book about the overlooked, it is a fitting way to enter the world: not through a retailer’s algorithm but hand to hand, in a room full of the people who run the shows.

What the book makes explicit is the thing she has believed all along. Davis spent years arguing that exhibitors are the industry’s most neglected constituency and that the shelf of business books holds almost nothing to help them. Rather than wait for the shelf to fill, she filled it. Her message inside the covers is the same one she brings to the training room — that exhibiting is iterative, that the fundamentals are what most people skip, and that everyone has the opportunity to exhibit smarter if they are willing to keep getting better.

That is the story, and it is a better one than any secret. Not a prodigy, not a next-generation voice — she has worked at this too long and won too much for either frame to fit. Something steadier: a private person who decided to become visible on purpose, for a professional reason she believes in, so that the exhibitors who need the most help and ask for it the least might finally have somewhere to turn.

What Robyn Davis leaves in the vault — the transferable principles, lifted from her practice.

• Better beats perfect. Exhibiting is iterative. The goal is never to get it flawless; it’s to get it better than last time, because there’s always another show and another door.

• Meet people where they are. Accessibility is a teaching value, not a nicety. The worst outcome is someone deciding that because they can’t do everything right, it isn’t worth doing anything.

• The edge is in the fundamentals everyone skips. Most exhibitors reach for the clever and neglect the basic. The basic, done on purpose, is the advantage.

• Ask the brutal question. Why should anyone cross the hall to your booth instead of doing literally anything else? If you can’t answer it, you aren’t ready.

• Measure what you came for. Not badge scans — return on investment, return on objectives, net impact. Decide the goal before the show, then prove it after.

• Reach the people who won’t come looking. The ones who most need help ask for it least. Build the help so it finds them, rather than waiting for them to find it.

• A career doesn’t have to be planned to be real. She fell into events and backed into a calling. The engineer’s instinct — treat the mess as a system with a solution hiding in it — did the rest.

• If the shelf is empty, fill it. She stopped waiting for someone else to write the book exhibitors needed and wrote it herself.

Sources

• Robyn Davis, CPTD, CEM — LinkedIn — biography, credentials, degree, experience, recommendations

• Exhibitors WINH LLC — LinkedIn company page — client organizers (NSSF, RE+, AEM, RSNA) and the gift-to-exhibitor model

• Robyn Davis Shows How Leadership and Lifting Others Transforms an Industry — IAEE — Distinguished Service Award, CEB Committee, the “why I wrote the book” framing

• How Robyn Davis, CPTD, CEM’s New Book Will Help Exhibitors Succeed — Trade Show Executive — Gary Shapiro, the Gold 100 debut, proof copy #1

• Rewriting the Trade Show Playbook, with Robyn Davis — “Event Peeps” podcast, Event Marketer — “fell into events,” nearly 17 years, the four strategic questions

• Exhibit Smarter — Kirkus Reviews — five-step framework, the pencil drawings, release

• Exhibit Smarter — book site — the book’s own description and framework names

• SHOT Show Exhibitor Academy — NSSF — her ongoing role facilitating exhibitor education

• EXHIBITORLIVE speaker bio — shows she creates programs for (SHOT Show, RE+, CONEXPO-CON/AGG)

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Edible Profile of Robyn Davis

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Forty CEOs sat around a conveyor belt in a villa above the French Riviera this summer, and the food came to them. BMF had built a custom dining table with a track running down its spine, hidden the kitchen behind the backdrop, and staged the whole thing so each course arrived as theater, a small piece of engineered wonder delivered to some of the most powerful executives in hospitality. The dinner was for Bilt. It was one of fifteen events BMF ran at the Cannes Lions festival this year, across five clients, in the agency’s tenth consecutive year on the Croisette.

Cannes has become the Olympics of activations, and the strange part is how little it has to do with the festival it is named after. The Cannes Lions is officially an advertising awards show, five days of trophies and panels inside the Palais des Festivals, but almost nobody who matters is in the Palais. The real week happens outside, along the Croisette, where the beach clubs have been rented and rebranded into temporary brand worlds with names like Spotify Beach, Sport Beach, Meta Beach, and Amazon Port. The deals get made on the sand. The relationships get made on the yachts. The status gets conferred at the invitation-only dinners in the villas above the town, and the awards ceremony most people fly in for is the thing they are least likely to attend. The festival is the pretext. The activation is the point, and BMF is in the business of building the point. What makes the week different from the hundreds of other activations BMF stages in a year is who shows up. Cannes is the one event the boss actually attends. A regional brand team can green-light a pop-up in a mall and never see it in person, but the CMO and the chief executive fly to the Riviera themselves, walk the villa, sit at the conveyor belt, and watch their own brand perform in front of their peers. That turns an activation into something personal. It is no longer a line item a marketing director signs off on from a distance. It is the boss’s own reputation, staged in real time, in a room full of the only people whose opinion the boss cares about. Feit builds for that pressure specifically, because at Cannes the client is not a company. It is a person, standing right there, hoping to look brilliant.

BMF is the experiential marketing agency Brian Feit founded in 2003 and still runs as a founding partner alongside Bruce Starr, his business partner since the beginning and the person he credits before he credits himself. What started as two people and two clients, Madonna’s Maverick Records and Kiehl’s, in a West Village apartment stacked with boxes is now a global integrated shop operating out of four offices, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and London, with a full-time staff grown past a hundred and a freelance bench that swells it further for the big builds. Industry trackers put annual revenue in the low twenty-million range. The agency runs on the order of three hundred campaigns a year across roughly twenty countries, spanning travel and tourism, fashion and beauty, hospitality, financial services, luxury, streaming, wine and spirits, and consumer packaged goods. The client list reads like a directory of the brands trying to stay in the cultural conversation: Amazon, Netflix, Disney, Marriott, Estée Lauder, Mastercard, Google, Capital One, Japan Airlines, Lamborghini, Gucci, and the TikTok-owned editing app CapCut. Kiehl’s, the second client BMF ever signed, is still on the roster more than two decades later.

To understand how a kid from St. Louis ended up building conveyor belts for CEOs, you have to go back to the candy. Feit was twelve years old, an only child in a big house with a single working mother who did sales and marketing, and he was eating a box of Jelly Bellies when he noticed the toll-free number printed on the back. He called it. He told the person who answered that he was a business. By the end of the call he had made himself a reseller, and shortly after that he had made a one-sheet, and shortly after that he was selling the candy to family and friends. He was twelve, and he had already grasped the thing most people in his industry spend a career trying to learn, which is that the distance between wanting to sell something and selling it is often just the nerve to pick up the phone and announce that you already do. The conveyor belt on the Riviera is that same phone call, twenty-three years later, at a scale the twelve-year-old could not have pictured. Feit will tell you the hustle in between has never changed character, only size.

The origin runs, as the public record has always said, through a handwritten letter to Clive Davis. What the record does not carry is what that letter was tangled up with. Feit was a teenager who had watched Madonna’s Truth or Dare and decided, watching her manager Freddy DeMann work the film, that he wanted to be in the music business. He worked radio stations and record stores, became Mercury Records’ college street-team kid in Illinois, and wrote letters to every label CEO he could name, Tommy Mottola, Sylvia Rhone, Clive Davis. Davis wrote back, which Feit still marks as an act of grace, a man at the height of his career taking the time to answer a no-name kid. He used the letter to persuade his mother to double her tuition bill and let him transfer to NYU. And in the same season that he moved to New York and started interning for Davis, he took his mother to a downtown restaurant called Bar Eighty Nine, where the bathroom doors fogged opaque when you locked them and turned clear when you did not, and he came out to her there. She was, as he tells it, entirely unsurprised, in the way of all mothers. The letter and the coming-out are the same moment in his life. Both were a no-name kid deciding to stop tempering himself and announce who he actually was.

The partner who would become the other half of BMF started out working for him. Feit knew Bruce Starr from Illinois, and when Starr came to NYU years later, he interned for Feit, who by then was running around the city doing press and promotion and retail for a small electronic-music label his cousin had started. The company that carries both their initials was decided in Starr’s dorm room. Feit had already taken the LSAT, and his father thought law school was the smart, safe move, and it would have been. Instead the two of them sat in that dorm room weighing a side project they were doing under the BMF name, a job for Madonna’s Maverick Records, against the sensible path, and Starr, who Feit describes as confident and a rock in exactly the moments Feit was not, said they would be the nice guys and build the thing. So they did. The intern became the strategist, the reader of the culture’s pulse, the person Feit now credits before he credits himself, and the whole company is proof of the bet Feit still makes on the people the rest of the industry has not looked at closely yet. He made it first on Bruce.

The Music Lounge is where the announcement became a business model. Feit and Starr, working alone, looked at a music festival and saw what everyone else in the ecosystem was ignoring, which was the dead time. The artists on the Lollapalooza stage were only on the stage for an hour. The rest of the day they were idle, and idle talent surrounded by idle press and idle brands was, to Feit, the most valuable unclaimed real estate at the entire event. BMF pitched the Hard Rock Hotel on a lounge across the street from the festival, got the space, and watched the program explode to the point that Lollapalooza itself began wondering how so much activity had migrated across the road. The lounge ran for eleven years. It moved to Coachella, where Feit once installed a live camel because he understood, before Instagram existed and while Facebook was still the only game, that no one could resist a photo next to a camel on the way in. Lady Gaga played one of the lounges before she was Lady Gaga. Katy Perry did too. The insight was never really about music. It was about finding the gap and owning it before anyone else noticed there was a gap to own.

It is hard to remember now how strange all of this looked in 2003. When Feit and Starr started sending record labels’ artists out into the arms of brands, the two worlds held each other at a distance. Brands were not sponsoring music festivals the way they blanket them today, and creating commercial opportunities for an artist was faintly disreputable, the kind of thing that got Feit eye-rolled by people who thought a musician and a toothpaste had no business in the same sentence. The early BMF product was a CD packaged thematically to match the record, dried rose petals for a sensual album, mailed to a brand in the hope of starting a conversation, and Feit is quick to point out that the exact same gesture, the branded package sent to a tastemaker, is now a whole industry aimed at influencers. What was eccentric in 2003 is table stakes in 2026. The temperament of marketing inverted underneath him. The fusion of brand and culture that once made buyers wary is now the entire premise of the business, and the practitioners who were dismissed as hustlers turned out to be early. Feit did not predict the shift so much as bet his company on the version of marketing he wanted to exist, and then wait for the rest of the industry to arrive.

Ask Feit where the ideas come from and the honest answer is everywhere, which is less a slogan than a description of how he actually works. The Jelly Belly business came off the back of a candy box. The camel came from imagining what a person would stop to photograph. The Music Lounge sponsorship that ran for years came because he blasted a deck to his contact list and a woman named Ashley Barrett at Coty wrote back and asked what he would do with fifty thousand dollars instead of the thirty-five he was asking for. Early in his career, before BMF was even a name, he gathered thirty people in a bar, went around the room so everyone could say what they did, and called it the New Business Network, because he had already worked out that the room is the asset and the conversation is the raw material. He keeps the tickler file. He tells anyone who asks for advice to read the trade press cover to cover, because the next idea is usually sitting in plain sight in someone else’s paragraph. The through-line of a BMF activation is not a signature look or a house style. It is a posture. Stay open, take the meeting, keep the note, follow up, and treat every conversation as a place an idea might be hiding, because in his experience that is exactly where they hide.

The Music Lounge was the first proof of a thing Feit has since turned into a working theory of value. When the conversation turns to luxury, he states it plainly. Access is the new luxury. The point is not that experiences are nice. The point is structural. When people learned how cheaply luxury goods are actually made, the object lost some of its power to confer status, and status migrated to the thing that cannot be knocked off, which is the invitation. Being at the Dolce and Gabbana event this week is the ticket. Being in the F1 suite shaking hands with Lewis Hamilton is the ticket. Social media is the engine underneath all of it, because the invitation is only worth having if you can be seen having received it, and life is short enough that people would rather brag about where they were than what they bought. Feit is careful about the failure mode, though, and he names it fast. Access curdles the instant the experience is bad. If the Dolce event is overcrowded and the room is hot and the bar has a line and the napkins are dirty, the invitation was worthless, because the story the guest tells afterward is a story about a line. There can’t be lines at the bar. That is not a hospitality nicety. It is the entire economic logic of the model. The scarcity only holds if the thing behind the velvet rope is actually worth having crossed the rope for.

Part of the luxury of running BMF at this scale is that Feit now gets to choose. He and Starr keep a vision board of the brands they want, the ones they think are cool, and go after them, which is how CapCut ended up a client at Cannes, the editing app every creator is already using. But the vision board is not the fun part, and here Feit says something that cuts against how most agencies posture. The thrill is not adding cool to a brand that already has it. It is hard to make Prada cooler, and not very interesting to try. The thrill is the toothpaste. Feit lights up about Colgate, about making Tide cool at the Super Bowl, because the mass consumer brands are where a BMF idea can actually move the needle, and where the budget is big enough to do something real. Anyone can throw a party for a fashion house. Making America’s toothpaste feel like it belongs in the cultural conversation is the harder, better trick, and it is the one Feit would rather be doing.

Pulling it off requires finding the one person inside the client who can see it. The executives do not start out convinced, and Feit is precise about the pattern. It almost always takes a visionary somewhere inside the company to push everyone else forward and bring in an agency like BMF to make it happen, and once that internal champion has cover, the rest of the executives get genuinely into it. Feit’s real skill, the one underneath the activations, is finding that person and handing them a win, helping them look good to the bosses who signed off, sometimes helping them win awards. He becomes, in the client’s own hierarchy, a kind of rabbi, the outside counsel the visionary trusts to make a risky idea land. The relationships compound from there, because an executive he made look brilliant once will bring him along to the next brand, and the next.

The failures, when they came, were almost always about venues, and Feit is unbothered telling you so. A fragrance launch collapsed because the venue, which BMF had found listed in BizBash of all places, turned out to be at war with its own landlord, and the team had to improvise a plan B on the spot to save face. A Hamptons event for a major client lost its permit at the last minute, after someone was injured outside the venue weeks earlier and the town decided it no longer wanted the risk. He says he never wants to work in the Hamptons again. The lesson he takes from the fires is not a grand one, which is part of why it is credible: be buttoned up about venues and permits, because that is where the disasters live, and the difference between a professional and an amateur is almost never the idea, it is whether the idea survives contact with a municipality.

What has not changed since the apartment is the arithmetic of the beast. Feit is candid that even now, with retainers and blue-chip relationships, BMF is an agency that always has to feed itself, and that the anxiety he felt in the apartment, knowing he had this month and next month covered but not the third, has never fully left. It has only gotten bigger, more mouths, more money that has to come in. He manages it the way he has always managed everything, through the tickler file he inherited from his mother’s sales desk and turned into a database of a couple thousand people, and through a refusal to let the size of the operation talk him out of the hunger that built it. Feeding the beast is not a complaint when he says it. It is the closest thing he has to a creed.

The same hunger makes him decent to everyone, and that decency contains a prediction, the one Feit seems most certain about. The person manning the pop-up booth, the freelancer running the sampling table, the gig worker no client bothers to learn the name of, that is the future marketing director, and probably the future superstar. He believes it because he lived the reverse of it, the kid nobody took seriously in an apartment full of boxes while the established players rolled their eyes and guessed wrong. The booth worker is standing where the culture is actually happening, closest to the consumer, ear pressed to a pulse the executives upstairs can only read about in a deck three months later. He has already watched the first wave arrive: the social-media kids who cracked viral content are opening companies and pulling ad dollars out of the television networks, and at Cannes this year the creator economy had become the whole conversation. He calls it a Game of Thrones and says the only move is to get on the right list and enjoy that the power is going into the people’s hands. The booth workers are next.

He would enjoy that, of course, because the kids are running his own play. The nineteen-year-old opening a company off a viral video is doing the exact thing the twelve-year-old did when he called the Jelly Belly hotline and announced he was a business, which is refusing to wait for permission to be taken seriously. The letter to Clive Davis was the same move. The Music Lounge across the street from Lollapalooza was the same move. The difference is only that the tools got faster and the audience got bigger, so the distance between a good idea and a company you can point to has collapsed from years to an afternoon.

What has not collapsed is the part nobody posts, and it is the same part Feit has been quietly betting on the whole time: the openness, the conversations, the attention paid to the people the industry overlooks. The creators who look like overnight superstars are, most of them, running the same unglamorous engine Feit has run since the apartment, the follow-up call, the tickler file, the decency to the person who cannot do anything for you yet, the quiet terror of not knowing where the third month’s money comes from. It looks easy from the outside because the hustle is the one thing that never makes it into the edit. Feit is proof of the trade the whole industry keeps trying to skip. He has been at it for twenty-three years and still runs on the hunger from the apartment, still takes the meeting, still keeps the note. The superstars of this moment make it look effortless. The ones who last will be the ones who figure out, the way he did at twelve with a candy hotline and a one-sheet, that it was never effortless at all. It was just hustle, and hustle, done long enough and generously enough, is the thing that finally pays.

Ten deposits from the founding partner of BMF on hustle, access, the cool factor, and the thing that has never once left his blood.

• On the new scarcity. “Access is the new luxury. Being invited to the Dolce and Gabbana event, being invited to the F1 suite and meeting Lewis Hamilton, that’s the ticket. Luxury goods got knocked when people revealed how cheaply they’re actually made. People know life is short, they value experiences, and social media helps them brag about it.”

• On the hustle. “The hustle doesn’t end, though. It’s in my blood. Back in the day I think people wouldn’t give me the time of day and would roll their eyes a little bit. But the hustle didn’t stop. You gotta keep going and not take no.”

• On how far the business has come. “Brands were not sponsoring music festivals at that time the way they are now. We were creating brand opportunities for the artists before that was even okay or cool. Those packages we sent with CDs, going to influencers is a thing now”

• On the business he is really in. “It really is a people business. If you don’t like people, then don’t go in this business. I received help from people, so I always give. Be someone that people wanna work with.”

• On the partner who started as his intern. “Bruce came to NYU and was my intern. We were in his dorm room, doing a side project for BMF, and I’m like, do we do this BMF thing, or do I go to law school? He’s been a rock for me. He was like, we’ll be the nice guys, and we formed BMF. Everything BMF is the two of us”

• On the discipline of the follow-up. “I call it my tickler file, because my mom did sales back in the day. She’d have a file for every day and put a note in the file date she wanted to follow up with somebody. Mine is really my database, and there’s a couple thousand people in there now.”

• On the people the room ignores. “The gig workers out on the street are gonna become the marketing directors of tomorrow, because they’re in touch with what’s going on. The money is going into the creator hands that produce content. It’s a Game of Thrones. Get on the right list.”

• On the consumer journey. “If you’re doing an event, there can’t be lines at the bar. Can’t be dirty napkins everywhere. Too much effort and a bad consumer journey is a deal breaker. That’s always how we design events.”

• On making the unglamorous glamorous. “It’s hard to bring more cool to Prada. It’s more fun to work with brands like Tide at the Super Bowl. They might have more budget, and we can move the needle bringing our cool factor.”

• On selling the vision inside. “It usually takes a visionary inside to push everyone forward and bring on someone like us to help make it happen. But then the execs get really into it. I just hope we make them look good, since they brought us on.”

https://suno.com/s/C1zRXvv51XGWT4jH

Edible Profile of Brian Feit

The Merch: Wearing the Argument

Every Wisdom Bank profile throws off an artifact you can wear, and the rule is simple: the object has to carry the thesis, not just the name. For Feit that bar sits especially high, because the shareable object is the thing he actually sells. Two pieces, built Vignelli-clean, three colors, no ornament.

The hat. An unstructured cap with ON THE LIST across the front, red over white. The velvet-rope thesis in three words, and the wearer is announcing, with a wink, that they made the list.

The tee. A crew with ACCESS IS THE NEW LUXURY set small on the left chest, the last word in red under a short rule. The manifesto worn as a manifesto. With the cap it is a two-part set: the argument on the shirt, the punchline on the hat.

Editor’s Note: I have operated BizBash in Canada for more than a decade, long enough to call people like Stacy Wyatt colleagues rather than sources. I am personally appalled by how Canada is being treated right now. My sympathies are with the Canadians who have built this industry in good faith while their neighbors make that harder than it should be.

Ask Stacy Wyatt whether the current political chapter has scared American companies away from Canada, and she doesn’t hesitate: no. If anything, a favorable exchange rate has made Canada an easier sell than it was. What has actually shifted, after three decades running the country’s most established gathering of event professionals, is the traffic going the other way. Canadian planners, by her account, have quietly stopped selling American destinations altogether, and individual travelers have grown wary of a border now associated with detentions and immigration scrutiny that has nothing to do with the meetings business and everything to do with the headlines. Americans are still showing up. The invitation just doesn’t run both ways anymore.

That read comes from someone who has earned the right to make it. (the entire incentive week was $4 million; the one party was around $1 million.

The party cost four million dollars. It had a sixty-foot mountain scape and Olympic skaters costumed as salmon and tuna, choreographed to glide across a rink built inside BC Place Stadium for two thousand people. It lost.

Stacy Wyatt and her then-partner Mark Wyatt had flown down to California for the Special Event awards, convinced their Canadiana-themed opening night party, the centrepiece of the largest incentive fam trip British Columbia had ever hosted, would win. Instead, the award went to a party built around a ten-thousand-dollar tax audit, a fraction of the budget, a fraction of the ambition. “We were stunned,” Wyatt says now. On the flight home, still stinging, she and Mark sketched an idea on a napkin: if the Americans weren’t going to recognize what Canadians were building, Canadians would build their own show to do it. That show turns thirty this April.

Wyatt has spent those three decades running Canadian Special Events, known inside the industry simply as CSE, the country’s answer to the Special Event awards. She built it by accident, ran it through a recession, a divorce, a full-time job for several of the lean years and a pandemic, and has spent the last several years deliberately making it smaller. The story of how she got from a million-dollar loss to a boutique, 700-person show she now protects on purpose says something specific about the difference between how Canadians gather and how Americans do, a distinction she has finally, mostly, named.

CSE is not one thing. It is a small media and events company built around four connected parts: Canadian Special Events Magazine, the annual trade show and conference called CSE Live, the Canadian Event Awards, and, as of 2024, the Canadian Venue Awards. The Canadian Event Awards is the oldest piece and the one Wyatt built first, established in 1997 as recognition for event and meeting professionals and now considered the industry’s most prestigious night of the year. CSE Live grew up around it later as the trade show and education arm, the one Wyatt has spent the last several years deliberately shrinking back down to the 800 people she actually wants in the room, even as CSE’s own promotional material advertises a bigger number closer to 1,500 for the wider week of programming. The magazine is the through-line I asked about without quite naming it: Wyatt is still, thirty years in, its bylined author, the person who assigns and often writes the coverage of the winning events she also helps judge. Here are last year’s roster of judges representing a cross section of Canadian talent.

The Napkin

Wyatt did not set out to work in events. She was twenty-one, working catering for outdoor festivals in Vancouver, freshly out of university, when she met Mark Wyatt, ten years older and already deep in an industry she says she did not know existed. Mark ran Daiseiko International, an incentive travel company he had built with his partner, Jan Carinci a former quarterback for the BC Lions who had just retired. The two of them had pitched Tourism Vancouver and Tourism BC on a familiarization trip, a bet that Japanese and Asian corporate incentive groups could be brought to British Columbia at scale. The Tourism BC staff, Wyatt says, told them flatly they’d “eat our desk” if the pitch worked.

It worked. Six thousand people from Amway Japan, Ricoh, Charle and Tupperware landed in BC across 1994 and 1995, in what Wyatt calls the largest economic spinoff incentive programs the province had ever seen. Daiseiko needed help with an outdoor event at Jericho Beach not long after, and Wyatt, who specialized in off-premises festival catering, got the job. That was the introduction. “We fell in love, and I went to work with him,” she says. One of the events that came out of that very first fam, for Amway Japan was the Canadiana party at BC Place, which went up for the industry’s top American honour and lost, which is how a napkin sketch on a flight home became the first Canadian Event Awards staged at the Hyatt in Vancouver.

Ten Years, Three Cities, One Divorce

The following year, a competitor already running a smaller, more locally focused special event show in the same market approached the Wyatts about buying them out. They did, and CSE as it exists today, Wyatt says, was built on that combination. The show ran in both Vancouver and Toronto simultaneously for roughly nine years, then briefly added Calgary, a decision Wyatt now describes flatly: “That was not a good idea.” Running three cities nearly broke the company. Calgary was amazing to the show but too small to sustain.

CSE phased out its Vancouver leg the year after the 2010 Winter Olympics, a moment Wyatt describes as an industry-wide reckoning. Event professionals across the province had either made millions on the Games or lost them inside a week, and the entire sector was, in her word, burnt out. The timing lined up with a harder personal fact: she and Mark were separating. “Mark and I were moving apart at that time, and it just made sense to manage just one place, and then we never went back,” she says. Mark Wyatt has been out of the company entirely since. He has spent the last fifteen years in the fire service and is now, Wyatt says, the fire chief in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, a role she says suits him

An Introvert Runs the Room

Ask Wyatt what drew her to an industry built on charisma and she does not hesitate: it wasn’t the people. “I am so introverted,” she says. “I can schmooze with the best of them and turn it on, but imposter syndrome for me is a real thing. What she loves, by her own account, is the architecture underneath the party: the lists, the logistics, the contingency plan for the contingency plan. She is not, by her own description, the typical schmoozy social butterfly this industry tends to recruit. Whatever pulls most people toward a room full of strangers for a living, it was never the thing that pulled her.

I have a working theory about that, sharpened across three decades of doing interviews like this one: people don’t change much between who they were at ten and who they are running a company thirty years later, whatever else shifts around them.

I asked Wyatt directly what she was like as a kid, whether she was the one behind the scenes running the clubs and the committees, looking for the DNA of the adult in the child. She didn’t hesitate either. “I think I was a little control freak baby,” she says. “I needed to be in control of everything. She is the youngest of what became a blended family of five siblings after her mother remarried when Wyatt was nineteen, the baby of the family who nonetheless needed to run things, a natural worrier for whom backup plans were, in her word, “my thing.”

That temperament collides directly with the job once a year, at CSE’s gala, which she describes as the most stressful night of her calendar. A room of five hundred people she genuinely knows, whose kids’ names she can recall, creates a specific kind of pressure that a company CEO hosting an annual conference never has to manage: everyone in that room deserves a genuine conversation, which Wyatt wants to have but there is no way to have five hundred real conversations in one evening. “It’s so uncomfortable because I feel so bad, because they’re here for that conversation,” she says. “They’re here to be seen, and you can’t see everyone.” She is not afraid of public speaking, she is careful to clarify. She simply hates it, does five minutes at the gala and no more, and hands opening remarks to trusted colleagues whenever she can.

Old Home Week

Pressed to name what makes Canadian gatherings different from American ones, a question she says she has turned over for years without fully answering, Wyatt lands on intimacy over scale. “I think that Canadians are much deeper in the way we communicate,” she says. “There’s always a desire for intimacy; there’s always a desire for deep connections.” Massive gatherings like Tomorrowland or Woodstock, she notes, simply do not take root in Canada the way they do in the United States, population size aside. The closest domestic equivalent she points to, The Monteal Jazz Fest, still runs on a fraction of the scale.

The phrase she has used for thirty years to describe what CSE is actually for is Old Home Week, language she never formalized into strategy but says has run underneath everything the company has built: bring the community together to reconnect, to be introduced, to be mentored, to see and be seen. “If I were to say one sentence that was woven through everything we did over the last thirty years,” she says, “it was building a community of like-minded people who just really wanted to be in a room together.”Old Home Week

The Size of the Room

To understand why Wyatt’s choice to stay small is a choice and not a limitation, it helps to see the industry she is choosing to be small inside of. Canada hosted roughly 2,555 business events in 2024, drawing about 1.2 million delegates and generating an estimated $47 billion in direct economic impact, supporting more than 240,000 jobs nationally, according to Destination Canada’s most recent published figures. An earlier global ranking from the Events Industry Council placed Canada sixth in the world for direct economic impact from business events, ahead of countries with several times its population[VA1]

.

Ask most Canadians what event represents the country, and the list is short and specific. The Calgary Stampede, running since 1886 and still billing itself as the Greatest Outdoor Show on Earth, drew 1.4 million visitors over ten days in 2026 and generated $721 million in economic output across Alberta, a third more than the same kind of study measured in 2019. Toronto’s Caribbean Carnival, still known to most people by its old name, Caribana, has run since 1967 and now draws well over a million visitors of its own, with organizers putting its annual contribution to the Canadian economy above $460 million. The Toronto International Film Festival, founded in 1976 as the Toronto Festival of Festivals and now a fixture of the fall awards calendar, draws hundreds of thousands of filmgoers each September and generates an estimated $240 million in annual economic impact. C2 Montreal, founded by the agency Sid Lee and Cirque du Soleil in 2012, built its reputation as one of the most forward-thinking business conferences in the world by turning a corporate summit into something closer to a festival, drawing thousands of decisionmakers each spring. Not every marquee name survives intact: Montreal’s Just for Laughs, the festival that once defined the city’s comedy identity, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2024 and had to be bought and relaunched at a smaller scale by a different operator that same summer.

BizBash, the trade publication I founded and ran for two decades before selling it, used to publish an annual Top 100 Events in Canada list, and the churn on it says as much about the industry’s actual size as the dollar figures do. Back in 2011, the list crowned the Toronto International Film Festival its top Entertainment Industry Event, the year TIFF screened 339 films from its new downtown home at the TIFF Lightbox. The 2017 edition crowned the Rogers Cup tennis tournament its top sports property and the B.C. Cancer Foundation’s gala its top benefit, at more than three million dollars raised in a single night. A year later, Toronto’s jazz festival had climbed to the top slot on 165 free concerts, the Grey Cup had jumped the rankings because Edmonton was hosting it, and Drake’s OVO Fest had quietly disappeared from the list entirely after nine consecutive years. Big, in other words, moves. CSE, at 700 to 800 people in a room it built on purpose, was never trying to compete on that list. It was trying to be the kind of event nobody drops off, because everyone in the room already knows why they’re there.

Finding Its Place

That philosophy now has a physical shape. CSE has spent three years at Great Canadian Casino Resort in Vaughan, Ontario, working across five venues with partners including Peter and Paul’s, deliberately staying out of the Toronto convention center where CME (formerly Incentive Works) runs its larger, more travel-and-hospitality-focused show. CSE draws 700 to 800 people, runs a single day instead of two, and has largely done away with rows of trade show booths in favor of forty-by-forty activation spaces built to function as their own small events, complete with entertainment and catering. “If I had it my way, we would have no booths,” Wyatt says. “It’s just a solid annual event where we bring the community together, and we’re not blowing our brains out anymore trying to be something that we’re not.”

Getting there took thirty years of trying, by her own account, to be everything to everybody, in venue after venue and format after format, before she let the sho[VA1] w settle into what it is Inclusion isn’t a late addition at CSE—it’s how we were built from the ground up. By working alongside organizations like Black in Events, South Asian and Asian event-planning communities, and LGBTQ+ event-planners, Wyatt emphasizes that our goal is always about growing genuine, lasting relationships instead of simply checking boxes

The Border, and the Room That Won’t Let Grief In

The specifics behind that read are more granular than the top-line claim suggests. She estimates that in any given Canadian delegation, a quarter to a third of attendees could face complications reentering the country if they are not fully naturalized, a risk calculation that has quietly reshaped where Canadian organizations choose to meet. I told her, half-joking, that I hoped the current chapter would pass soon, “because we got a nutcase running the world here.” Wyatt didn’t disagree. “Your lips to God’s ears,” she said.

Closer to home, CSE is absorbing a loss that is only a week old at the time of this interview. Jammi Gunnerson, given CSE’s Emerging Leader Award last April, died in her sleep the week of this conversation, at 28, with seventeen events booked for the company she was working for through the end of the year. A week after the interview, Reid Hubick another young star with e=mc2 events also passed away. Wyatt connects the losses directly to a shift she is navigating in real time: attendees increasingly ask her to fold formal wellness and mental health programming into CSE Live itself, and so far, she has been saying no, not out of dismissal but because the ask keeps arriving faster than she can figure out how to do it right inside the main show.

What she has built instead runs just outside it. This past April 27, the Monday before CSE Live opened, Wyatt and three co-founders, Carly Silberstein, Connie Cay-Santos, and Samantha Mele, launched SANCTUARY, a single day of reflection and leadership work for event professionals, deliberately capped in size to keep the room small. “As event professionals, we spend so much of our time building experiences for others that we rarely pause to invest in ourselves,” the founders wrote in announcing it. It ran again this spring, and the group says they intend to keep building it. What she can point to without hesitation is the informal version that has always run underneath both: the check-ins, the messages, the running tally of roughly fifteen people she stays in daily contact with across the year. “It’s my community. It’s my world that I live in,” she says of the roughly two to three thousand people she considers her real network inside Canadian events.

Thirty Years of Spirit

CSE’s flagship individual honor, now called the Leslee Bell Spirit of the Industry Award, was renamed in memory of Leslee Bell, founder of Decor & More Inc, a figure the awards program itself describes as embodying the qualities the honor now looks for: leadership, mentorship, and integrity. The winners on record, going back as far as CSE’s own public archive reaches, read like a partial roll call of the people Wyatt has spent thirty years building a room around:

· 2025: Pat McGannon

· 2023: Rennie Colelli, bbBlanc Audio Visual

· 2022: Keri Miller, CSEP, e=mc² events, Calgary (the inaugural winner under the Leslee Bell name)

· 2019: Lynn Fletcher, Lynn Fletcher Weddings, Calgary

CSE introduced a second lifetime-style honor, the ICON Award, in 2025. Its first-ever recipient was Joel Hock, recognized for what the program called his visionary leadership and lasting impact on the evolution of live events in Canada. Other individual awards from CSE’s more recent years add names to the same list: Jody Litvack of Jet Entertainment was named Event Professional of the Year in 2022; Julie Danylov of Cirque Revolution won Event Industry Volunteer of the Year in 2023; Spencer Croft of MKEM won the Emerging Leader Award in 2023, followed Luisa Alvarez, Reveal Events Group 2024, and Samantha Patrick, The Gathering, Calgary, AB in 2025

Handing Off the Napkin

CSE’s 30th anniversary runs April 26-28, 2027, and Wyatt is building it around memory rather than spectacle. She is pulling old photographs for a walk-down history: Raviv K of R5 Events at 22 Chad Brincheski at his first award ceremony wearing what she remembers as a genuinely funky hat, Corey Mandell at twenty-one presiding over a trade-show-floor hot tub with his all-black-clad AV crew. She wants to bring back every living winner of CSE’s Spirit of the Industry Award for a roundtable, and beyond that, she wants something closer to a stunt: competitors who have spent thirty years duking it out for the same clients, on the same stage, talking honestly about where the industry has been and where it’s going. “I love a stage packed with people that no one would ever imagine on the same stage,” she says. “it’s fun because it’s so disruptive.”

The harder problem is the generation arriving underneath all of it. Wyatt describes a widening gap between the veterans who came up through the Special Event era, some of whom she says are making millions and have zero interest in the industry’s association scene, and the Gen Z professionals now filling her show’s younger seats. What she has learned, slowly and by her own admission incompletely, is that this generation does not want to be marketed to. They want to be told specifically why they were invited. “I literally get emails saying ‘why me,’” she says. “They don’t want to be be marketed to. They wanna be invited to an intentional event because it’s them, not because they have a generation attached to their name or their birth year.” That takes individual attention at a scale mass marketing was built to avoid, and Wyatt says plainly she does not yet have it figured out.

Thirty years ago, a twenty-one-year-old festival caterer flew to California, lost to a party a quarter the size of the one she’d helped build, and sketched a napkin on the way home rather than accept the verdict. The show that came out of that napkin now tops out at 800 people on purpose, runs one day instead of two, and has no interest in ever being the biggest room in the building again. Wyatt calls that finding her place. Thirty years in, it reads more like she finally got to set the terms.

GatheringPoint covers the people who build the gatherings. Subscribe at GatheringPoint.news.

1. On why she stayed thirty years:

“It’s all I’ve known for so long. Not all I’ve known, but it’s inside me. It’s ingrained in me.”

2. On the temperament underneath the job:

“I am so introverted. I can schmooze with the best of them and turn it on, but imposter syndrome inside me is screaming.”

3. On what a gala actually costs the host:

“They’re here to be seen, and you can’t see everyone.”

4. On what makes Canadian gatherings different:

“I think that Canadians are much deeper in the way we communicate. There’s always a desire for intimacy, there’s always a desire for deep connections.”

5. On the one idea that runs under thirty years of programming:

“If I were to say one sentence that was woven through everything we did over the last thirty years, it was building a community of like-minded people who just really wanted to be in a room together.”

6. On choosing to stay small:

“If I had it my way, we would have no booths. It’s just an annual community event where we bring the people together, and we’re not blowing our brains out anymore trying to be something that we’re not.”

7. On what Gen Z wants from an invitation:

“They don’t wanna be marketed to. They wanna be invited to an intentional event because it’s them, not because they have a generation attached to their name or their birth year.”

8. On the board member too afraid to be filmed, and her advice to him:

“Why are you continuing to do film year after year? How about we just don’t do it? We can say no. No one’s going to die.”

Edible Profile of Stacy Wyatt

The Crisis Game Plans on GatheringArchitecture.com cover 34 situations, from an attendee collapsing in the middle of a keynote to a fake copy of your event site taking ticket money. Each one lays out what happens, the first moves with their real costs, and what to prepare before the day. The point is to settle in advance who decides and who does what in the first ten minutes, when nobody has time to ask. They are a public service, free with no signup, for anyone who hosts anything. [

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I wasn’t at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April, but I watched it as an organizer does, asking who had the authority to act in the first ten minutes. It was chaotic. Plenty of people in our industry take safety seriously and do a great job, and so do companies like Freeman, GES, and Encore and the convention centers and venues that host us. This is not a criticism of them, and the more voices on the subject the better, because talking it through in advance lowers the cognitive load when something actually happens.

My focus is the organizer community, which is so massive that good practice has to reach every nook and cranny of it, including the people running the smallest events. It also has to go up the ladder to the ultimate organizers, the trade show owners, brands, political campaigns and others who put events on, who should have this tool too. I would rather we write down what good looks like before the next bad night than improvise it in public.

That is the why of GatheringArchitecture.com: a reference bookshelf for the gathering industry, where what the people who run these rooms know gets written down, tested, and shared. The crisis game plans are its first shelf.

They are a first draft, and I need your help. Tell me what is wrong, tell me what is missing, and above all tell me about the crises of the AI era, such as the cloned voice, the fake alert, and the hoax that spreads faster than the facts, so we can build them in. Tell me, too, what you would do in the first ten minutes of any of them. Write to me at david@gatheringpoint.news or just comment where ever you see this.

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Safety & First Response

• Attendee Collapses During Keynote — An attendee collapses in the middle of a packed keynote session. 800 people are watching. You’re the event director backstage.

  

• Tornado Warning During Outdoor Festival

  — A tornado warning is issued for your area during a 5,000-person outdoor corporate festival. You have 15 minutes before potential impact.

• Severe Allergic Reaction at Lunch Service — An attendee goes into anaphylaxis during the catered lunch. They noted a nut allergy on registration — but the caterer mislabeled a dish. 300 people are eating.

• Fire Alarm Triggers Mid-Session — Fire alarm sounds during a packed afternoon plenary. Sprinklers haven’t activated. No smoke visible. Venue staff aren’t responding to the radio.

• Attendee Reports Harassment by a Speaker — An attendee comes to your team in tears: a featured speaker made unwanted advances at last night’s reception. The speaker is on the program in 90 minutes.

• An Attendee Dies at Your Event — Despite immediate care, a delegate dies on site. His colleagues are in the building, his family is on another continent, and 900 people are waiting for the afternoon plenary.

• Sixty People Are Sick Overnight — Your hotline logs 60 attendees with vomiting and diarrhoea before 7am. Day two starts in two hours and nobody knows yet whether it is the food, the water, or a virus moving person to person.

• A Child Is Missing in the Venue — A parent at your family day cannot find her seven-year-old. It has been eleven minutes. The venue has four exits, a car park and a canal along one side.

  

• The Crowd Is Surging at a Single Entrance

  — Two thousand people are pressed against one entrance twenty minutes before doors. The front rows can no longer move their arms and someone has fallen.

• Violence Erupts in the City Where You Are Meeting — A shooting two kilometres from your venue has killed several people. Your attendees are hearing sirens, reading alerts, and asking whether to stay in their rooms.

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Accessibility & Inclusion

• Wheelchair User Locked Out of Breakout

  — A wheelchair user arrives at a breakout session to find stairs are the only access. They’re a VIP sponsor representative. Other attendees are watching.

Event Operations

• Total AV Failure Before Opening Keynote — 10 minutes before the opening keynote, your entire AV system goes dark — no projector, no sound, no confidence monitors. Your CEO is the opening speaker.

  

• Total Power Failure During Gala Dinner

  — Mid-dinner, the entire venue loses power. 600 guests, dark ballroom, hot food in the kitchen, and the keynote was 10 minutes away.

• Keynote Speaker Doesn’t Arrive — Your headline keynote is supposed to take the stage in 30 minutes. They’re not at the venue, not answering, and their flight landed three hours ago.

• Live Translation System Crashes — Your simultaneous interpretation system fails 5 minutes into a multilingual plenary. 200 of your 600 attendees rely on it.

• Caterer Doesn’t Show for Lunch

  

  — It’s 11:45 AM. Lunch was supposed to arrive at 11:30. Caterer’s phone is off. 500 attendees break for lunch in 30 minutes.

• You Lose the Venue Six Days Out — A burst main has flooded your main hall. The venue says it cannot host you. Eight hundred people are booked, ticketed and flying in on Thursday.

• A Strike Strands a Third of Your Attendees — A national rail strike and a snowstorm have combined the night before. Two hundred attendees, three of five keynote speakers and your AV crew cannot reach the city.

  

• Registration and Payments Fail With 2,000 People in Line

  — Your check-in platform and card terminals both go down at 08:10. The badge printers have no data, the queue is out of the building, and the opening session starts at 09:00.

Security

• Aggressive Intruder at Registration

  — An unauthorized individual becomes aggressive and threatening at the registration desk after being denied entry. They’re shouting about a speaker who ‘ruined their career.’ 200 attendees are in the lobby.

• Activist Group Storms the Main Stage — A coordinated activist group (similar to Climate Defiance) rushes the main stage during a high-profile keynote, unfurling banners and chanting. 600 attendees are watching. Media cameras are rolling. The speaker freezes.

  

• Bomb Threat Emailed to the Venue

  — Venue security forwards an email received 20 minutes ago: a credible-sounding bomb threat naming your event by name. Police have been notified. They’re asking what you want to do.

• Unauthorized Drone Filming Outdoor Event — An unidentified drone is hovering low over your outdoor festival. It’s distracting performers, alarming guests, and clearly filming. Your security team can’t locate the operator.

• Medical Emergency Inside a Locked Security Perimeter — A head of state’s protective detail has locked down the venue. No vehicles in or out — including ambulances. A guest collapses with a cardiac event in the back of the hall, and the nearest paramedics are staged outside the hard line.

Crisis Communications

• Keynote Speaker Makes Offensive Remarks — Your headline keynote speaker makes a culturally insensitive joke that offends a significant portion of the audience. People are walking out. Social media is lighting up in real-time.

• Negative Incident Goes Viral During Event — A video of a heated confrontation between your staff and an attendee over a seating dispute goes viral mid-event. The clip is edited to make your team look aggressive. Journalists are calling. Sponsors are nervous.

  

• Title Sponsor Threatens to Pull Out Mid-Event

  — Your title sponsor’s CEO is furious about a panelist’s on-stage comment criticizing their industry. They’re threatening to pull funding and walk out — with their 30-person delegation — in front of cameras.

• Attendee List Leaked Online — An attendee posts a screenshot showing the full delegate list — including private emails and dietary requirements — is publicly accessible via your registration platform.

• Attendee’s Negative Thread Goes Viral During Event — An attendee with 200K followers posts a viral thread mid-event detailing real grievances: queues, AC, food, accessibility. It’s gaining traction by the minute.

• Your Award Recipient Is in the News Overnight — The person you are honouring tonight is the subject of a serious investigative story published at 06:00. Six hundred people, three sponsors and two reporters are coming to dinner.

AI & Technology

• Deepfake of Your Keynote Speaker Spreads Mid-Event

  — A convincing fake video of your keynote speaker saying something inflammatory is circulating in the event hashtag. It was never said. She goes on stage in 40 minutes.

• A Fake Version of Your Event Site Is Taking Attendees’ Money — An AI-built copy of your registration page, one letter different in the domain, is selling tickets that do not exist and harvesting passport details.

• AI Notetakers Are Recording Your Off-Record Session — Halfway through a closed, off-record roundtable you notice three AI transcription bots in the hybrid link — and one participant’s laptop is quietly recording the room.

• Your Speaker’s Statistics Were Invented by a Chatbot — A speaker is presenting striking figures with citations that do not exist. An academic in row three has already checked two of them and is standing up.

See all 34 situations →

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In 2018 Greg Hitchen went to Birmingham to look at a solar trade show and came away convinced it was a bad event. Its owner was, by Hitchen’s account, losing about £500,000 a year on roughly £400,000 of revenue, which is the arithmetic that sends most buyers back to the car park. Hitchen concluded instead that his company could do better with it, and he called the owner. The first show under Terrapinn doubled the revenue. He is an executive who reads a loss that size as an invitation.

Covid interrupted, and seven or eight years on, he says, the UK show turns over about £8 million, twenty times what it did. Terrapinn now runs twenty solar events around the world, none of them in the United States or Latin America, and a columnist who tracks the industry’s deals credits solar with pushing the company past $30 million in EBITDA. Terrapinn entered the ranking of 2024 revenues for the first time at number twenty, as Hitchen noted on LinkedIn in September 2025, and he told Skift Meetings in March that it brings in about $180 million a year and expects roughly $40 million in profit this year. It produces about ninety events with some 450 people, run from London, and it is the only company in the top twenty that, by his account, private equity does not own. A good deal of that sunshine started in a Birmingham exhibition hall that he thought needed fixing.

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He was back in Birmingham on 23 September, and he posted about it on LinkedIn. “What a great night out at the Solar & Storage Live Awards,” he wrote, calling it “an opportunity to meet new people and celebrate the industry’s achievements. And to celebrate with the outstanding Terrapinn team.” The photographs show a hall washed in purple light and a chief executive in a conference lanyard, leaning into a selfie with a group of colleagues, under a headline that describes him as someone who builds global events at scale. The post says nothing about the £500,000 loss that came first, and it needs to say nothing: the company that once nearly closed was celebrating its industry in the city where it fixed a bad show.

In conversation Hitchen is ebullient, a man who describes a bank traineeship, a collapsed Asian business and a spreadsheet bot in the same delighted register. His vocabulary gives him away. The Philippines solar show was “unbelievable,” the experienced salespeople his managers hired were “way too average,” the crisis response is “a moving feast,” the Gulf damage is “disastrous,” and an acquisition is judged on “vibes.” His LinkedIn posts run to exclamation marks, and he spent six or seven years as a professional rock musician. He treats a room, I would say, as a gig.

Solar was not a new idea for the company, only a newly serious one. It began as an offshoot of the power and electricity events Terrapinn had produced in South Africa since the mid-1990s: a show director suggested a solar event, the Philippines followed and was, in Hitchen’s word, unbelievable, then Vietnam and Cairo. The pattern is how the company says it grows, with someone proposing a show and someone senior answering with the question Hitchen credits to Tony Steel, who founded the Sydney company in 1986 or 1987 as a publishing house financed with his brother-in-law’s money. When that money’s venture company got into trouble, Hitchen says, Steel flew to London to talk to Euromoney Publications. Steel keeps out of the limelight, but his temperament runs the place: “Why not? Let’s go for it.” Conferences began as a hobby attached to the publishing, and the hobby proved more interesting, and financially more interesting, than the publishing.

Hitchen came to that company by an unlikely road. His father died when he was five, and his mother devoted herself to making sure he and his brother had economic stability and studied hard, in a household he describes as limited when it came to collaboration or intellectual adventure. What formed him instead was a set of rebellious friends in Australia in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and an economics degree he says he mostly had fun with. His first real job was as a trainee manager in a bank, which taught him within a short time that the career was too straight-laced for him, and he then spent six or seven years as a professional rock musician, in bands he places, without much conviction, as post-punk, earning nothing. At thirty he had no career and no clear idea what came next. After some travelling he joined Australian Investment Publishing, studied for a part-time diploma in corporate finance, and within a couple of years was running the company’s business in Singapore, and a few years later had nearly two hundred people reporting to him. “Did anyone really prepare me for that? No,” he said. “But I just had to learn on the job.”

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Click to hear our musical profile of Greg Hitchen

The sunshine is easier to credit because of the weather that came before it. By 1995, by Hitchen’s account, the hobby was a conference factory, producing 1,500 conferences and 1,000 public training seminars a year through fifteen offices, and he says it had become the second-largest conference producer in the world, bigger at the time than IBC, the company that became Informa. Euromoney Publications had owned it since about 1991, and it represented half of Euromoney’s revenue. It made, in Hitchen’s telling, no money. Four of the offices, in Sydney, Singapore, London and Johannesburg, were doing well, and then the company opened in Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Germany, Holland, France and the United States, and in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur, until it had too many offices in too many places.

Euromoney lost patience, and the two separated. A trade-press profile records that a profit collapse led Steel to buy the conference company back, and that revenue fell from about $70 million to $38 million between 1996 and 1999 while headcount was halved to 200. Then came the crisis. On the thirtieth of June 1997 the company had close to two hundred people in Asia, and on the fifteenth of March 1998 it had sixteen. Hong Kong and Singapore were, in Hitchen’s words, the best business, and the Asian financial crisis left it “wiped out, destroyed,” taking with it “the whole engine for all of Terrapin.” Hitchen says that in theory the company should have gone out of business, and Terrapinn’s website today still lists Singapore among its four offices, alongside Dubai, London and Sydney.

What he took from the wreckage was dissatisfaction, which in his hands turned out to be a productive mood. He was unhappy with the high-volume conference business and resolved to build event brands of higher value and recurring income, which took years. By the time it was done the numbers belonged to another company: about ninety events where there had been 1,500 or 1,600, depending on which telling you hear, a shift he described on the Trade Show Talk podcastas moving from “high volume, low quality of earnings” to “low volume, high quality of earnings.” In that same Q&A he calls the conversion from a conference business to “an Exhibitions/Large Scale Events business” his biggest strategic bet, and credits what he learned at SISO, where he sits on the board, with giving him “the confidence to do this.” The growth he dates to about 2018, which is to say to Birmingham.

The music stayed with him more usefully than the bank did. Hitchen says he has always thought of the events he produces as show business for business people, with the lighting, staging and backdrop that implies, and that a band needs everyone “on the same wavelength” or the thing does not work. He read The Experience Economy by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore around 2000 or 2001 and says it changed his outlook on events completely, and about twenty-five years ago the company began to think of an event as four overlapping circles: knowledge, showcase, fun and networking. A great event sits where all four intersect, and in a Q&A for the Society of Independent Show Organisers (SISO) posted on LinkedIn in early October he put the old model more bluntly: leading events are now “more than a bunch of people wandering aimlessly around a shed.” Speed networking, roundtables and one-to-one meetings followed about twenty years ago, and Hitchen is candid that the company conceived them early and monetized them badly: “we were even ahead of the game,” he said, but “we weren’t able to translate it” as Jonathan Weiner, the founder of Money20/20, Shoptalk, HLTH and HumanX, has.

The same appetite governs what he buys, though he has become more clinical about it. Hitchen built a crude bot on ChatGPT that scores any acquisition out of ten, and he wants an average above seven. An event he bought before the scorecard existed rates about three and a half in retrospect, largely, he told Trade Show Talk, because of the integrity of the seller and the people: “We got sold something that really was not what it was portrayed to be.” He judges integrity by vibes, he said, tested where possible by visiting the seller’s workplace and watching how the boss and the employees deal with each other. Terrapinn bought the Digital Health Festival in Melbourne and the EV Charging Summit & Expo in Las Vegas in 2025, then FMS, the Future of Memory and Storage conference in Santa Clara, in March, and Skift reports it also bought Smart Energy Conference & Exhibition in Sydney. When he spoke to Trade Show Talk he was reading John Malone’s Born to Be Wired, and he sees in Malone’s roll-up of small cable companies a parallel to what everyone in trade shows is doing now.

He stopped writing five- and ten-year strategies, he told me, ten or fifteen years ago, on the grounds that life does not cooperate with them. What replaced the plan is a statement of purpose, to promote innovation and technology that changes people’s lives for the better. The company will not run a defense event, a gambling event or anything to do with tobacco, and it will run vaccines, orphan drugs, digital health, solar and storage, and electric vehicle charging. It is a filter more than a strategy, and it has produced a portfolio that reads like a strategy. The optimism is built into the filter: a solar show and a vaccine show are both bets that the future will be better than the present.

To see interactive map link here

The people who run that portfolio were mostly raised inside it. Every senior person at Terrapinn, Hitchen says, is a lifer who started young and grew into the job, and no senior role goes to a headhunter’s candidate: it is filled from inside or it stays empty. In recent years, he told me, middle managers drifted from the rule, hiring experienced salespeople at high salaries who turned out to be “way too average,” and the company has gone back to hiring graduates and to excluding anyone who has worked for another events company. He wants hunters, not account managers, and in a company built on the optimism of a good show that makes his salespeople sellers of sunshine, the promise that the right room will be full of the right people. The metaphor is this profile’s, not his. He holds that a sales manager cannot manage targets, only activities, and that the best salespeople generate their own from ideas and relationships. Value in his industry, he says, comes from three sources: knowledge and concept, relationships, and how well you grow and mentor people. “Almost anything else is just filling in forms.”

He is careful to say what he did not learn from Weiner, a friend of mine, whose Shoptalk and HLTH events ended up with Hyve. Terrapinn, Hitchen says, will never invest five million dollars a year for three years and then flip the result. What he took from Weiner is vision: the ability, as Hitchen tells it, to look at any subject in the world, even large landholdings in Virginia, and build the definitive event on it. On the Trade Show Talk podcast he also credited Weiner with an instinct for creating extra inventory and selling it, which is the difference between the one-to-one meetings Terrapinn bundled into packages for fifteen years and the price they deserve.

He took no large leadership role in the industry’s associations earlier in his career, he told me, but he sees their benefit now, and SISO shows why. Years of conversations with its members, he says, taught him the global possibilities of trade shows and how to execute them, and when he first attended, Terrapinn was “predominantly a ‘Conference’ organiser.” He praises SISO’s “spirit of entrepreneurship and the energy around this,” and he says it must “resist the temptation of being too big and too corporate.”

Away from the business, he plays golf, listens to music and plays the guitar less than he would like. He loves Australian rules football, wants to see ABBA Voyage in London, eats no meat, keeps sparkling mineral water as his go-to drink, and loves falafel. His wife, Heather has had what he calls a profound influence on him in all aspects of his life and offers advice on how he dresses, and his family includes his son, Lewis.

The sun has a shadow, and at the moment it falls on the Gulf. About 30 percent of Terrapinn’s revenue comes from Dubai and Saudi Arabia, he said, and since the war the company has lost between 40 and 50 percent of that. Multiplied out, his two figures put the damage at somewhere between 12 and 15 percent of the group, a number he calls disastrous. Hitchen describes the response as a moving feast of rescheduling, reorganizing, rationalizing and improvising, says the situation is not over, and believes that in the medium term the region will be good again and that any company that pulls out will not be looked on kindly when it tries to return. Skift reported in March that the company had about eighteen events across Dubai and Riyadh, another in Cairo, and roughly 120 staff in the region. He does not draw the comparison to 1997, when one region carried a business that could not survive losing it, but a reader who knows the story will, and what the Gulf is now teaching is what it means for nearly a third of a company to sit inside one region’s weather.

On 23 November, Solar & Storage Live is scheduled to open in Riyadh, one of Terrapinn’s biggest solar shows, in the market that has cost him the most this year. In the early-October Q&A he named doing business in the Middle East as his biggest issue and added: “Otherwise, I see nothing but opportunity.” Hitchen, who stopped drawing up five-year plans a decade ago, has committed the company to the calendar. The exhibitors will be selling panels, batteries and the proposition that energy from the sun is the surest thing in the Gulf. It is a hard place to argue that the sun has stopped coming up.

Volume versus earnings: Greg Hitchen cut Terrapinn from about 1,500 conferences a year to about 90 events, because volume is not earnings. A company that runs fewer, better events with recurring income makes more than a factory that runs everything.

What the crisis taught: When the 1997 Asian crisis took Terrapinn’s Asian staff from about 200 to 16, Hitchen used the dissatisfaction to rebuild toward higher-value event brands. A business that depends on one region for its survival has no margin for that region’s weather.

Buy what your platform can fix: Hitchen bought a Birmingham solar show that was losing about £500,000 a year because he believed Terrapinn could run it better, and the first show under his company doubled the revenue. A loss that comes from weak operation, not weak demand, is an invitation to a buyer with the operation.

Score the seller: Hitchen scores every acquisition out of ten and wants an average above seven. He now judges a seller’s integrity by visiting the workplace and watching how the boss and the employees deal with each other, after one deal scored about 3.5 because the seller and the people were not what they had been portrayed to be.

Lifers: Every senior role at Terrapinn is filled from inside or stays empty. Hitchen found that experienced hires on high salaries proved “way too average,” and the company went back to hiring graduates and growing them.

Manage activity, not targets: Hitchen holds that a sales manager cannot manage a target, only the activities behind it, and that the best salespeople generate their own targets from ideas and relationships. Manage the work, and let the results follow it.

Four circles: Terrapinn designs an event as four overlapping circles: knowledge, showcase, fun and networking. A great event sits where all four intersect, which is what makes it more than a bunch of people wandering aimlessly around a shed.

People are the hard partA; Hitchen places the value in his industry in three things: knowledge and concept, relationships, and how well you grow and mentor people. Almost anything else, he says, is just filling in forms.

Purpose over plan: Hitchen stopped writing five- and ten-year strategies because life does not cooperate with them. A statement of purpose, to promote innovation and technology that changes people’s lives for the better, now decides what Terrapinn will run and what it will not.

Stay in the market: Hitchen believes any organizer that pulls out of the Gulf during the crisis will not be looked on kindly when it tries to come back. His own response is to reschedule, reorganize and improvise, on the bet that the region will be good again.

Borrow confidence from peers: Hitchen calls the conversion from a conference business to large-scale exhibitions his biggest strategic bet, and credits what he learned from fellow organizers at the Society of Independent Show Organisers (SISO) with giving him the confidence to make it. When a decision is big, peers who have run the playbook are the cheapest source of courage.

Sell sunshine: In a company built on the optimism of a good show, a salesperson sells the promise that the right room will be full of the right people. A seller who believes the future will be better than the present sells it better. This is the profile’s metaphor, not Hitchen’s phrase.

Edible Profile of Greg Hitches.

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They really did it. I just got home from a week in Las Vegas at IMEX America, and I keep thinking about what the people behind it built. If you have never heard of it, IMEX is the three-day trade show where the people who plan meetings, conferences and incentive trips for companies and associations come to meet the hotels, cities and venues that host them. This industry spends plenty of time criticizing, and sometimes it should. This story does the opposite: I want to hold IMEX up as a role model, the way you point a younger colleague to someone whose work you want them to copy. We usually think of role models as people. I have come to believe an event can be one too, a character that shows the rest of us how to behave. I call an event that earns that role a Lovemark Event, and before I make the case, here is exactly what I mean by it.

A Lovemark Event is an event people love and respect at the same time, so much that it has become a character they feel they know. It is not about being the biggest or the most elaborate. It is the event people return to because going back feels like seeing someone, and at its strongest it becomes almost a lifestyle, the way PTTOW! and YPO are for the people who belong to them. You can tell you are in one when you can say what the event would never do, and when you would defend it at dinner.

I borrowed the word. In 2004 Kevin Roberts, then chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi, made it famous with Lovemarks, arguing that the greatest brands earn both love and respect. Roberts was writing about brands. My argument is that events earn that attachment too, and may earn it more deeply, because the product is other people.

What makes it work is a bond psychologists call parasocial. A parasocial relationship is a friendship that runs in one direction: you feel you know someone who has no idea you exist. The sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl coined the term in 1956 while studying television hosts. It is the bond millions feel with Taylor Swift today: you know their moods, their friends, their lives, and they have never heard of you. It also stretches past people. My argument, and it is my argument, not established research, is that people form it with events. An organizer authors an event year after year until its personality is so consistent that you can say what it would never do. You may never meet that organizer. You still feel you know the event, you look forward to seeing it, and you defend it at dinner. I was honored to author a few of these myself over twenty-five years at BizBash, starting with our first event the month after September 11th. That bond is the mechanism, and the Lovemark Event is what it adds up to.

What the bond gives you is a feeling, and the feeling is what brings you back. You leave TED feeling smarter and SXSW feeling hip. It happens in every industry, even the most esoteric, and the sidebar has thirty of them.

If I were making merchandise for these events, this is what I would put on it: not a logo, but the line a regular would say about why they keep coming back. “I came for the talks. I stayed for the hallway” on a TED tee, “Stitched together by strangers” on a QuiltCon tote, “Same field. Same friends. Every year.” on a Glastonbury shirt. These are my own unofficial mockups, not endorsed by any event. When what people would wear is a sentence about belonging instead of a logo, the event has become a character they want to be seen with. The full collection, all 30, is in a companion piece, The Lovemark Event Merch Line.

IMEX's character, to me, is the reunion. I could not walk ten steps on that floor without running into someone I had known for years or had heard of for most of my career. The booths were destinations from around the world, so the hall felt like traveling it, one conversation at a time. One of them has stayed with me. In an aisle, standing with Nir Hindle, a leadership consultant, I met David Kliman, who told me how he traveled the world with no money in the 1970s and not only survived but reached places that are now considered luxury destinations, back when people like him were simply called hippies. It explained, to me, why he ended up in events: he has spent his life finding his way into places and getting people to open up. I got goosebumps, and I think that is what a hall like this makes that a screen cannot, a stranger who tells you who he is because the room feels like it can hold it. When I profiled Carina Bauer, IMEX's chief executive, last year, I called her the Secretary General of Belonging. In Las Vegas I understood why the title fit, because the event was an even better version of the United Nations.

Here is what I think the milestone is. IMEX is a temporary city, and it is built with a conscience about three things at once: content, commerce and culture. In my read, content is the education program, which gave joy a room in a hall full of buyers. Commerce is the appointment-driven business that lets the show pay for itself. Culture is the reunion, the feeling that you are among your own people. Plenty of events do one of these well; a Lovemark Event does all three on purpose. That is the behavior I think the gathering economy should reach for: care in the details, a reason behind every choice, and an awareness that you are building a place where people will spend days of their lives.

A character like that is built, not announced. Ray Bloom built IMEX, now in its 15th edition in Las Vegas, around a simple idea, that you bring the buyers as guests, with their travel covered in exchange for a calendar of pre-scheduled appointments. The organizers say it drew more than 17,800 participants and about 96,000 scheduled meetings, its biggest edition yet. I judge an event by how many conversations it facilitates, not by how many people are in the room.

The mood in the hallways was realism. The Incentive Travel Index, launched at the show by the Incentive Research Foundation and SITE, found that 62% of buyers expect their programs to stay about the same size in 2027, even as average spend per person rose 7.8% to $5,500. When every dollar gets that much scrutiny, what survives is whatever people feel is worth it, and that is the case for a Lovemark Event.

On Sunday night, October 11, I went to a dinner at Caesars Palace honoring Brian Stevens, who created ConferenceDirect and is retiring. As the magazine’s account has it, the evening began over lunch on the sidelines of a PCMA conference, where Mike Gamble, the chief executive of Searchwide, and Michelle Mason, the chief executive of ASAE, got to talking about Brian and realized that after more than four decades of building this industry, nobody had ever stopped to thank him for it. Mason put it plainly: “Why don’t we plan an event just for Brian to say thank you?” Gamble agreed it was a great idea. Within months it was a room of about 290 people, some of whom came to Las Vegas early for it, raising $1 million for the Brian D. Stevens Hospitality Education Fund, which will pay for scholarships for students entering hospitality, meetings and events. Brian spent a long career helping other people, including 19 years on the PCMA Foundation board, and the dinner worked as a living tribute: everyone was talking to everyone, and it warmed my heart.

There is one more thing I would add, and it is generosity. IMEX leaves room for other people’s events to attach themselves to its week, what Scott Schenker calls barnacle events in his book Acts of Humanity, The Power of Purposeful Events. The Events Industry Council's awards celebration, where this year it inducted six people into its Hall of Leaders, is the best example I saw: it gives the week a feature IMEX did not have to build. A show that welcomes barnacles is confident it is a place worth attaching to, and that, in my read, is part of what makes it a Lovemark Event.

That celebration was on Monday, October 12, at the MGM Grand, and it honored eleven people in all, six of them inducted into the Hall of Leaders. One of the six was David Kliman, the man I had met in the aisle, a co-founder of ELX and the owner of The Kliman Group. [What you saw: whether you were in the room, and how it felt to watch him honored. Delete this bracket if you weren’t there.] The traveler who crossed the world with no money in the 1970s had just been named one of this industry’s leaders, and I could not have scripted it better. The others inducted were Elliott L. Ferguson II of Destination DC, Robert Priest-Heck, the retired chief executive of Freeman, Kit Lykketoft of Wonderful Copenhagen, WeeMin Ong of Marina Bay Sands and Annamaria Ruffini of Events In & Out. (Full list from Northstar Meetings Group.)

The other five honorees were people earlier in their careers and people doing the work of change. The Pacesetter Awards, for emerging leaders, went to James Filtz of Cvent and Evan Nielson of AARP. The Social Impact Awards went to Anna Abdelnoor, the founder and chief executive of ISLA, and Alisson Batres, chief executive of Organización, S.A. The Adaptation and Innovation Award went to Chin-Hsun (Ken) Tsai, who directs the event management program at Iowa State University. Congratulations to all of them. (All 2026 recipients, from Travel Daily News.)

At IMEX I moderated a session in the Ideas Theater called “Can You Bottle Joy?”, with Jenn Whitmer of Joyosity Works, Panos Moutafis of Zenus and Mark Maydon of Crowd Connected. Before we started, I did what I always do and asked the audience to turn to each other and talk with the challenge always getting back to business. Getting them back takes a shush that spreads from one person to the room, and feelings travel the same way. The session opened with a video introduction song, (see video below) and not for decoration. McGill researchers found that music releases dopamine twice, once as the moment builds and again at the peak, the thing people describe as chills. Chills are goosebumps, and goosebumps are our business.

IMEX’s head of programming, Tahira Endean, literally wrote the book on this. Our KPI Is Joy argues that live events build happiness, productivity and trust, and she and the IMEX education team gave the idea a room in a hall full of buyers. (See the video I did to explain her book and to promote Joy below.)

That is why the money has noticed. Blackstone paid a reported £600 million for Clarion Events in 2017, and this month Informa agreed to pay about £2.2 billion for it. Buyers can count attendance and margins, but what they are really buying is a Lovemark Event, and a character has to stay in character. In a world of avatars and AI slop, a room full of people who are glad to see each other is the antidote, because goosebumps are the one thing a screen can’t fake.

If you run an event, treat IMEX as a role model, not a rival to beat, and ask what it would take for your event to be this deliberate. The goal is to become a Lovemark Event, a character people feel they know, not an attendance number or a sponsorship package. Count the conversations, and the sentence a stranger says about you, that it feels like coming home, will follow. If you buy events, protect the Lovemark Event, because it can’t be put back once it’s gone.

For all of that, I am designating IMEX America a Lovemark Event, GatheringPoint.news’s editorial designation for an event that has become a character people feel they know. It is my judgment, not a popularity contest, and IMEX earns it by doing content, commerce and culture all on purpose.

I am still thinking about all of it, days later. We are in the goosebump business. Thank you, Las Vegas. Thank you to Tahira and the IMEX education team for putting joy on the program, and to everyone who makes this industry feel like a family. See you next year.

If this is the kind of analysis you want in your inbox, the forces shaping how the world gathers, not the press releases, subscribe to GatheringPoint.news. It’s free. Know someone who plans, hosts or funds gatherings? Forward this to them.

Editor’s Note: A Lovemark Event is a designation GatheringPoint.news gives to an event that has become a character people feel they know and love, the way you can love a person or a place. It is my editorial judgment, not a ranking or a popularity contest, and I plan to use it again.

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Walk ten steps at IMEX America and you will run into someone you know. That feeling does not fit on a badge. It fits on a T-shirt.

So we did the obvious thing. We took thirty events people love, gave each crowd a nickname, and let a shirt say what that crowd would say if anyone ever asked. Some are loud. Some are a little sappy. One of them has a heartbeat.

Fine print, because someone will ask: the nicknames, the lines and the “what connects them” reads are my own take, not the events’ words. The shirts are unofficial concepts, with no logos, no endorsements and nothing for sale.

Scroll for yours. Then tell me which shirt is missing, and which nickname you refuse to wear.

1. IMEX America

The meetings and events industry’s trade show, held at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. The Reunion Regulars. “Every ten steps, someone I know.” What connects them: A reunion with a trade show attached.

2. TED

The ideas conference, in Vancouver for 12 years and moving to San Diego in 2027. The Hallway People. “I came for the talks. I stayed for the hallway.” What connects them: The stage gets the attention. The hallway gets the friends.

3. SXSW

Austin’s music, film and interactive festival. The Happy Accident Club. “Found it by accident.” What connects them: The best discoveries are the ones nobody scheduled.

4. Sundance

The independent film festival run by Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute, leaving Park City for Boulder in 2027. The Dark Room Congregation. “In the dark, together.” What connects them: A room of strangers holding the same breath.

5. Web Summit

One of Europe’s biggest technology conferences, held in Lisbon. The Stay for the People Set. “Come for the pitch. Stay for the people.” What connects them: The deck is the excuse. The introduction is the point.

6. Hay Festival

The literary festival in Hay-on-Wye, Wales, founded in 1988. The Bookmark Brigade. “Among readers.” What connects them: Where reading stops being a solitary habit.

7. Davos

The World Economic Forum’s invitation-only annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland. The One Room a Year Club. “The right room, once a year.” What connects them: A date on the calendar that people protect.

8. Cannes Lions

The advertising and creativity festival, held each June in Cannes. The Prouder of the People Crew. “Proud of the work. Prouder of the people.” What connects them: Craft, celebrated by the ones who made it

9. PTTOW!

A YPO for marketers: an invite-only community and summit for CEOs and CMOs, founded in 2009. The Belongers. “You belong in this room.” What connects them: The invitation is the feeling.

10. Comic-Con

San Diego’s convention for comics and popular arts, run by a nonprofit. The Mother Tongue Crowd. “Finally, everyone speaks my language.” What connects them: The relief of not having to translate.

11. Gen Con

North America’s largest tabletop gaming convention, founded in 1968 by Gary Gygax and now held in Indianapolis. The One More Game Gang. “One more game, with my people.” What connects them: Play, with witnesses.

12. DEF CON

The hacking convention in Las Vegas, begun in 1993 as a farewell party. The Curious Company. “Curiosity, in good company.” What connects them: Where being the curious one is the norm.

13. Essence Festival

New Orleans’ multi-day celebration of Black culture, music and food. The Seat Savers. “We saved you a seat.” What connects them: Welcome, extended in advance.

14. QuiltCon

The Modern Quilt Guild’s quilt show, with competition, workshops and a vendor hall. The Patchwork Collective. “Stitched together by strangers.” What connects them: A craft that is quietly a community.

15. Maker Faire

A family-friendly celebration of invention and creativity, where makers show their work.The Show and Tell Society. “Everyone here made something.” What connects them: Everyone arrives as a creator, not an audience.

16. Chelsea Flower Show

The Royal Horticultural Society’s garden show, held each May at the Royal Hospital Chelsea in London. The Slow Growers. “Grown with love.” What connects them: Patience, put on display.

17. EAA AirVenture

The weeklong aviation gathering in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, drawing more than 500,000 people. The Heads Up Club. “Look up. Everyone here does.” What connects them: A field of people looking at the same sky.

18. Crufts

The Royal Kennel Club’s dog show, held at the NEC in Birmingham. The Best in Show Believers. “Every dog is best in show.” What connects them: The one place nobody tires of dog stories.

19. Burning Man

The temporary city built each year in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, on the principle of leaving no trace. The Week-Long Residents. “Home for a week.” What connects them: A temporary city people actually miss.

20. Glastonbury

The festival at Worthy Farm in Somerset, resting in 2026 and back in June 2027. The Same Field Faithful. “Same field. Same friends. Every year.” What connects them: The ritual is the reunion.

21. Coachella

The music and arts festival at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California. The Once a Year Friends. “The friends I only see here.” What connects them: A yearly appointment with your people.

22. Oktoberfest

Munich’s festival, begun in 1810 for a royal wedding. The Table Sharers. “Prost, stranger. Prost, friend.” What connects them: Shared tables turn strangers into friends by the second round.

23. Sturgis

The South Dakota motorcycle rally, begun in 1938 with a race and nine riders. The Crew That Found Itself. “Rode in alone. Left with a crew.” What connects them: Arrive solo, leave with a story and a few phone numbers.

24. Kentucky Derby

The Churchill Downs race in Louisville, first run in 1875 and known for its hats. The Hats Off Traditionalists. “Hats off to tradition.” What connects them: A custom people keep because it keeps them.

25. Relay For Life

The American Cancer Society’s community fundraiser, where teams take turns walking laps, often overnight.The Night Walkers. “Walking for someone.” What connects them: The love in this one is the whole point. Sincere, and not for sale.

26. ELX

The Event Leaders Exchange: an invitation-only community of senior corporate event and meeting leaders. The Leaders Turned Friends. “Came as a leader. Left as a friend.” What connects them: Where title gives way to trust.

27. CES

The Consumer Technology Association’s annual trade show, first held in New York in 1967 and now at the Las Vegas Convention Center. The Fully Charged Crowd. “Fully charged by the people.” What connects them: The gadgets are the reason. The people are the recharge.

28. SISO

The Society of Independent Show Organizers, founded in 1990 by twelve show organizers and now more than 195 member companies. The Friendly Rivals. “Competitors. Confidants.” What connects them: Rivals in the market, peers in the room.

29. HLTH

The health innovation conference in Las Vegas, founded by Jonathan Weiner and first held in 2018. The Silo Breakers. “No more silos. Just people.” What connects them: A system built in silos, and the week it comes out of them.

30. HumanX

The AI conference co-founded by Stefan Weitz and Jonathan Weiner, which debuted in Las Vegas in 2025 and moved to San Francisco in 2026. The Humans in the Loop. “The AI is artificial. The room isn’t.” What connects them: Everyone talks about the machines. The room is the point.

Freeman’s latest research, the Pre-Event edition of its Trends Report, finds that attendees decide whether to go months before they register, and that about half either pay their own way or have to persuade a manager. The survey of 2,272 attendees and 1,187 exhibitors, taken in September 2026, also contains a puzzle for organizers. Event organizers commonly offer flexible cancellation to win early sign-ups, but seven in ten attendees said it would let them register closer to the event, and nearly three in ten said significantly later. Those are stated intentions, not observed behavior, so the finding calls for a test, not a conclusion.

It points at something larger. Attendees are not making an impulse purchase that a deadline can pry loose. They are making a case, and a case takes time.

The decision happens early

More than eight in ten attendees say they decide to go at least four weeks before they register, and four in ten decide three to five months out. Freeman’s agency arm, mdg, reports from its own 2026 campaign averages, not from the survey, that about half of registrations arrive in the final four weeks. So the survey describes when people decide, and mdg’s data describes when they pay.

Once they have decided, more than half begin planning at least three weeks ahead. Nearly half go with colleagues and meet beforehand to divide the coverage.

Conundrum 1: Can I cancel?

The bind. Flexible cancellation is the second most cited lever for registering earlier, named by nearly four in ten attendees. Yet seven in ten say flexible terms let them register closer to the event, and nearly three in ten significantly later.

Why it is structural. The thing that lowers the risk of committing also lowers the pressure to commit.

A way through (my inference). Test two policies at two events and compare registration timing.

What we don’t know. The report presents these two findings separately, so I can’t tell whether the same people gave both answers.

Who is being persuaded

About half of attendees say going was their own idea: a quarter paid their own way and a quarter pitched their manager. For another quarter a manager asked them to go, and for 15% it was required. Half your audience is therefore either spending its own money or building an internal argument.

What wins that argument depends on the attendee’s motive. Commerce-minded attendees lead with products that benefit the organization, learners with skills, and networkers with a partnership worth advancing. Freeman recommends giving attendees a justification kit, including a letter they can send to a boss. On these numbers, I would treat it as basic equipment.

What counts as proof

The attendee’s checklist is specific. They open the exhibitor list and floor plan (a little over half), the detailed program (nearly half), and the education sessions and networking pages (four in ten each). Their complaints are about missing information: four in ten say program detail is lacking, four in ten say the program wasn’t posted early enough, and nearly four in ten can’t tell which companies and products will be there.

What most often compels them to register is knowing who else is coming. Six in ten want the types of organizations attending, and nearly half want named experts.

Urgency does much less. Limited registration availability drives fear of missing out for fewer than one attendee in ten, and limited early expo hours for about the same. Discounts still work, since six in ten say a discount would get them to register earlier, but cheap scarcity is working harder than the evidence supports. That last point is my inference from comparing two separate questions in the same survey.

Conundrum 2: Who is coming?

The bind. Attendees want to know who else is attending before they commit. Most register late, so the list is thin while they are deciding. Exhibitors decide even earlier: four in ten start nine or more months out.

Why it is structural. The proof people want is created by the commitment you are asking them to make.

A way through (my inference). Publish proxies: last year’s attendee mix by organization type, plus a running count of registrants by segment. Organization types are knowable from past data without knowing any individual’s plans, and they are what attendees ask for most.

What we don’t know. Freeman doesn’t test whether proxies persuade as well as a real list.

Conundrum 3: Who is speaking?

The bind. Four in ten attendees say the program wasn’t posted early enough. But the same survey says speaker names, titles and short descriptions are enough for four in ten, and only about three in ten want a detailed program.

Why it is structural. Organizers often don’t have the speakers confirmed when the first decisions begin. That part is industry experience, not survey data.

A way through (my inference, built on Freeman’s advice to post what you have). Publish confirmed speakers as you go, on a dated rhythm, so people know when more is coming.

What we don’t know. The survey shows what people say suffices, not how many registered because of it.

Exhibitors run the same test

Exhibitors apply the same standard, with larger stakes. Nearly half say organizers don’t post the roles and levels of attendees, and four in ten say they can’t easily tell whether the event will deliver a return. Only about one in six says events explain that return effectively.

Their approvals rest on concrete numbers: nearly two-thirds need expected new leads, and just over half need existing relationships advanced. Their strongest fear of missing out is competitors exhibiting, at six in ten. They also decide early, since four in ten begin nine or more months out, which is long before most attendees have registered.

AI is a tool attendees bring

Freeman calls AI “your newest gatekeeper,” but its survey supports something narrower. About one attendee in five has used AI to find events. Of those, more than eight in ten used it to shortlist, and about half say it changed which events they consider. Yet only one attendee in ten names AI as a way they learn about events, and fewer than one exhibitor in ten does, far behind colleagues, vendors and trade organizations at nearly half each.

When asked what they would use for preparation, four in ten prefer a familiar tool such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, and about one in eight wants the event’s own. Only a quarter expect an event to offer one. My read is that AI helps attendees justify a trip using their own tools. Freeman’s practical advice for organizers is the cheap step: put dates, location, pricing and speakers in plain text instead of PDFs or images, so the tools attendees already use can read them.

Four readers, four moves

This is my reading of the survey. Freeman did not measure how any of these readers would react.

• If you run marketing: scarcity counts for little and proof counts for more. Post last year’s attendee mix by organization type.

• If you exhibit: you are deciding before the data exists. Ask for past-event benchmarks before you commit.

• If you attend: you are probably building the case yourself. Lead with one reason: a product, a skill, or a relationship worth advancing.

• If you are the boss: the evidence is suggestive, not proof. Approve one publishing change and one test.

What to bring your boss

If you are the person who has to persuade the executive above you, the case should be small, cheap and testable. The report gives evidence, not proof. It says what attendees say they want and how they say they behave, and it cannot tell you that changing your tactics will move your registration numbers. These are objections I would expect, not ones anyone has voiced.

• “Deadlines and discounts have always worked.” The survey agrees about discounts, and nobody is proposing to drop them. It does not say deadlines fail. It cannot tell you whether your late-registration surge comes from your deadlines or from people being busy. That is a gap to test, not an argument to win.

• “Show me it changes registration.” It can’t. Run a cheap experiment: publish last year’s attendee mix by organization type and a running registrant count at one event, or compare flexible and strict cancellation terms at two, and watch registration timing. The report says where to look, and your own data says whether it works.

• “Our exhibitors renew anyway.” Perhaps. But nearly half say they can’t find who attends, only about one in six says events explain the return, and four in ten start deciding nine or more months out. Put a number on that renewal risk from your own data.

• “We should build an AI assistant.” About one attendee in eight prefers the event’s own over a familiar tool. The cheaper step is plain text for dates, location, pricing and speakers.

• “Freeman sells services.” True, and it is fair to separate the survey’s numbers from the recommendations built on them.

What to ask for: one low-cost change to publishing and one test, not a strategy overhaul.

What we don’t know

This is one survey at one moment, with no year-over-year comparison, so it describes how attendees say they behave now, not a change over time. Some questions don’t make clear who answered them, and a few of the report’s own figures disagree with its charts, so I have used the safer numbers. “Events are justified, not bought” is my synthesis, not a finding Freeman states.

Source: Freeman, Trends Report: Pre-Event Edition (Q4 2026), a September 2026 survey of 2,272 attendees and 1,187 exhibitors.

GatheringPoint covers the people who build the gatherings. Subscribe at GatheringPoint.news.

Go Directly to the White Paper

Editor’s note: this story is the short version of a longer piece of work. GatheringArchitecture.com is where I publish the Gathering Architecture Papers, research papers on the gathering industry that carry their sources and data, and each paper goes up there first and is taken up here afterward. The papers look at the structure underneath the gathering economy, meaning who organizes the gatherings, who hosts them, who supplies them and how buyers find them, and this one asks who owns the rooms. Throughout, every figure is tied to a source or labeled as my inference, and anything that depends on Informa, which had not commented when this was published, is marked as unconfirmed.

Informa, the biggest trade-show organizer in the business and a publicly listed company, agreed last Tuesday to pay £2.24bn for Clarion Events, which runs more than 100 brands from defense and gaming to energy transition. The enlarged group will have B2B live events revenue above £4.2bn across about 1,000 brands, and Informa already held more than twice the exhibition revenue of its nearest rival before the deal, according to Skift’s report on Grant Thornton Stax data. This piece asks what that means for the people who pay for the rooms (exhibitors), the people who host them (venues) and the people who run the shows, and it sends you to a white paper with the full sourcing.

The price has a history. Clarion began inside the Earls Court & Olympia group, which ran two London exhibition halls and the shows held in them, and in October 2004 a team led by Simon Kimble bought it out for £45m. Earls Court closed in December 2014 and was demolished, while Clarion changed hands four times in 18 years and rose in price at every stop: £120.5m to Veronis Suhler Stevenson in 2008, £200m to Providence Equity in 2015, and a reported £600m to Blackstone in 2017. Informa puts the enterprise value at 11.1 times Clarion’s expected 2027 EBITDA, roughly 3.7 times the 2017 price, though the comparison is loose because Clarion bought other businesses along the way. The early prices come from Buyouts Insider and SBC News, and the 2017 figure is a trade-press report, since Blackstone’s own release named no price.

The power moved from the hall to the show

That chain of prices is the argument. The old model kept the hall and the show under one roof, and Messe Frankfurt still does, owned by the city of Frankfurt and the state of Hesse. The 2004 sale separated them, and the four sales since have moved the value toward whoever owns the shows. Informa now wants the hall’s advantage back by contract: its own list includes a Saudi joint venture with venue exclusivity, preferential rates in Frankfurt, a memorandum with the Hong Kong Tourism Board and a joint company with Dubai World Trade Centre, and it says it wants hotels and cities to “participate more directly in the value we create.” My reading, which is inference, is that this is the venue owner’s old bargain without the building. The question that follows is whether a hall that has pledged its dates to one organizer can still be neutral ground for everyone else.

The biggest owner is still a small slice

Informa’s October investor deck describes the group in 2028 as hosting over 9 million attendees a year. As I read it the figure includes Clarion, because Informa’s own 8 million-plus added to the 1.2 million on Clarion’s website comes to about 9.2 million, but that arithmetic is mine, the deck’s number is a forecast and not a count, and Informa had not commented when this was published. Nobody defines “attendee,” so read it as visits and not people, and none of it is audited.

The Events Industry Council and Oxford Economics count about 318 million trade-show participants worldwide in 2025 and $179bn of direct spending. Nine million is roughly 3 in 100 of those participants, and Informa’s £4.2bn of projected live-events revenue is about the same share of the spending. Both comparisons are loose, since one is organizer revenue and the other is everything participants spend, hotels and flights included, but they point the same way. It is also why “too big” cannot rest on market share: UFI commentary in 2018 put Informa and UBM together at around 6 percent of the global exhibition market, and the UK’s competition authority decided not to refer that deal for review. I found no regulator review of Informa and Clarion, only the phrase “customary regulatory clearances” in the announcement.

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Where the concern lives

The honest case for concern is narrower and sits in the niches, where a single show can be the place an industry meets. On organizer figures, Informa’s Game Developers Conference outdraws its nearest rival 20,000 to 5,804, CPHI draws 59,000 against BIO’s 21,600, and ICE Barcelona, which Informa’s deck lists among Clarion’s brands, draws 65,000 against 30,000 for SiGMA Central Europe. The map is not uniformly kind to Informa, though, because RSAC reports nearly twice the attendance of Black Hat and DSEI trails Eurosatory. Every one of those numbers is an organizer’s own and unaudited.

GDC is the case people will cite. After Informa redesigned it as a “Festival of Gaming,” the cheapest pass rose to $649, the $200 to $399 expo-floor pass was dropped, and attendance fell from about 30,000 in 2025 to about 20,000 in 2026, according to Skift. The name, the format and the prices all changed at once, so no one can say the pricing caused the drop, and Informa has not said what did. My inference is that a community event is where a bigger owner’s pricing shows first, which makes GDC’s 2027 pass prices and attendance the first numbers to watch.

What the exhibitor, the venue and the boss should do

For an exhibitor the first test is the 2027 price notice. CEIR’s survey of exhibitors, as reported by PCMA, puts about 4 in 10 marketing dollars into trade shows, though benchmarks of all B2B marketers put events at roughly 5 to 14 percent, so the figure belongs to exhibitors and not to marketing in general. Informa says a pricing calculator covers about 85 percent of its B2B revenue and that prices for its Top 50 brands are signed off centrally, and eight Clarion brands are due to join that group. It also says its roughly £50m of annual cost savings takes the price to about 9 times earnings; my inference is that savings come from purchasing, duplicated back offices and venue terms, and that the revenue synergies it counts on come from exhibitors and sponsors, through price and add-on services. Phil Soar, chairman of CloserStill, told Exhibition News in 2025 that organizers price at roughly inflation plus two to three points and that shows rarely face a direct rival. I found no study of exhibitor prices after a trade-show merger, so that is a description of the mechanism an acquirer buys and not proof that mergers raise prices.

For a convention-center or tourism-bureau executive the thing to watch is dates: whether a company with preferential arrangements in four cities asks for first call on the calendar where Clarion is strong. That is inference, and it is the first question I would put to a venue sales director. For the organizer’s boss, or anyone who has to convince one, the case is not that the show will get worse. The research supports one core idea, that meeting in person forms ties that would not otherwise form (about 16 percent fewer co-authorships followed the cancellation of a conference by Hurricane Isaac), but I found no independent study that ties deal counts to a particular trade show, and the figures organizers publish, such as Dubai Airshow’s $202bn in announced deals, are list prices and memoranda, not closed sales.

The conundrum. A show is worth the most to an exhibitor when it has no rival, and that is the moment the exhibitor has the least power to refuse the price. The owner who raises it is behaving rationally, and so is the exhibitor who pays. Nothing in the deal documents resolves that, and no study I could find measures it (inference).

New on the shelf: Gathering Architecture Papers

Two to start with. No. 01, The Disclosure Economy, is about agents deciding which events get attended. No. 04, Who Owns the Meeting Rooms, is the full version of the story above: the Informa and Clarion price chain, the 2022 to 2026 roll-ups, the industries these rooms serve, the niche-by-niche comparison, what changes for the people inside, and who could change hands next.

Here is how to use the two together. Read the story for the argument and the actions, then open the paper for the tables, the sources and the data behind every chart. Every figure in the paper is tied to a source or labeled as my inference, and the things I could not confirm, including anything that depends on Informa, are listed in a section of their own.

Every figure above is sourced in the white paper, “Who Owns the Meeting Rooms,” Gathering Architecture Papers No. 04, at GatheringArchitecture.com. The building at Earls Court is gone and the organizer that began there is worth £2.24bn, and it is the organizer, not the building, that exhibitors and venues now have to deal with.

A disclosure: I founded BizBash, which Tarsus acquired in 2020 and which is now part of Informa Connect.

GatheringPoint covers the people who build the gatherings. Subscribe at GatheringPoint.news.

I love writing these because a profile lets you get to know the people in our industry in a way a badge or a LinkedIn headline never will: how they got here, what they got wrong along the way, and what they are building now. Every profile also carries two things I can’t help adding. The first is what I would serve if I threw a party in that person’s honor, and the second is a song that captures who they are.

This is only the beginning, and I am always looking for people to profile, so send me your suggestions at David@gatheringpoint.news. I am also experimenting right now with formats, techniques and unique story ideas like the history of event fashion and the 50 Biggest Flops in Event History, so this is a good moment to subscribe at GatheringPoint.news/subscribe and watch the work and our business evolve in real time.

Scan the list below and see who you may have missed. These are the first 52 of my Wisdom Bank profiles, and the full collection lives in two places: on GatheringPoint.news here on Substack, and at smallbitearchitecture.com. Also check out the reference library for the gathering industries. Gatheringarchictecture.com and my fun new project in the works Satiricalswag.com. If you want to see the actual wisdom bank, check this out.

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Something is shifting in the gathering economy, and Amy Calvert is the person leading the march. The Events Industry Council, the 75-year-old coalition she has run since 2019, just released the most consequential economic argument in its history: 1.65 billion participants, $1.8 trillion in total GDP, 24.2 million jobs, and a global footprint that ranks the business events sector as the sixteenth-largest economy on earth. Those are not numbers that get ignored. They are numbers that get read into the congressional record, that land on the desks of finance ministers, that change the conversation in boardrooms where event budgets have always been the first line item to go. The industry that Charles Osgood called invisible in 1996 is becoming, finally and deliberately, visible. Calvert is the coalition’s general. The march, as she would be the first to tell you, started a long time ago in a kitchen in New Jersey.

Her grandmother’s kitchen in Essex County, New Jersey, was not a large space. There was barely enough space for the stove and the prep table, let alone for the wheelchair her grandfather occupied at the edge of it, watching the woman he’d married move through the small square footage of their domestic world with the confidence of someone who understood that feeding people is not a logistical act. It is a moral one. Amy Calvert was the oldest grandchild, the first, and for years the only child in that house on Sunday afternoons, and she sat near her grandfather and listened to his stories while her grandmother cooked for fifteen or twenty people without apparent effort and without apparent anxiety, as if abundance were simply a matter of deciding to provide it.

The great-grandparents on that side had come from Italy and could not speak English, and there is film footage, black and white, of them gathering in the parks of Essex County for Sunday suppers that they brought entirely from their own kitchens, building fires in the grass and then producing pasta dinners from those fires as if the displacement from their home country had not cost them any of the rituals that made home mean something. What Amy Calvert absorbed in that kitchen, and in those park films, and in the long Sunday afternoons of her New Jersey childhood was not a set of event planning principles. It was something more foundational than that. It was the understanding that the act of gathering people is an expression of what you believe about them, and that the most serious thing you can do with a gathering is make everyone at the table feel like they were always supposed to be there.

She would spend the next several decades discovering that this was, in fact, a profession.

Two Families, One Education

The Italian grandparents were not the only ones. Amy Calvert grew up between two family cultures that were, in her telling, adjacent but distinct. Her mother's side was the warmth and the pasta and the Sunday supper. Her father's side was German, more formal, more structured, WASP-inflected in the way of families whose sons go to Dartmouth and enter the textile business with their brothers. Her grandfather on that side was entrepreneurial and demanding, but also something rarer: a genuine teacher. He believed in the liberal arts with the conviction of someone who had seen what happened when people stopped thinking carefully about the world, and he passed that conviction down with the same seriousness he brought to everything else. He was committed to conservation long before it was fashionable, rooted in a work ethic that did not distinguish between what mattered and what did not, because in his view everything you did either mattered or it didn't. He was not an easy man. He was an instructive one. Amy Calvert is grateful for the difference. Her grandmother on that side was loving, and she too had people around constantly, and she had the beach house at Spring Lake, and everyone came.

Her father, who played football and sports at the high school level with her mother’s oldest brother, found his way into that Italian household and never quite left it. The warmth was different there, and he gravitated to it. Her mother always felt slightly ostracized on the other side, slightly on the outside of a culture that had not been designed with her in mind. Amy Calvert grew up watching both dynamics simultaneously, the family that opened its table and the family that required you to learn its codes, and she absorbed from that watching the thing that would become the organizing principle of her professional life: what it feels like to be on the outside looking in, and what it costs a person to be made to feel that way.

She grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, which she describes as a pretty progressive town, and she came of age in the proximity of New York City, which in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a very particular kind of finishing school for people who would spend their lives thinking about how spaces work. She went to the Limelight. She went to Aria. She danced next to Andy Warhol once in Aria with a boy she was dating, which she mentions the way you mention a thing that was ordinary in the moment and only acquires its shape in retrospect. She went to Studio 54, where the door was the event: they would pick you out of the line or they would not, and everyone knew it, and inside, once you had cleared that threshold, something shifted. “Everybody was welcome, in a way,” she says, “once you were in the door.” She would not have called it event architecture at the time. But she filed it.

She grew up in Montclair, New Jersey, which she describes as a pretty progressive town, and she came of age in the proximity of New York City, which in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a very particular kind of finishing school for people who would spend their lives thinking about how spaces work. She went to the Limelight. She went to Aria. She danced next to Andy Warhol once in Aria with a boy she was dating, which she mentions the way you mention a thing that was ordinary in the moment and only acquires its shape in retrospect. She went to Studio 54, where the door was the event: they would pick you out of the line or they would not, and everyone knew it, and inside, once you had cleared that threshold, something shifted. "Everybody was welcome, in a way," she says, "once you were in the door." She would not have called it event architecture at the time. But she filed it. What New York taught her in those years was the same thing her grandmother's kitchen had taught her in Essex County: that the most consequential thing you can do with any gathering is decide, in advance and with intention, who feels like they belong.

The Apprenticeship Nobody Planned

She graduated from the University of Maryland with a BA in English literature and art history, having attempted a business degree and abandoned it after failing biology. She waited tables at Bentley’s in College Park and at Santa Fe, carrying high-neck tequila bottles over her head on a tray and learning what she would later identify as the irreducible core of hospitality work: the system has to work, you have to be part of it and grateful for it, and the people you are serving have to feel that care was taken on their behalf.

Her first job after graduation was in healthcare administration, which she describes in two words: “couldn’t stand.” Then she talked her way into a catering coordinator position at an independent hotel in Annapolis, persuading the general manager that she could do the job vacated by a woman going out on maternity leave. She was twenty-three. She had no formal training in events, no professional credential, and no particular reason to believe she knew what she was doing beyond the evidence of her own instincts. The woman on maternity leave did not come back. Amy Calvert got the job.

The hotel became a Loews property. Charlotte, who would become VP of sales, was there. She watched how Loews positioned itself with organizations like ASAE, how the company built strategic partnerships and became an institutional ally rather than just a vendor, and she was absorbing this the same way she had absorbed the Sunday suppers: watching, cataloguing, not yet knowing what she was building toward.

From Loews she went to the Long Beach Convention Bureau, then to InterContinental Hotels Group for nearly eleven years, selling a portfolio that ran from Staybridge Suites to InterContinental and living through at least three formal name changes of the company, including one period in which the company operated under an acronym she declines to spell out but describes with a laugh that suggests it was as bad as you think. She was part of a global sales team that was entirely remote, reporting up through a chain of people she describes with genuine affection, people she calls “before their time” in how they managed and mentored.

Then she went to Visit Baltimore as SVP of convention sales, which is where the straightforward career narrative begins to complicate itself in interesting ways. Tom convinced her to come. She insisted on doing a city leadership program that ran for about a year, specifically because she wanted to understand the real culture and history behind the promotional story she was being paid to tell. The program was designed to help people understand Baltimore from the inside, and she was in the middle of it when Freddie Gray died in police custody and the city erupted. She watched a city she had been assigned to market reveal itself as something far more contested and alive than any convention bureau pitch could accommodate. She learned from that what good leadership in a destabilized institution actually requires: you have to know what the real story is, not just the approved one, before you can tell any story honestly.

She left for the Events Industry Council in April 2019, stepping into an organization with a strong foundation that its previous CEO had carefully built over many years. The board saw an opportunity to extend that foundation into new territory: broader advocacy, deeper global presence, a more expansive vision of what the organization could mean to the industry it served. Amy Calvert was the person they chose to carry that forward. Six months later, the world shut down.

The Institution She Walked Into

To understand what Amy Calvert inherited, you have to go back to February 3, 1949, which was a cold Monday in New York City, and a table where four organizations sat down and decided to stop operating in parallel and start operating together. ASAE, PCMA, the International Association of Convention and Visitor Bureaus, now Destinations International, and HSMAI, each representing a different node of what they were calling “group business,” committed to a formal coalition. They called it the Convention Liaison Committee. Their first project was a booklet titled “Group Business Unlimited,” which they produced to help hotels understand the opportunities and challenges that convention business actually presented. It was unglamorous work. It was the right work.

What those four organizations understood, in 1949, was that the business of convening people had become serious American economic infrastructure, and that the people doing that business were operating without the institutional support that any serious profession requires. The hotel needed to understand the convention official. The convention official needed to understand the bureau representative. The bureau needed to understand the hotel. Nobody was talking to each other in a coordinated way, and the industry was growing fast enough that the absence of coordination had begun to cost everyone.

The organization renamed itself the Convention Liaison Council in 1974, formally incorporated in 1981, launched the Certified Meeting Professional credential in 1985, became the Convention Industry Council in 1999, and became the Events Industry Council in 2017. Each renaming tracks a widening ambition. Each one also tracks a problem that the previous name had not quite managed to solve, which is the problem of making an industry that touches every sector of the economy legible to the people outside it who benefit from its existence. The events industry has been the invisible industry since Charles Osgood named it that in a 1996 documentary, and the EIC has been fighting that invisibility for seventy-five years, with varying degrees of success and with better and better data.

Amy Calvert walked into that history with a specific mandate: grow the brand beyond what people thought it was. Diversify revenue. Expand membership. Do the work that the organization had been gesturing toward but not quite executing. She started a listening tour. She commissioned visioning work with her chair Paul and past chair Tina, going beyond strategic planning to ask the harder question: why does this organization exist, and what is its true purpose? She had six months of that clarity before the pandemic took everything off the table.

A Case for Leading the Business Events Industry

The Year the Industry Stopped

In March 2020, the Events Industry Council, the global federation that exists to support an industry whose entire premise is that people gather in person, watched that industry become illegal in most of the world. Its $1.6 trillion global footprint did not disappear overnight, but it stopped functioning in the ways that had justified its existence, and the people who had built careers in the assumption that physical gathering is permanent human infrastructure suddenly needed someone to tell them what to do next.

Amy Calvert did not wait to be asked. Within weeks she was issuing direct calls to action, sharing with the industry that it needed to unify its voice and communicate loudly to policymakers, that twenty-six million jobs depended on the capacity to make that argument clearly and immediately. The EIC’s board had just completed its vision work in the fall of 2019. She had something to anchor to. She used it.

What the pandemic revealed, in her telling, is not simply that the industry needed better advocacy infrastructure, though it did. What it revealed is that the EIC’s most important function might not be what anyone had been treating as its most important function. The certification was the revenue engine. But the purpose was something larger: to be the place where the industry could find itself when it needed to figure out what it was. “The pandemic taught us we can’t keep barreling forward with this notion that things are always going to be the same,” she says. “That was maybe one of the best things that ever happened to EIC.”

She is precise about what she means by that, and the precision matters. The pandemic did not simply disrupt the industry. It forced the EIC to become, for perhaps the first time in its history, genuinely indispensable. An organization that had been describing itself as the global champion of event professionals found out, in the worst possible way, that the description was accurate. Thirty-five hundred people attended a webinar in March 2020 to learn about sustainable event practices while the borders were still closing. Eighteen hundred people have since gone through the Sustainable Event Professional Certificate program she built from that moment, sixty percent of them outside North America. She did not plan that program. She thru the support of hundreds of global SMEs and the team responded to what people needed. The difference between those two things is the difference between managing an organization and leading one.

What She Is Actually Building

The EIC’s 2026 Global Economic Significance of Business Events Study, produced with Oxford Economics and released in May of this year, is the most important piece of research the organization has ever produced, and understanding why requires understanding what it is actually for. It is not a data report. It is a brief for policymakers, a credential for advocates, a story for every CMP and convention bureau and hotel sales director who has ever had to explain to a skeptical CFO or an indifferent congressman why what they do matters.

The numbers are extraordinary. In 2025, business events brought together 1.65 billion participants globally and generated $1.3 trillion in direct spending, a 12.2 percent increase over pre-pandemic 2019 levels. Including indirect and induced impacts, the sector supported $3.1 trillion in total business sales, $1.8 trillion in total GDP, and 24.2 million jobs worldwide. That GDP figure would rank the sector as the sixteenth-largest economy on earth, ahead of Turkey, Indonesia, the Netherlands, and Saudi Arabia. Trade shows alone directly supported $180 billion in spending. Oxford Economics projects direct spending will reach $1.6 trillion by 2028.

And then there is the number that carries the actual argument: seventy percent of survey respondents identified face-to-face relationship building as the event outcome most difficult to replicate digitally. Twenty-eight percent said they would lose revenue without hosting in-person events. This is the veracity premium, the proposition that the in-person moment is not substitutable, measured and sourced and delivered with the institutional authority of Oxford Economics behind it. Amy Calvert has been making this argument since her first day on the floor at IMEX Frankfurt in May 2019. Now she has the data to make it unanswerable.

The advocacy agenda is powered by research. The workforce development agenda is powered by credentialing. That portfolio is larger than most people outside the industry realize. The CMP, launched in 1985 and now held by more than 13,000 professionals across 55 countries, remains the flagship: the only globally recognized standard in a profession with no licensing requirement, no bar exam, and no accreditation body that can tell an organizer they are not qualified to put twelve hundred people in a ballroom and run a three-day summit. The CMP-HC specialty credential extends that standard into the healthcare meeting sector, where compliance and regulatory complexity demand their own framework. The Sustainable Event Professional Certificate, the SEPC, is the newest and fastest-growing: 1,800 completions since Calvert built it from a pandemic webinar audience in 2020, sixty percent of them outside North America, eighteen hundred practitioners who now have a shared language for what responsible event practice actually requires. For long-tenured CMPs who have shaped the profession itself, the CMP Fellow tier recognizes sustained contribution at the highest level. And Calvert is building further still: a work readiness certificate grounded in CMP competencies, designed to reach people before they commit to post-secondary education and lower the barrier to entry for the next generation. The credentialing is powered by community, which is the part that the EIC had perhaps underestimated before she arrived. She talks about neuroscience the way someone talks about something they believe is about to change everything. She talks about cognitive load as a design principle for events. She talks about white space and the danger of overscheduling and the shared responsibility between organizers and participants for making the experience worth having. “We keep loading, loading,” she says. “It’s crazy.”

Her Vision 2030 framework positions advocacy and workforce development as the twin central commitments of the next chapter. The research gives the advocacy its ammunition. The credentialing gives the workforce its pathway. The question she is asking, in every direction at once, is: how do we make people who are not already inside this industry feel like they were always supposed to be here?

She learned the answer to that question in a small kitchen in Essex County, watching a woman who could cook for twenty people without making any of them feel like an imposition.

The Closing Argument

Amy Calvert will tell you she wants to open a wine bar when she retires. She will describe the menu she has in mind, small things, the kind of food her grandmother made, and she will say this with enough specificity that you believe her. She is not the kind of person who says things she does not mean.

She will also tell you that she loves this work, that the organization is purpose-driven in a way that feels genuine rather than performative, that the volunteers and the board and the member organizations show up with a generosity that she finds consistently humbling. She says this without the cadence of someone who has been trained to say it. She says it the way her grandmother said there is always enough for everyone: as a statement of fact about how she has organized her world.

When she looks back at the EIC’s articles of incorporation from its 75th anniversary, she says what struck her was the vision and the foresight of those four organizations that gathered at a table in New York City on February 3, 1949, and committed to leveling up a profession by unifying it. She is doing the same thing they were doing, at larger scale, with better data, and with a clarity about why it matters that the pandemic supplied at considerable cost to everyone. The problem they diagnosed in 1949 is the same problem she is working on in 2026: there is no single place to go to understand what your entry point into this industry is, what your credential means, why your work matters to the people who are not yet convinced.

She is building that place. She learned how from a grandmother who fed twenty people every Sunday in a kitchen that was not large enough for it and somehow always made space.

The kitchen is the curriculum.

Calvert absorbed the architecture of welcome before she had language for it, watching a grandmother who understood that the act of gathering people is an expression of what you believe about them.

Know what the outside feels like.

Her mother felt ostracized by her father’s family. She absorbed that. The instinct to make people feel included rather than tolerated is not a policy position for Calvert. It is a personal inheritance.

The door is the event.

Her Studio 54 observation is precise event architecture: it is not about what is inside. It is about what it feels like to cross the threshold. Design the arrival.

The system has to work.

She learned from waiting tables that hospitality is not a solo performance. You are part of a system, you need good relationships with the bartenders and the kitchen line, and the experience the guest receives is the product of how well those relationships function.

No challenge declined.

Loews to IHG to Baltimore during Freddie Gray to CEO of the EIC six months before the pandemic. She did not stumble into difficulty. She walked toward it consistently and emerged from each crisis with a more sophisticated understanding of what the work requires.

The vision exercise saves you.

The EIC’s board completed its vision work in the fall of 2019. When the pandemic arrived six months later, she had something to anchor to. Do the hard thinking before the crisis arrives. You will need it.

Respond to what people need, not what you planned.

The SEPC was built from thirty-five hundred people showing up to a webinar in March 2020. She did not plan that program. She heard the demand and met it. That is the difference between managing an organization and leading one.

Research is not a report. It is a weapon.

The 2026 Oxford Economics study exists so that every CMP in every conversation with every indifferent policymaker has a number, a source, and an argument they did not have to build themselves. The organization’s role is to arm its people.

Cultural competence is not a value. It is a prerequisite.

Everyone says they want to be global. Global means understanding the uniqueness of every community you are trying to reach and showing up with curiosity rather than conclusions.

Welcome intentionally.

Her single biggest stated life lesson in leadership is how to be intentional about making space for new voices. Not as a program. Not as a committee. As a daily practice of not assuming that everyone already feels welcome to the party.

Every Wisdom Bank profile gets a song. Amy Calvert's is called "Now They're Gonna Hear Our Song," a late-70s New York disco anthem that carries her grandmother's kitchen, the door at Studio 54, and the board now dragging a 75-year-old institution into its next chapter, all the way to the bridge. Listen for the moment the credentials become a chorus.

An Edible Profile of Amy Calvert ( Click )

Small Bite Architecture turns a profile into something you can taste. In a moment when so much hospitality has become standardized, a tray of identical canapés handed to a room of strangers, we believe the next era of gathering is personalization: food and drink built around the specific person being honored, not a generic menu pulled from a catering binder. Every bite here is built around a single detail from Amy Calvert’s actual story, from a fire in the park to the door at Studio 54 to the number that made an invisible industry undeniable. The result is something rare at most events: a guest of honor who feels truly seen, and a room that understands why. Have a look at what we built for her.

Every other month on the calendar answers to something outside itself. September answers to the return from summer. November answers to Thanksgiving bearing down on it. December is spoken for entirely. October answers to nothing, and the industry has built its whole autumn around that fact.

That is why IMEX America and TechCrunch Disrupt land on the identical three days, October 13th through 15th, one at Mandalay Bay selling the meeting itself, the other at Moscone West selling what gets built next. Same window, two rooms that never overlap because there is no better week available to either of them.

Chicago Runs Wall to Wall

The Bank of America Chicago Marathon takes fifty thousand runners through the Loop on October 11th, the same week McCormick Place hosts APTA’s Transform Conference and Expo, the transit industry’s premier gathering, October 4th through 7th. Two weeks later Pack Expo International takes over the same convention center, October 18th through 21st, another fifty thousand attendees for packaging and processing. A city that just cleared its streets of runners spends the rest of the month clearing loading docks for freight

.Las Vegas runs its usual double duty. The NACS Show fills the convention center October 6th through 9th with the convenience store and fuel retailing industry’s biggest floor of the year, on the same blocks of the Strip that host IMEX a week later. New York Comic Con lands mid-month. The Breeders’ Cup World Championships close the month at Keeneland, October 30th and 31st, fourteen Grade One races and more than thirty five million dollars in purses, the tail end of a fall meet that has been running since October 2nd.

Paris, Then London

The month opens mid fashion. Paris Fashion Week’s womenswear spring summer 2027 shows run through October 6th, the tents coming down just as the art world moves in behind them. Frieze London and Frieze Masters take Regent’s Park October 14th through 18th, nearly three hundred galleries from forty eight countries, timed alongside London’s evening auction sales. The circuit then crosses the Channel for Art Basel Paris, October 21st through 25th, with its own auction week built around it.

The Gulf Switches Its Economy On

Riyadh Season 2026 launches October 21st, ten weeks of concerts, sport, and family attractions built and run by the Kingdom’s General Entertainment Authority. It is a temporary city, sovereign funded, switched on for winter the same way Black Rock City is struck and hauled away each September, except this one runs on a decade’s budget instead of a nonprofit’s.

The hotel pipeline is timed to match. Nobu Hotel Al Khobar, Faena The Red Sea, and the Baccarat Hotel and Residences in Diriyah all open in October, three of hospitality’s most self consciously premium names landing the same month the Kingdom’s entertainment machine comes back online. The room supply and the programming calendar are no longer separate stories.

New on the Table, and Under the Roof

Daniel Humm, the chef behind Eleven Madison Park, opens Humm in Manhattan’s West Village this October, a Pierre Yovanovitch designed room built around a seasonal a la carte menu. A few blocks over in Soho, London chef Thomas Straker opens Straker’s New York, his first restaurant outside the UK, in the old Lucky Strike space Keith McNally once ran.

On the hotel side, La Réserve Firenze opens on the 16th, six ultra luxury apartments inside a restored fifteenth century palazzo in the Oltrarno district. Hotel the Mitsui Hakone, a Luxury Collection property designed by Yabu Pushelberg, debuts in Japan’s hot spring country the same month.

The Stage and the Diamond

Broadway loads its fall slate into October. Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ed Harris, and Allison Janney open in a revival of Other Desert Cities on the 18th. Billy Crystal returns in his autobiographical solo show 860 on the 21st. Aaron Sorkin’s A Few Good Men, starring Bradley Whitford, closes the month on the 29th.

The World Series opens October 23rd and, if it goes seven games, runs through Halloween itself, the Commissioner’s Trophy handed out the same weekend Riyadh Season is a week into its run and the Breeders’ Cup has just wrapped in Kentucky.

And the month ends the way it always threatens to. Salem’s Haunted Happenings marks its 29th year, Universal Orlando’s Halloween Horror Nights turns 35, and the Village Halloween Parade runs up Sixth Avenue on the 31st. It is the shortest lived temporary city on the whole calendar, and the only one that comes back on schedule every single year.

One footnote from Washington: the Kennedy Center remains closed for its court supervised renovation fight, its National Symphony scattered across six regional venues. The story is well known by now, worth a mention here only because it will shape how the capital gathers for culture through the next two seasons.

GatheringPoint covers the people who build the gatherings. Subscribe at GatheringPoint.news.

Twelve percent. That’s the share of Gen Z professionals who said, in a 2025 survey of conference attendees by GoGather, that they actually want to hear a keynote speech from a leader. Fifty-three percent wanted hands-on demonstrations and live simulations instead. Another quarter wanted a workshop or a breakout. In the same survey, 61.4 percent said they disengage entirely from a session the moment it stops feeling relevant to them, phone out, attention gone, whatever the person on stage is still saying.

That is not a generational quirk. It’s a preview. Gen Z is simply the first cohort of attendees who grew up with every keynote ever given already sitting on their phone, one search away, free, and they have responded accordingly: the stage isn’t where they expect to learn anything. A new white paper landing this week from GatheringArchitecture.com, the framework and format-research site I founded after BizBash, argues that everyone older than Gen Z is quietly arriving at the same conclusion, just more slowly and with more money already sunk into the old model. “Speaker Industrial Complex: The 2026 Report” runs to sixteen sections and an interactive audit tool, and its real argument is that three different people in the same room, the organizer who booked the speaker, the speaker themselves, and the attendee sitting in row twelve, are all quietly having a different reaction to the same booking, and the industry selling the speaker has only ever built a pitch for one of them.

For the organizer: what you’re actually buying

Ask an event organizer why they’re paying $40,000 for a keynote and you’ll get an answer about content. Watch what they actually do with the booking and you’ll see something else. I spent two decades watching that gap up close, clients telling me they wanted “thought leadership” and then spending the entire budget review on whether the name would move registration. The report’s central device is what it calls the four currencies: spectacle, marketing, learning, and networking, the four different things a speaking slot can be bought to deliver, usually confused for one another in the buying decision and rarely all delivered by the same person on the same night.

Spectacle is the entrance, the production value, the thing that makes an opening plenary feel like an event rather than a meeting. Marketing is the name on the save-the-date email that gets a registration clicked. Learning is the actual transferable skill or framework a session leaves behind. Networking is the excuse the room needed to stand in a hallway and talk to strangers. A marquee booking, the report argues, is superb at the first two currencies and, per that Gen Z data, closer to worthless every year at the third, which is a finding organizers already know in their gut and rarely say out loud, because saying it out loud means admitting the budget line didn’t buy what it looked like it bought. I said it out loud plenty of times over the years and watched it land badly in board meetings, because nobody wants to be the one who tells the committee the keynote was a marketing line item, not an education one.

There’s a fifth thing hiding inside spectacle that the report insists on giving its own name: bragging rights. The story an attendee tells for a year afterward, the “I was in the room when,” is a real commercial output, not a soft consolation prize for a keynote that didn’t teach anyone anything. Organizers who understand this buy it on purpose. Organizers who don’t buy it by accident and then wonder why the survey scores came back mixed. The report also walks through who’s actually making these calls: four distinct organizer types, from the association running on member dues to the brand-as-publisher treating its conference as a marketing channel, plus a fifth player, the outside agency that conceived the whole event and has its own incentives baked into every recommendation it makes. Knowing which one you are, the report argues, should come before you know which currency you’re buying.

One more gap the report doesn’t let organizers off the hook for: the format itself. You can book the right speaker for the right currency and still waste the slot by defaulting to a panel with a moderator and twenty minutes of Q&A, which is still what most rooms default to even though most organizers will privately tell you it’s the weakest structure they’ve got. I built a library of more than 150 session formats on GatheringArchitecture for exactly this, organized by the outcome you’re actually trying to produce, a decision, an alignment, new thinking, not by novelty. And once you’ve picked the structure, you still need someone who can hold it; a directory of more than 140 verified convenors and facilitators, rated on a four-level scale from convenor to steward, is the companion piece. Both are free to browse.

The layer nobody’s pricing yet: AI, real-time data, and a stack no one’s consolidated

Underneath everything above, and I think it’s the single most underappreciated finding in the whole report, a completely different layer of this business is being rebuilt in real time, by AI and by a scattered handful of platforms nobody’s consolidated yet.

Planners are starting to just ask an AI assistant who to book instead of googling a list of names, and that’s not a speaking-industry trend, it’s happening to search generally: something like 68 percent of Google searches now end without a click at all, and Google’s own AI Mode has been measured as high as 93 percent zero-click. Point that at speaker discovery and the math is brutal for anyone not already inside whatever ChatGPT or Claude or Perplexity surfaces when someone asks “who should I hire to talk about burnout.” A cottage industry of “AI visibility audit” consultants has sprung up around exactly this gap, and I’d treat their own scary statistics the way the report treats every self-interested “Top 25” list, skeptically, but the underlying mechanism is real: a handful of AI labs are quietly becoming the new arbiter of who gets recommended, with zero transparency about why.

That’s all still an AI helping an organizer decide who to book. A separate, more disruptive version is an AI helping the attendee decide whether to show up at all, screening the agenda and the speaker list and either recommending against the trip or just registering you, without you personally reading a bio or watching a sizzle reel. I can’t prove that’s happening yet at scale, but if it does, every persuasive thing this industry has built, the one-sheet, the demo reel, the bureau’s marketing copy, was built for a human deciding whether to spend a day of their life in a room, not for a machine making that call on the human’s behalf.

A related shift gets mischaracterized every time I hear it discussed: is this happening because speakers hate their agents? I don’t think so, there’s no survey showing that’s a widespread sentiment. What’s actually happening is the market dynamic this report keeps landing on: content got commoditized, a speaker with a following now has distribution a bureau’s Rolodex can’t beat, and below roughly $20,000 to $25,000 a fee, where the bulk of working speakers actually sit, the commission math just doesn’t clear for anybody, no bad actors required. The funnel runs through a LinkedIn clip instead of a one-sheet, a booking form instead of a booking desk, a QR-code survey instead of a bureau’s word for it. Worth flagging for any organizer who thinks “self-serve marketplace” means commission-free: Talkadot charges a subscription plus a 20 to 30 percent platform fee, bureau math with a nicer interface, while SpeakerHub runs flat-subscription with no cut at all. Two products wearing the same marketing.

There’s a whole layer most coverage misses because it’s about who represents the buyer, not the speaker. Bob Strange has run The Closer Speakers’ Consultancy out of the UK for three decades, sourcing speakers directly for corporate clients, not bureaus. Scurati, built by ex-bureau veteran Dogan Altindag, sells the same buyer-loyal pitch with an AI-assisted disclosed-commission shortlist, past clients including Audi, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz. PR firms and ad agencies do a rougher version daily, sourcing from bureaus on a client’s behalf and billing a coordination fee the client never sees itemized. And for the record, since I’d assumed otherwise: Freeman’s move here isn’t a human consultant, it’s a 2025 software partnership with Sessionboard running the whole content pipeline for organizers. Given the October kickback reporting on undisclosed bureau markups, a buyer-loyal, fee-disclosed layer isn’t a curiosity, it’s what a market with a trust problem produces on its own.

There’s a mirror-image tool for the speaker’s side of the same equation. Adam Parry’s SpeakerStacks, launched at SXSW London 2025, fixes the fact that an organizer legally can’t hand a speaker the room’s attendee list, so a speaker can give the talk of their career and walk off with nothing but the check. “Most event organisers can’t legally hand over attendee data, and that’s a huge missed opportunity for business speakers,” Parry told Conference News. His fix, a QR code, a consent-based landing page, an ROI report, now plugs into Lineup Ninja and Sessionboard. Everybody in this business measures the fee. Almost nobody measures what either side got back for it.

The quiet part about all of this: the content and speaker-tech layer is still wild west, SpeakerStacks, Talkadot, Sessionboard, the buyer-side curators above, each solving one piece of a fragmented stack with no dominant player and nothing talking to anything else. I think that’s an opportunity, not a knock, since the bureaus certainly aren’t building the connective tissue themselves.

Since people are going to ask: is there tech that lets a speaker see the room’s reaction in real time and adjust on the fly? The sensing half is real. Zenus does camera-based facial and sentiment analysis, already running at IMEX Frankfurt, IMEX America, and PCMA’s Convening Leaders. One meeting used it to notice women under 40 weren’t represented on its speaker roster, fixed the lineup, and watched engagement rise. But that data goes to organizers and sponsors after the fact, not to the person on stage while they’re still talking. Piping it back to the speaker in real time is still science fiction, and I looked hard enough to say that with confidence. My own bet, and it’s mine, not a product anyone’s announced: closing that loop, a live signal of how the room is receiving you while you can still act on it, would be worth more to a speaker’s career than any bureau relationship. The sensing technology exists. Somebody just has to point it at the stage instead of the sponsor booth.

There’s a bigger shift buried in that same technology: it’s making the whole program as important to analyze as any one speaker. Zenus’s own example wasn’t about whether one keynote landed, it was about which topics across a full agenda created excitement, a program-level finding. Once you have that data, the real question stops being “was this speaker good” and becomes “did the day’s actual mix match what we sold this event as,” and the report’s audit tool for that goes from a planning estimate to an actual measurement. I’ve been doing versions of this analysis myself, and it surfaces two things worth naming. One: event strategist Elizabeth Lumley has already said the quiet part, sponsors pay for access to job titles, not “interesting speakers,” so a lot of what gets billed as Learning is Marketing wearing a content costume, and real session-level data finally makes that gap visible instead of assumed. Two: Swapcard already runs AI-personalized recommendations across 4,000-plus conferences, matching people to sessions by role and interest; the next step, close now, is an agent that tells you what’s missing from the agenda for you specifically, which only works once it’s reasoning over the whole program’s shape, not one speaker at a time.

For the speaker: no ranking, and a shrinking lane

For the working speaker, the report’s most uncomfortable finding might be the simplest: there is no credible, independent ranking of who’s good at this job. Business has Thinkers50, film has the Academy, books have the Booker. Professional speaking has a scroll of “Top 25 Speakers of 2026” listicles, and the report checked, and nearly every one of them was published by a bureau or a platform with a financial interest in the names on the list. I’ve read enough of these lists over the years, on behalf of clients trying to do real due diligence, to have stopped trusting any of them on sight, and it turns out that instinct was correct. The absence of anything like an honest arbiter isn’t a footnote. It’s the finding.

There’s a small, durable lane inside this business the report insists on naming properly: the full-time act. Donna Brazile and Karl Rove, marketed jointly by the Harry Walker Agency as strategists from opposite ends of the aisle, are the one actually working the circuit right now, with two confirmed joint appearances in 2024. James Carville and Mary Matalin invented this format, and I’ve known them since the Washington Dossier days, but my own reporting for this piece found Matalin canceled a scheduled joint appearance at Chautauqua Institution in June 2025 and Carville, 81, disclosed hernia surgery in mid-2026, while the bureaus still list them together at the same fee. Whether that’s a couple still touring or a listing that’s outlived the tour, I genuinely don’t know. Harry Walker sells the identical format with Brazile paired against Michael Steele, the former RNC chair, which tells you the pairing matters more than the specific person. Newt Gingrich runs the same circuit solo, six figures a night, over a decade in. None of them ever held elected office. Unlike Clinton, Bush, or Blair, whose fees the report tracks in a dated, sourced table, speaking was never their second act. For a quarter century, it’s been the only act.

The harder news for the ordinary working speaker, the one without a cable-news chair behind them, is what’s happening underneath all of this. The report’s argument is that content alone, the framework, the three-step model, the TED-style idea, no longer justifies a fee the way it did even five years ago, because that content is one search away from free. What’s scarce now is the ability to run a live room, read it, and adapt in real time, which is a facilitation skill, not a stage skill, and most professional speakers were never trained in it and most bureaus have no way to sell it.

Who actually represents these people, and the strange bedfellows in between

One thing the report tracks that I don’t think anyone outside this industry appreciates: the agency behind a booking tells you more than the fee does. The Harry Walker Agency, now owned by Endeavor/WME, exclusively represents both Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, the cleanest, most documented representation deal in this market. Trump’s own circuit has no comparable arrangement: his 2023 financial disclosure showed a between-terms speaking income (2021 to 2025) that the report calculates as comparably lucrative to the Clintons’ own peak, run entirely without a clean agency relationship like theirs, his adult children booking instead through open marketplace bureaus. He’s back in office now through January 2029, so what he charges next is speculation, not a finding. The full breakdown, disclosure figures and all, is in the report.

The real strange bedfellows story, and a better one than any bureau double-act, is George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, who ran against each other in the ugliest terms in 1992 and then were recruited by George W. Bush in 2005 to co-chair tsunami relief fundraising, raising over $10 million in what NBC News described as Bush calling Clinton “brother” onstage. They did it again for Katrina, and George W. Bush and Clinton later co-founded the Presidential Leadership Scholars program together. No fee was ever paid for that stage. It’s a real civic friendship between two men who beat each other, a different, better story than “opposite sides of the aisle for hire,” which is what Carville and Matalin actually are.

And since we’re on the subject of people who used to be somebody: Rudy Giuliani’s net worth has collapsed from a peak in the tens of millions to a fraction of that, a bankruptcy filing and a $148 million defamation judgment behind him, disbarred, with Cameo and book royalties standing in for the $270,000-a-speech bureau fee he once commanded. That’s notoriety finding a cheaper channel once the legitimate one shuts down. Running the other direction, toward reconciliation: Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer turned star witness against him, had Trump on his own podcast in August 2026, both men saying afterward they’d “forgiven” each other. That’s the parasocial currency doing exactly what I described above: an audience that already feels it knows the relationship can resurrect a career the legal record alone should have ended.

For the attendee: the room is the whole point

Go back to that 12 percent. It isn’t that Gen Z has a shorter attention span. It’s that the scarce commodity at a live gathering was never the content, it was always the room itself, a specific configuration of people arguing about a specific problem on a specific afternoon, and that cannot be downloaded, replayed, or generated. The report leans on Dunbar’s number and basic cognitive-load research to argue a plenary hall of 3,000 has never been where learning actually happens. It happens in the breakout, the roundtable, the hallway conversation the breakout was designed to cause, and all three live or die on the person running them, not the person headlining them.

That person is a facilitator, and the report treats the fact that facilitation has no fee scale, no bureau infrastructure, and no bragging-rights value remotely close to a keynote’s as the industry’s most obvious blind spot. Speakers have Harry Walker, Washington Speakers Bureau, APB, and a private-equity ownership map the report walks through in detail. Facilitators, doing arguably more of the actual teaching that happens at any given conference, have nothing comparable. I think that gap is the single biggest mispricing in this entire industry, and the report’s bet is that it closes, and closes fast, precisely because AI has made the free-content half of the speaker’s value proposition worthless while making a skilled live facilitator more valuable, not less.

The currency nobody in the bureau world names: parasocial

Here’s the fifth thing driving bookings that the report insists on naming properly, because I think it explains more of this business than the four official currencies combined, and it doesn’t require the speaker to be impressive at all. It requires the audience to feel, correctly or not, that they already know this person. Psychologists Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl coined the term “parasocial” back in 1956, watching early television audiences fall for on-screen personalities they’d never met. I think it’s the whole explanation for why Taylor Swift can command seven figures for a single corporate date while a Nobel laureate can’t clear five, and it’s the honest answer to a question I keep getting asked: why do consumer conventions built entirely around reality television and comic-book franchises keep outgrowing the business events I spent a career building.

BravoCon is the cleanest example: fans paid up to $1,950 for a top SVIP tier at the 2022 event, buying meet-and-greet access to Bravo personalities, not learning anything from a Real Housewife. Comic conventions run the identical math higher up, with reported weekend guarantees putting Robert Downey Jr. as high as $1.5 million. Taylor Swift is the same mechanism at the top of the market, and it’s why the report’s entertainment-tier fees run past $1 million a date: a corporate booker is paying for proximity to someone millions of people feel they already know, not an hour of songs.

Live podcasting is the newest version of the same instinct, and it’s starting to compete with the keynote circuit for the same money. “SmartLess” took its format to the Hollywood Bowl; Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy” ran a sold-out arena tour. Both booked through Ticketmaster and Live Nation, concert infrastructure, not a bureau, because a podcast host offers hours of accumulated audio intimacy no forty-minute keynote can match.

I’ll go a step further than the report does, because this is my read, not a proven finding: parasocial dynamics explain more of Donald Trump’s political durability than his policy positions do. A University at Buffalo study found voters who’d watched “The Apprentice” felt they genuinely knew him, a feeling that predicted their 2016 vote and made them discount negative coverage. The mechanism isn’t partisan, researchers have described a similar “My friend AOC” bond on the left, it’s just more powerful than most of us want to admit.

The same logic is reaching places that would have been unthinkable a decade ago: OnlyFans now sends its executives to legitimate business conferences, its CFO argued at TNW Amsterdam in 2024 that the platform is a creator marketplace, not an adult site, while adult performers already run their own speaking circuit at XBIZ and AVN on the same fee logic as BravoCon.

For an organizer, the takeaway is simple: this currency doesn’t correlate with the report’s other four. A reality personality or podcast host can be worthless for learning and still sell out the room, because nobody’s buying content or status. They’re buying a familiar face, the right tool for some events and exactly the wrong one for a room that needs people to learn something.

Nobody wants to talk about the actual controversy

Here’s the part of this business that never makes it into a bureau’s pitch deck, and it’s become the most consequential thing happening in the room right now: the country the speaking business sells into is polarizing faster than the business has adjusted for, and organizers no longer agree on who counts as a safe booking.

Start with the generational gap. An ongoing national survey by icitizen found 48 percent of adults 18 to 34 said they’d support replacing capitalism with socialism, against 29 percent of adults 50 and older, an opt-in poll worth taking loosely on the exact number but not on the direction (Latin Times). That gap stopped being theoretical in November 2025, when Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist backed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, won the New York City mayor’s race on an affordability platform carried by young and progressive voters (CBS News). That’s not a campus theory anymore. That’s the mayor of the largest city in the country.

Gaza is the fastest-moving trigger on top of that, and it’s not staying on campuses even though campuses are where it’s best documented. Rutgers dropped a biotech CEO from its 2026 commencement after students objected to his posts on Gaza. Georgetown Law’s speaker withdrew after a student petition over his views on Israel. Utah Valley pulled a commencement speaker after backlash tied to a post about Charlie Kirk’s killing on that same campus. South Carolina State canceled its lieutenant governor over her politics, citing safety concerns (Inside Higher Ed). A PR professional quoted in that reporting said it plainly: critics now surface a disqualifying statement “within minutes, hours, days” of an announcement, not weeks. I’ve watched that speed happen in real time on bookings I had nothing to do with, and it is genuinely faster than most comms teams are built to respond to.

Here’s the uncomfortable connection back to Brazile and Rove, and the format Carville and Matalin invented. Their whole act depends on a room believing two recognizable sides can disagree in good faith and both walk away respected. That premise gets harder to sell every year a meaningful share of the youngest people in the audience stop seeing the two major parties as the real poles at all. I don’t think the bipartisan double-act disappears. I think it gets harder to book without someone in the room deciding it’s a statement rather than entertainment.

So is everybody just scared? Mostly, yes, and I don’t think that’s cowardice so much as arithmetic. A controversy hits spectacle and bragging rights, the two currencies a board or a membership actually sees, and never touches learning at all. Nobody gets credit for the provocative booking that goes fine. Everybody remembers the one that doesn’t. What the corporate and association world does instead of a public disinvitation is quieter and less dramatic: a morality clause negotiated before the contract is signed, not improvised during a crisis. A bureau source I’ve seen quoted described pulling an offer from a celebrity caught on camera in an ugly, abusive confrontation, and getting the agent to back off the signed deal only after documenting the exposure in writing. Her advice was the whole lesson: don’t wait until you’re in the middle of it to have the clause.

There’s a second threat sitting next to that one, and it’s not the same problem wearing a different hat, so I want to be precise about the difference. A morality clause defends against a booking that turns into a liability before the event happens. It does nothing for a group that shows up to an event that’s already fully contracted and running, and takes the stage, the hashtag, and the news cycle in real time. I wrote about exactly this collision back in November, in “Inside the Protest That Stole Your Event,” and Climate Defiance is still the clearest case study going. They’re not limiting themselves to podiums with politicians on them: their record includes disrupting Occidental Petroleum’s CEO mid-remarks at the New York Times’ Climate Forward summit, an event that ended up going virtual after ten arrests, though the footage was already circulating before the room had even cleared; a three-story “Oil $$$ Out of the DNC” banner at the DNC’s winter meeting; and confronting EPA administrator Lee Zeldin in the Hamptons during wildfire haze, chanting “What will you tell your children when the Hamptons are underwater?” That’s not improvised outrage. Michael Greenberg, the group’s founder, told me his read on a room comes straight from his stand-up background: “You sense energy. You break tension. Protesting isn’t that different, it’s a live audience, and you’re trying to change how they feel.” His team runs like a startup war room, dedicated Slack channels for visuals, rapid response, legal, a decentralized plan where only a handful of people know the full sequence, videographers trained, in his words, to “hold frame, upload fast, beat the official feed.” That’s a deliberate, rehearsed operation running its own script against your program’s script, on your stage, on your night. No morality clause touches that.

What’s grown up to meet it is its own quiet industry, and it deserves its own paragraph because most organizers have never heard of it. Crisis firms, Brunswick, Edelman, APCO, Hill+Knowlton, Sitrick, Teneo, Rokk Solutions, FTI, SKDK, BerlinRosen, The Messina Group, Kekst CNC, are now getting called in before a stage is built, not after something happens on it, drafting disruption scenario trees for programs that haven’t run yet. David Fuscus, who runs Xenophon Strategies and built the predictive platform Précis AI, put it to me in the plainest possible terms: “There are two kinds of companies. Those that have had a crisis. And those that will. Speed is everything.” When his team found three protestors hiding in a supply closet at one event, his instinct ran the opposite direction from instinct: “Security wanted to arrest them. I told them: give them sandwiches. Walk them out. Don’t feed their narrative with a perp walk.” For the highest-exposure sectors, oil, pharma, defense, the playbook goes further than a well-briefed moderator: mapping the room for likely flashpoints in advance, live sentiment spotters reading the emotional temperature of the crowd in real time, lighting and music cues built to de-escalate without anyone visibly confronting anyone, high-risk content quietly siloed into invite-only breakouts, pre-written response content ready to flood social the instant something happens, even a celebrity appearance or product reveal timed deliberately to overshadow a protest’s window. A few firms have gone as far as hiring former protestors to help design against their own old tactics. This is not theoretical. It’s the same production discipline this whole report keeps circling back to, aimed at the newest thing an event now has to manage: whether the room stays your story, or becomes someone else’s.

What’s inside the full report

• The four currencies every event is actually buying, and why most organizers can only name one of them

• Four organizer types, and the outside strategist who isn’t the organizer at all

• A dated, sourced table of what former presidents, prime ministers, and first ladies have actually been reported to charge, Clinton to Blair to Palin

• The new, unaccountable ranking system nobody’s talking about: how AI assistants are becoming the arbiter of who gets recommended, with zero transparency into why, and the stranger next step, an AI agent deciding on the attendee’s behalf whether to show up at all

• The buyer-side layer nobody maps: independent consultants, AI-assisted curation shops, and the agencies quietly sourcing speakers on a client’s behalf

• Real-time audience-reaction tech: what’s actually real (Zenus), what’s still science fiction, and the case for pointing it at the stage instead of the sponsor booth

• The bipartisan double-act: Carville and Matalin, Brazile and Rove, Gingrich, and why they’re the industry’s actual full-time speakers

• Who represents whom: Harry Walker’s exclusive hold on Obama and Clinton, Trump’s looser circuit, and the real story behind the Bush-Clinton “strange bedfellows” friendship

• The honest Giuliani story, and Michael Cohen’s stranger one

• The parasocial currency: BravoCon’s meet-and-greet pricing, Taylor Swift’s fee logic, live podcasting, and why a theory about Trump belongs in a report about event booking

• The politics underneath the booking: Gaza-driven disinvitations, the generational shift toward socialism, and why the old bipartisan center is narrowing

• Defensive planning for the disruption era: inside Climate Defiance’s playbook, and the crisis-firm industry built to counter it

• The entertainment tier: what it costs to book a touring act instead of a keynote, and why those fees are up 30 to 40 percent since 2020

• The bureau ecosystem, the boutiques that work commission deals with the big houses, and how private equity quietly bought the top of the market

• Why there’s no Booker Prize for public speaking, and what that absence actually means for organizers doing due diligence

• The decade GOATs, argued rather than ranked, 1990s to now

• A working audit tool: score any session on all four currencies before you book it, not after

The taste of it, market by market

Run the full-time-speaker question across politics, business thinking, motivational speaking, entertainment, and sports, and the same pattern holds everywhere with a different cast: a small, durable lane of people for whom speaking was always the whole job (Brazile and Rove, Tony Robbins, Brené Brown), sitting next to a much larger population for whom it’s a second act grafted onto a career that ended somewhere else (the ex-president tier, retired athletes). The full-time-speaker category turns out to be rare enough, in every one of these markets, that you could name most of its members off the top of your head. The report walks all five markets decade by decade, plus its own editorial read of who defined the job in each one, the “decade GOATs,” from Robbins and Ziglar in the ‘90s through the TED-talk era to whatever’s being written right now. That’s a full report’s worth of detail I’m not going to try to compress into a paragraph here; read it at GatheringArchitecture.com.

The bet

None of this means the keynote disappears. Spectacle and bragging rights aren’t going anywhere, and a marquee name will keep selling tickets to a general session for exactly the reasons it always has. What the report is actually betting on, and what I’m putting my own name behind by publishing it, is a reallocation: less money assuming a famous face on a mainstage solves every problem a gathering has, more money finding its way to the people running the rooms where the actual work happens, the organizers who name what they’re buying before they buy it and who put the morality clause in the contract before they need it, the speakers who learn to run a room instead of just perform in one, and the attendees, Gen Z first, everyone else close behind, who’ve been telling us for years that the hallway was the good part. GatheringArchitecture is calling that shift now, in public, with an audit tool attached, so that in two years there’s a receipt for having said it first.

“Speaker Industrial Complex: The 2026 Report” is available now at GatheringArchitecture.com.

Lea Karam‘s company has a word for the moment its work lands. Put a theory to her, half a hunch really, that the whole business of bringing people together is the business of raising the hair on someone’s arms, and she does not hesitate. “We are,” she said. “Do you know that every time we crack a brief, the thing we do in our team is goosebumps? It’s a thing. It’s like a recurring inside joke.”

A behavioral scientist who advises Google, TikTok, Snap, and the BBC keeps a private vocabulary organized around a physical shiver. That is not a charming detail. It is the whole thesis, and it is why her work keeps pulling her toward the one industry that trades in shivers for a living. Karam runs Mindscope, the London consultancy she built to answer a question the marketing world has been getting expensively wrong: not what makes people click, but what makes them feel enough to move. A goosebump is the receipt that something moved. And the place it is easiest to raise, and nearly impossible to fake, is a room full of people who chose to be there.

She did not come up through events. She came up through behavioral science and advertising, and then watched her platform clients pour money into live experience until she followed the spend to understand it. What she found became central to how she works. In a culture she says has been optimized into sameness, the physical gathering has become the last place trust is expensive enough to be real. She calls it the trust filter. You vote with your feet, your calendar, and the mental tax of showing up, and that cost is exactly what makes the room believable. It is also, she suspects, why valuations across the events business keep climbing while so much of what happens on a screen quietly loses its worth.

Her clients do not come to her through a deck or a cold email. They come because they watched her take a stage and describe, out loud, the thing they had been failing to name. “We never pitch once,” she said. “We get referred.” The demand has become its own logistics problem: five talks at Cannes Lions, keynotes at MIPCOM and South by Southwest London, a Q&A line at the World Experience Organization that ran long because the room would not stop asking.

The kid who wouldn’t stop asking

Karam grew up in Beirut, inside the French school system, which she describes with the specificity of someone who has thought about exactly why it worked. Her parents are entrepreneurs, retail franchise operators, brick and mortar, the physical world of getting people through a door. Sunday lunches were business conversations she was allowed to absorb. When she was nine or ten, before chatbots and before Google had fully colonized childhood, her mother handled her relentless questions the analog way. “My mom used to buy me 1,000 Reasons Why books, because I kept asking her questions,” she said. “You don’t really learn it. You’re just born with it, and then you cultivate it.”

The cultivation was cross-cultural by design. The French school in Beirut, then the American University of Beirut, then Imperial College London, each system stacking a different way of reading people onto the last. At Imperial she sat an exam in consumer behavior where the class average was 34, brutally low by British marking. She scored 80. “I love consumer psychology and behavior,” she said, as if that explained the gap, which it did. She loved statistics and probability, never geometry. She specialized in economics in high school. The through-line was never math for its own sake. It was pattern.

Ask her what she was actually good at as a child and she does not say reading, or numbers, or nerve. She says observation. “The best entrepreneurs are those that observe, found a pain point, and then fixed that pain point,” she said. “Observation is the most underrated skill.” She learned as much in a high school band and on a sports field as in any classroom, which is why she now lectures the industry about getting soft skills and digital literacy into secondary schools before the algorithms get there first. The girl who could not stop asking why grew into the scientist whose entire product is the answer.

What she actually sells

Mindscope is built as three labs, and the architecture is the pitch. A technology lab, where the platforms live, where her team rebuilds what she calls the north star a company like TikTok can stand for and works out how an entertainment app becomes a place people shop. An entertainment and culture lab, working with broadcasters and studios and creators, the BBC and ITV among them. A commerce lab that bridges the two. She calls the output not insights but foresights, and the distinction is not vanity. Insight tells you what happened. Foresight maps the psychology of who these people are before they have done the thing you want them to do.

The method runs backward from how the industry works. Everyone else quantifies first and asks questions later. Karam does the qualitative work first, the observation and the experiments, and only then reaches for the numbers. “We validate with quant, not the other way around,” she said. It is the same instinct that makes her suspicious of the field’s data obsession. “The future belongs to the people that find what the data is too coarse to see.” Her newest work, a set of trademarked viewer typologies she built for a major broadcaster, sorts audiences not by age or income but by the mood they are in when they watch, a controller mood, a collective mood, a reflector mood, each predicting behavior that no spreadsheet cell can hold. She had released it publicly only days before we spoke. It will not reach her own LinkedIn for weeks.

And then there is the argument she has built a reputation on, which is that the industry’s favorite tool is dead. Nudge theory, the decade of small tweaks and default settings and one clever button, she considers finished. “It’s invasive, it’s unethical, it’s wrong, and it’s outdated,” she said, in a single breath, as if she had said it many times because she has. What replaces it is bigger and slower. “It’s about system thinking now. You have to build long-play intervention.” Not a nudge but an infrastructure. Not a trick at the point of sale but a culture built around the brand long before the sale is in view. The reason it works, she said, is the reason all of it works: “Human impact equals commercial impact.”

The only constant

Underneath the labs and the trademarks is a single conviction she returns to like a tuning fork. Human behavior is the only thing that does not change. Technology turns over every few years and culture drifts every few months, but the wiring underneath, the need to belong, to connect, to be recognized, has not moved in millennia. This is why she refuses to build strategy on the technology itself. “People are treating AI as a tech challenge,” she said. “It’s a human challenge.” Understand the psychology sitting behind the tool and you can future-proof against a tool that has not been invented yet. Whether the model hallucinates, what the next interface looks like, none of that is where she places her bets. The bet is always on the constant.

Her sharpest worry about artificial intelligence is not that it will replace people but that it will flatten them. She splits thinking into two kinds. Convergent thinking pulls patterns together toward a single answer, which is precisely what a machine does best. Divergent thinking pushes outward into the places a machine cannot follow, the cultural context, the creativity, the heartbreak, the sensory memory of a song. “We need more divergent thinking,” she said, because the hazard of a tool that only converges is a culture that slowly agrees on everything and feels less and less. The evidence is already in the numbers she watches. Engagement on Instagram fell sharply through 2025, she said, because the feed went AI-first, and content built machine-first “biases you from the start.” The right sequence is human insight first, then scale it with the machine. Reverse the two and you get reach without a pulse.

Why any of it works comes down to a piece of neuroscience she treats as bedrock. “The brain is not a deliberation engine, it’s a prediction engine.” People do not reason their way into wanting things. They predict their way there, out of habit and anticipation, long before the moment of choice arrives. Her favorite illustration is the gap between wanting and liking, drawn from decades of research at the University of Michigan showing the two run on separate circuitry. You can want something before you have liked it, before you have even had it. Brands, she argues, have poured everything into the moment of consumption and almost nothing into the anticipation that precedes it, which is where desire actually lives. It is the thesis she helped the agency Havas build into a global proposition they named the science of desire, and it is why she insists desire is the most human feeling there is. Any brand can be wanted. Most simply forget to make themselves anticipated.

Why the young trust her

Karam is careful about the word generation, which is unusual for someone whose business depends on it. She does not call herself Gen Z. “I’m on the cusp,” she said. “A late millennial.” She prefers a different label entirely, one that describes a posture more than a birth year. She is a perennial, positioned in the seam between the generation that remembers three television channels and the one raised inside infinite ones, fluent enough in both to translate. That seam is where her value sits. “No one understands the youth,” she said, “and I’m here to also bring that.”

What she understands about the youth is that they are lonelier than the metrics admit, and that the platforms blamed for it are also the only tools large enough to fix it. She got neutral broadcasters, the BBC and ITV and Channel 4, placed at the top of the TikTok algorithm, deliberately seeding diversity of thought into feeds she watched calcify into red-pill and incel and misinformation loops. She champions Snap not out of loyalty but out of design, because it is built around a camera and small circles rather than public performance. “The camera is a vessel of emotions,” she said. “Text is information.” Her read on the whole arc is generational and blunt. The broadcast economy gave way to the attention economy, and the attention economy is over. “Everyone’s done with it.” What comes next she calls the relational economy, and it runs on connection rather than reach. Brands no longer push. Audiences pull.

She reaches for the World Cup to make it concrete, because it is the last time she watched strangers manufacture belonging at scale. It landed in a country that does not love soccer and it bonded people anyway, and now, she said, they miss it. “How do I fill my time?” The behavioral name for what they lost is a bonding tie, the deep kind, as opposed to the bridging tie, the wide shallow kind the internet mints by the billion. The world has too many bridges and not enough bonds. That gap, she believes, is the entire opportunity of the room.

Make humans more human

Ask her where all of this is heading and she frames her own career as a two-part project. Right now, she said, she is trying to make technology more human, dragging behavioral psychology into platforms that had optimized it out. The second act is the larger one. “Eventually, what I want to get to is make humans more human.” She means a behavioral science lab built around health and wellness, a natural turn for a family steeped in it, with a brother doing a master’s in AI and health at Oxford and a sister finishing a neuroscience PhD at the Paris Brain Institute. Performance, wellness, and communication, she argues, have quietly become the same conversation.

The urgency behind that second act is a bet about work itself. As automation hollows out the satisfaction people once drew from their jobs, she expects them to go looking for meaning in what they do off the clock, which is why she tracks the rise of wellness, longevity, and what urbanists call third and fourth spaces, the places that are neither home nor office. She reaches, unexpectedly, for the Lebanese poet Kahlil Gibran, who lived out his years in New York and wrote that work is love made visible. “Society has made work so weak and redundant and negative,” she said, “and that’s not the case.” Strip the purpose out of labor and people do not stop seeking purpose. They seek it somewhere else, and the somewhere else is not always benign. “It could be new vices or new cults or religion,” she said, anything that hands a person a compass. The work, as she sees it, is to build the healthier somewheres before the darker ones fill the vacuum. Gatherings, designed around genuine human need rather than reach, sit near the top of her list.

The power, and the fear of it

The demand unnerves her a little. Karam is always, by her own description, the vessel; every client relationship begins and ends with her personally, a flattering problem and a dangerous one. “I’m scaling so quickly,” she said, “and there’s so much demand for what we do.” The bottleneck is not clients. It is finding people as good as she is to hand the work to.

The deeper unease is about what the work can do in the wrong hands. Push the science of belonging far enough and you arrive at the places the conversation kept circling back to, the cults and the movements and the conferences that become religions. She has a lot to say about it. Belonging, taken to its extreme, stops being a feeling and becomes an operating system. “It becomes so ingrained in your identity that it’s your way to encode information and decode it,” she said. “You only see with those echo chambers and those lenses.” She can run the machine in reverse. After one keynote about surprise and tribes and hooks, a stranger approached her and said she had just explained why Donald Trump was elected. “Yep,” she told him. “I know the thought process behind it. I can re-engineer it.” The style that wins that way, she said, does something worse than persuade. “It gives people permission” to drop the filter, and with young brains it does not merely enable, it conditions.

The mechanism has a name she borrows from cross-cultural psychology. Power distance, the measure of how far below authority people place themselves, used to describe whole countries. Now, she argues, it describes tribes. Inside a political movement the power distance runs enormous, the followers looking up at a single figure for their compass and their coordinates. The young invert it. They defer to almost no one, which sounds like immunity until you notice what rushes into the space where deference used to be. They consume extreme content instead, and it is misinformation, not obedience, that pulls them to the edges. Her line for their political drift is bleak and precise. “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” A generation convinced its vote is useless does not need to be argued with. It needs to be given a reason to care, which is a design problem, not a moral failing.

What saves the argument from cynicism is that it clearly costs her something. “Because I know it so well,” she said, of the manipulation she can diagnose in seconds, “I’m like, there’s no reason for you to act this way.” She has made peace with the scale of the problem by refusing to try to solve all of it. “Pick a part of the world,” she said, meaning a domain, not a map, “and try and fix it.” Hers is the youth, and the platforms, and the rooms.

The last honest room

The trust filter is where the whole argument comes to rest. If the room is believable because it is expensive to attend, it is also, for the same reason, quick to convict. “You’re voting with your feet,” she said, and a vote that costs a flight and four days is a vote the voter takes seriously enough to regret. Spend all of that and you are entitled to decide, fast, that the thing was fake. She says the industry “mistook intelligence for efficiency” and optimized itself toward sameness, and the gathering is the correction, the one place a person can still feel something a feed cannot counterfeit.

That verdict is the danger she sees coming. Pay-to-play programming, hollow awards, margins thin enough to tempt shortcuts. “The minute the private equity people start looking at the trust factor and seeing the fakeness in the learning,” she said, and let the sentence finish itself. Her antidote is to treat the event less like a product and more like a living thing. When the metaphor of terroir came up in conversation, the wine idea that no vintage repeats and the older years are often the best, she seized it. Counterintuitive and yet obvious, she said; the bespoke thing, the one not built to a fixed purpose, is “even better because it’s more historic.” An event, by that logic, is a lab you get to rerun every season, built around behavioral tribes rather than demographics and fed real connection rather than reach. Do that, and it becomes the one space the relational economy cannot fake and cannot livestream.

Across a long afternoon, Karam kept giving away things she said she had never told anyone in public. The conversation was, in the end, a small proof of her own thesis. Two people who had never met before found the rare thing they had in common, and the reference point was high enough that the connection took. A bonding tie, formed in a room. You could almost feel the goosebumps.

Lea Karam, in her own words — ten ideas to keep

On what the work is for
“We’re in the goosebump business.” If it doesn’t raise the hair on your arms, it didn’t land — the shiver is the proof no metric can fake.

On artificial intelligence
“People are treating AI as a tech challenge. It’s a human challenge.” Study the psychology behind the tool, not the tool.

On the death of the nudge
“It’s invasive, it’s unethical, it’s wrong, and it’s outdated.” Replace small tricks with system thinking and cultural infrastructure.

On data
“The future belongs to the people that find what the data is too coarse to see.”

On desire
“The brain is not a deliberation engine, it’s a prediction engine.” Invest in the anticipation, not only the moment of sale — you want before you like.

On the new consumer
Brands no longer push; audiences pull. Put the human at the centre, because “human impact equals commercial impact.”

On tribes
“I call them behavioral tribes.” Stop targeting individuals and map the group they belong to.

On the room
Events are the ultimate trust filter. “You’re voting with your feet,” and that cost is what makes the room believable.

On the young
“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” A generation that thinks its vote is useless needs a reason to care, not a lecture.

On the mission
“Pick a part of the world and try and fix it.” First make technology more human; then make humans more human.

Sources

More on Lea Karam and Mindscope.

• “The nudge era is long gone” — Performance Marketing World

• Lea Karam — expert profile, InsideBE

• Behavioural science consultancy launch — micebook

Edible Profie of Lea Karam

New Report September 2026

A note from the editor. The gathering economy is everything that happens when people come together on purpose, for a defined event, in a defined place, for a defined time: the organizers who own those gatherings, the venues that hold them, the suppliers who make them possible, and the platforms that connect them all. It is everywhere, and almost nobody keeps its books. Law has its case digests and medicine its journals, but this industry has never had a reference layer under its news, so I am building one. The fundrasising world uses events and have the same passion as people in corporate events, trade shows, marketing, ceremonial and other aspects of gatherings. GatheringPoint reports on the gathering economy. Gathering Architecture documents how it works, with more than 30 working tools, a crisis simulator with 34 scenarios, the working methods of more than 70 practitioners and a glossary of nearly 90 terms. Its Papers add the evidence, and the census below is Paper No. 02. Every figure carries its source or is left blank, corrections are dated on the page, and it will be rebuilt every year. Like everything on the site, it is free and ungated. David Adler

It takes more than 1,500 staff, vendors and production crew, working around the clock for roughly 170 hours, to turn 400,000 square feet of the Jacob K. Javits Center into a single room. That room is where the Robin Hood Foundation, the New York anti-poverty charity, holds its annual benefit. The crew builds it for one night, then takes it apart.

In May that room raised $73 million, the largest total in Robin Hood’s history. The same evening launched a $1 billion endowment campaign anchored by the Bezos family. Richard R. Buery, Jr. has run Robin Hood as chief executive since 2021.

Nine months earlier, 6,500 people rode bicycles across Massachusetts over a weekend. No room, no build, no seating chart. The Pan-Mass Challenge delivered $78 million to the Boston cancer center Dana-Farber, which makes it the largest benefit event in the United States: the largest single gathering held to raise money for a charity. Billy Starr founded it in 1980, still chairs it, and still rides.

Nobody in the gathering economy could have looked that up, because nobody keeps the list. Today Gathering Architecture publishes it. The Benefit Event Census counts 120 benefit events across 21 markets, ranked by verified dollars. Every confirmed figure links to its source, and every unconfirmed one is left visibly blank. Each total is the most recent edition on record, which for 29 of the 34 means 2025 or 2026. The Pan-Mass figure is the 2025 ride, since the 2026 total has not been announced. Robin Hood’s is from this May. It arrives in the week the fall season opens, when development directors, the people who run a charity’s fundraising, are building committees and pricing tables. It found five things, and the first is the one you have just read.

The biggest benefit events are not galas

The pattern holds well past the top two. The Met Gala raised a record $42 million. Tipping Point Community, a San Francisco anti-poverty charity, raised $40,287,321 at its May benefit, though $25 million of that came from a single gift by Sue and John Sobrato. Fifth is the Naples Winter Wine Festival at more than $30 million, chaired by Rob Heidt Jr. of the Naples Children Foundation. Sixth is Old Bill’s Fun Run in Jackson Hole, run by Laurie Andrews at the Community Foundation of Jackson Hole. Three of the eight largest benefit events in America are a ride or a run.

Old Bill’s deserves a second look. It raised $26,104,015 from 4,246 donors in a county of fewer than 25,000 people. The Chronicle of Philanthropy profiled it in June as a structure that shifts power to everyday donors. The census puts a number on how far that structure can go.

Seats cap the money

The reason is structural, and a theater explains it. A theater holds a fixed number of seats, so the only way to earn more is to charge more for each one. A gala works the same way. Its money is capped by the number of seats times the price of a table, which is why the census calls it a seated benefit. A ride or a run has no house. The ticket is cheap or free, and the money grows with every person who signs up, which is why the census calls it a participatory event.

The numbers follow the theater. Six participatory events in the census produce $125.0 million. Twenty-three seated benefits produce $233.2 million. Per event, that is $20.8 million for the participatory events against $10.1 million for the seated ones, roughly two to one.

None of this means the gala is finished. The fundraising platform OneCause reports that 97 percent of nonprofits held an event in 2025 and that 77 percent met or exceeded their event fundraising goals, with the organizations that held in-person events only doing better still, at 80 percent. Those goals are set by the organizations themselves, so the number measures confidence as much as performance. The pressure is not on the format. It is on the people running it.

A development team of three that produced a gala in 2015 is now a team of two producing the same gala, alongside grants, monthly giving and donor care. In a crowded market, the same loyal supporter is being asked to buy five tables instead of one.

SIDEBAR | What a room like that costs to build

The Robin Hood benefit is not a dinner with a stage at one end. It is a temporary building. More than 1,500 staff, vendors and production crew work around the clock for roughly 170 hours to convert over 400,000 square feet of the Javits Center, and it comes down the same week. This year the decor was also inventory: the cocktail installations and dinner centerpieces were built from nearly 60,000 donated shelf-stable food items and pieces of kitchenware, given afterward to City Harvest, River Fund, Grand Street Settlement and other Robin Hood community partners. Robin Hood credits 50 partners by name for the 2026 benefit, which almost no other organization in this census does. The full production credit, with links, is published at All-Star Event Partners.

The Pan-Mass Challenge needed a road.

Resort markets play by their own rules

Resort markets are not smaller versions of city markets. Naples raised more than $30 million in a single January live auction, across 51 lots, in a county of roughly 400,000 people. Palm Beach does not compete on any one night. It competes on the calendar, running more than 60 galas between December and April.

Technology money bought the top of the market

The buyers at the top changed in a single year. The Met Gala went from $31 million to $42 million. Individual tickets rose to $100,000 from roughly $75,000, and the $350,000 tables were bought by Amazon, Meta, OpenAI and Snapchat. Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez Bezos led the sponsors at a reported $10 million, the first year a technology figure held that role rather than a fashion house. Anna Wintour has chaired the gala since 1995. Max Hollein runs the museum that banks the proceeds.

Fashion money built that event. Technology money owns it now, and it brings a reputational risk the old buyers never carried. In San Francisco the shift reached the cause itself. Sam Cobbs, Tipping Point’s chief executive, used the May benefit to launch a push to prepare Bay Area workers for an economy reshaped by artificial intelligence.

Most of the industry does not publish a number

Of the 120 events in the census, only 34 publish a total anyone can verify. Five entire markets, including Nashville, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Louisville, produced no confirmed figure at all. Nashville’s Swan Ball has anchored its market for decades and does not publish a total. There is no shared scoreboard in benefit fundraising. That is why the census had to be built by hand, and why the paper prints the blanks instead of filling them with estimates.

SIDEBAR | Which market wins, and which will not say

This is a disclosure map more than a fundraising map, and the right-hand column is the one to read. New York leads on money, but only three of its ten listed events publish a number. Houston discloses five of seven and still lands eighth, which suggests a market that is underrated rather than outperformed. San Francisco’s entire total is one event. And five markets produced no verified figure at all, which is not a measure of their generosity, only of their silence.

Market Verified dollars Events disclosing New York $117,500,000 3 of 10 Boston and Massachusetts $81,399,874 3 of 7 San Francisco Bay Area $40,287,321 1 of 7 Los Angeles $35,100,000 3 of 10 Naples and Southwest Florida $31,000,000 2 of 3 Jackson Hole $26,104,015 1 of 2 Memphis $15,800,000 1 of 2 Houston $15,663,000 5 of 7 Dallas and Fort Worth $9,189,305 2 of 8 The Hamptons $8,800,000 3 of 10 Chicago $6,879,471 3 of 9 Palm Beach $6,700,000 2 of 10 Aspen $4,000,000 1 of 3 Nantucket $2,000,000 1 of 2 Washington $2,000,000 1 of 7 Miami and South Florida $1,885,000 2 of 6 Atlanta none published 0 of 4 Louisville none published 0 of 2 Napa and Sonoma none published 0 of 3 Nashville none published 0 of 4 Philadelphia none published 0 of 4

Verified dollars are the sum of confirmed totals for each market’s listed events, most recent edition on record. Blanks are printed rather than estimated.

Robin Hood’s room at the Javits takes 170 hours to build. The Pan-Mass Challenge needs only a road. The census exists so that anyone can see which one raised more, and start asking why.

Read The Benefit Event Census at gatheringarchitecture.com

Somebody has to keep the books of the gathering economy. If you work on the production or development side of any event in the census and hold a number the press never got, send it. The second edition lands after Old Bill’s reports its thirtieth-anniversary total on October 28, and Nashville, Atlanta, Philadelphia and Napa are the markets where we currently have nothing.

The Robin Hood benefit is not a dinner with a stage at one end. It is a temporary building. Robin Hood converts more than 400,000 square feet of the Javits Center into it, and the conversion runs on roughly 1,500 staff, vendors and production crew working around the clock for about 170 hours. The room then holds more than 3,000 guests, plus 500 community partners and 500 fans admitted for the concert. It comes down the same week.

This year the theme was food, which meant the decor was also inventory. The cocktail installations and dinner centerpieces were built from nearly 60,000 donated shelf-stable food items and pieces of kitchenware, all of it given afterward to Robin Hood community partners including City Harvest, River Fund, Grand Street Settlement, St. John’s Bread & Life, Project Renewal, Win and Children’s Aid. Robin Hood reports that last year’s benefit avoided nearly 64 metric tons of CO2e by cutting trucking and changing production practices. P!NK headlined, The Lumineers played the seated dinner, Pete Davidson did stand-up, and the Young People’s Chorus of New York City performed.

The Benefit Event Census found that 86 of 120 American benefit events do not publish what they raise. Far fewer publish who built the room. Robin Hood publishes a full production credit every year, which is why this list can exist at all, and which is the standard worth holding other organizations to.

Below is that credit in full, as published by Robin Hood.

Executive Producer: Lindsay Carroll, Robin Hood

Catering: Union Square Events; DEGA Catering

Choreography: Natalie Galazka

Creative, Decor & Design: David Stark Design & Productions

Draping: Drape Kings

Table & Ticket Management: Event Associates Inc.

Printed Materials: Riverside Graphics

Lighting: 4Wall Entertainment Lighting

Mobile Check-in & Pledging: Checkin Tech LLC; SmartSource; Roswell

Photography: Ronald Antonelli; Travis W Keyes; Mashbooths

Production (Event, Show & Technical): Nimblist

Production Staffing: Theatrical Resources; Pentwater Productions

Rentals: AFR; John To Go; Dimitri Carpet; Party Rental Ltd.; Pete’s Big TVs; Precise Prompting; Productions on Point; SGPS; Taylor Creative; United Rentals

Rigging: 2XD Productions; C2W

Scenic: Atomic Design

Screens & Show Staffing: Loren Barton; Livewave; Janine DeVito; Abbey Lieber; Bold Move Productions; FUSE; Lauren Quinn

Security, Health & Safety: K Street Group; The Baghera Group; Xonar

Sound: Clair Brothers Audio Systems

Staging: All Access

Talent Management: Marty Hom, Inc.

Transportation: The Bevan Group

Venue: Javits Center

Video: All Mobile Video; FUSE; Livewave

Video Content: Long Story Short

Music Director: Vincent Smaldone

Talent Booker: Erin Sermeus / Curation

Credits as published by the Robin Hood Foundation. Links go to a company’s own site where one is published, or to a trade directory listing where none exists. Partners credited without a link had no public site we could confirm, and individuals are listed without links unless they publish a professional page of their own. Nothing here is inferred and no partner paid for inclusion.

If you worked on this crew and your name is missing, misspelled or unlinked, write to us and it will be corrected with a date. The same credit, kept current, is published at All-Star Event Partners, the production companion to The Benefit Event Census.

Send your questions to David@gatheringpoint.news.

A note from the Curator: I’m experimenting with something here. The events and gathering industry mostly gets covered in trade-press paragraphs full of deal sizes and platform strategy, accurate but unreadable unless you already speak private equity. So this issue borrows the oldest trick in the business, the advice column, the same device Dear Abby and Ann Landers used for decades to make the news of the day feel like a conversation instead of a briefing. Five people, five letters, five real situations in this industry right now, answered honestly. If it works, you’ll see more of it.

Nobody in this business writes a memo that says “we are consolidating your show to protect our exit multiple.” They write a press release about synergy. So the letters kept arriving, and we kept answering them the way an advice column answers everything: honestly, and with the receipts.

The One Who Got Folded

Dear Curator,

My show has run for eleven years. Good crowd, loyal exhibitors, nothing fancy. Last month our parent company folded us into a sister brand we used to consider a rival. New combined name, same floor, and nobody asked us. Is this a merger or a funeral?

— Orphaned in the Exhibit Hall

Dear Orphaned,

It’s neither. It’s a spreadsheet. Somewhere a finance team is sitting on a portfolio of shows selling booths to the same few hundred exhibitors across two separate registration systems, two separate marketing budgets, and two separate sales teams, and asking why. One combined show sells the same booths at a bigger badge price with half the overhead. That’s the whole memo, dressed up in a new logo.

You are not the first. Catersource and The Special Event, two shows that had run side by side under Informa for years, were folded this year into a single brand called Cater+Event, its first full edition set for New Orleans in March 2027. Informa’s own numbers explain the appetite: the company’s B2B events division posted eight percent underlying revenue growth in the first half of 2026, with more than four and a half billion dollars already committed or visible for the full year. Fashion by Informa ran the identical play, combining MAGIC, COTERIE, SOURCING, PROJECT, and OFFPRICE under one roof in Las Vegas and again in New York, nearly nine hundred brands under a single badge instead of five separate ones.

You didn’t lose a rivalry. You became a rounding error that got rounded the profitable direction. The tell is always in the timing. These moves land during growth years, not down years, because a company only bothers optimizing a portfolio it plans to keep showing to a buyer.

The One About to Be Cloned

Dear Curator,

We sold our conference to a strategic buyer three years ago. Good deal, we stayed on to run it. Last week the parent company announced they’re launching a version of our show in the Middle East, same format, same name, with a local partner we’ve never met. They called it exciting news. It didn’t feel like news I was part of.

— Still Holding the Clicker

Dear Still Holding,

You’ve just met the word the industry uses for what happened to you: geo-cloning. It means taking a proven show and stamping the format onto a new city with a local partner, and it has become, in the words of one trade publication, a go-to growth strategy for exhibition organizers looking to expand internationally, with less risk than building a brand new launch from nothing.

Hyve Group put a name on it in their own language: geo-cloning our strongest brands to meet global customer demand, Shoptalk into the Middle East, Fintech Meetup into Europe, Breakbulk into Asia, Bett into the USA. They opened Shoptalk Luxe in Abu Dhabi this past January, four editions deep into a brand that started as one show in Las Vegas.

Providence Equity and Searchlight Capital took Hyve private in 2023 for a little under half a billion pounds, and the cloning worked so well that this June a deal was announced to sell Hyve again, this time to Hellman & Friedman for a reported $1.9 Billion, roughly triple the 2023 price. Not every organizer even wants the word for it. dmg events, which runs more than eighty events across twenty five countries, prefers geo-adaption, a version of the same idea with the local market’s fingerprints left on it rather than erased.

Here’s what nobody tells the founder who stayed on: the clone doesn’t need you in the room . It needs your format, your run sheet, your session titles, and a local partner who knows which government office issues the permits. You built something reproducible. That was the whole point of selling it.

The One Watching His Festival Go Abroad

Dear Curator,

I’ve produced the same music festival for nine years. Small, weird, ours. We got acquired by a major promoter two years ago and last month they announced a European edition using our name and none of our programming team. My inbox is full of congratulations. I don’t know what I’m being congratulated for.

— Homesick in a Sold-Out Field

Dear Homesick,

You’re being congratulated for becoming infrastructure. It happened to Lollapalooza the same way. Perry Farrell’s traveling festival became a fixed Chicago event in 2005, Live Nation bought a controlling stake in its parent company C3 Presents in 2014, and the brand has since opened in Santiago, São Paulo, Berlin, Paris, and Stockholm, each one produced with a local promoter and the same headliner-driven format stretched across a new city’s park. C3 alone gave Live Nation what was, at the time of the deal, the largest festival platform in the world, more than sixty five events when combined with its European arm Festival Republic, and the footprint has only grown since.

The mechanism is not evil, it’s just not about you anymore. A publicly traded roll-up doesn’t need the founder’s instincts once the format is proven. It needs the format, a stage plot, a sponsorship deck, and a city with a park big enough. What you built stopped being a festival and started being a template the moment someone else could run it without you in the room.

Ask for the thing that’s actually yours to ask for now: money for the use of your name, or a real seat in how the new editions get programmed. The nostalgia won’t get you either one. The contract might.

The One Building the Corporate Super Bowl

Dear Curator,

My CEO wants our small annual user conference turned into, quote, our Dreamforce. Bigger, louder, a whole city taken over. I don’t have Salesforce’s budget or their forty five thousand attendees. Am I being set up to fail?

— Terrified Marketing Director

Dear Terrified,

Your one of the few letter this week whose company isn’t for sale, and that changes everything about your problem. Dreamforce gets called the Super Bowl of corporate events for a reason: it’s not a trade show trying to attract exhibitors, it’s owned media that happens to have a keynote stage. Gainsight’s own flagship conference, Pulse, reportedly generates seventy five percent of the company’s annual sales pipeline in a single event. Nobody at Salesforce is optimizing Dreamforce for an exit multiple. They’re optimizing it as a revenue engine that never stops running, because the smaller touring formats built off it, Agentforce World Tours, TDX, Tableau Conference, all stay tethered to the mothership brand instead of spinning off as their own companies.

That’s actually good news for you. You don’t need forty five thousand people or a city takeover. You need the one thing every flagship event actually shares underneath the spectacle: every touchpoint, from the keynote sequencing to the follow up email, connects to a measurable business outcome instead of existing for its own sake. Your CEO watched the fireworks and missed the wiring behind them.

Build the wiring first. The fireworks are optional.

The One Bracing for the Mother of the Groom

Dear Curator,

I’m planning a wedding and the groom’s mother has opinions about the guest list, the seating chart, the florist, and a dress code nobody asked her to weigh in on. Every planner on my team warns me before we walk into a meeting with her, like it’s a known thing. Is this really as universal a problem as everyone keeps making it sound?

— Bracing for Battle

Dear Bracing,

It is, and it isn’t really about her personality. It’s about a seating chart she has no seat at.

Wedding tradition built its entire formal structure around the bride’s family. For generations the bride’s side was solely responsible for hosting the wedding and the engagement party, which meant the bride’s side also made the decisions, since the one hosting has always been the one deciding. The groom’s family got one assignment: the rehearsal dinner. That’s it. That’s the whole traditional job description for the woman who spent eighteen-plus years raising the groom and now gets a toast, maybe, if the timeline allows.

Opinions are what happens when someone who cares that much gets that little formal say. She isn’t overstepping a boundary. She’s finding the only door tradition left unlocked, and she’s going to keep finding doors until one of you hands her a real one.

This isn’t a secret in the industry either. Every planner who came up through Engage! (Engaging Summits) has a version of the same story: the pre-pandemic year Mindy Weiss stood on stage and gave a talk with a title that needed no subtitle, Beware the Mother of the Groom. A speaker of her standing does not build an entire session around a personality quirk. She builds it around a pattern every planner in the room already recognizes on sight.

You already know the first fix: redirect every question back to the couple, warmly and without negotiation. The fix most planners skip is the second one, which is giving her a lane that’s actually hers before she goes looking for one that isn’t. The rehearsal dinner, a toast, a family reading, the welcome bags, something with her name on it in the program that a guest can actually see. People who feel structurally excluded do not calm down when you tell them no. They calm down when you hand them a yes that’s real.

The couples who hire you to referee a fight over florists are usually hiring you to solve a smaller problem than the one actually in the room. The florist was never the issue. The seat at the table was.

Five letters, four different machines and one that isn’t a machine at all. The trade show and the festival exist to be sold, so they get consolidated or cloned depending on whether the parent company owns one brand too many or one brand too few. The corporate flagship exists to sell something else entirely, so it never gets cloned into a franchise, it gets tightened into an engine. And the wedding was never a business in the first place, no matter how much it costs, though it still runs on the same question as every letter above it: who gets a real seat at the table, and who gets handed a door that only looks locked. Know which room you’re standing in before you take the congratulations personally.

Ask the Curator runs at GatheringPoint.news, where David Adler, Curator in Chief, answers what the events industry is actually asking. Subscribe at GatheringPoint.news. Send your letters to David@gatheringpoint.news

The first thing you notice is that he is standing in the aisle. Not walking it with a handler, not passing through on the way to a partner meeting, but standing inside the booth at his own company’s trade show stand, talking to whoever comes up. It is disorienting enough that the question forms before you can stop it: is he the CEO? Ben Erwin runs Encore, which employs thirteen thousand people, works out of 2,200 hotels and venues across twenty-three countries, produced 400,000 events last year, booked 3.4 billion dollars of revenue, and has a filing sitting at the Securities and Exchange Commission proposing to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker ECR. If you have attended a conference around the world in the past decade, there is a strong chance his people ran the room, and you never learned the company’s name. And there he is, in the aisle.

Asked about it, he does not reach for a line about servant leadership. “It’s the only place I’d want to be,” he says, and then makes the case in operational terms, which is the more revealing answer. “You can in the matter of an afternoon get a lot of intelligence, hear a lot of things, and candidly get closer to your business than I can standing where I am right now.” Where he is right now is the Chicago office. He describes it later, without prompting, as the one place his business does not happen. “Our business comes to life in 2,200 places. My office building here in Chicago is not one of them.”

Consider what he is declining. Somewhere in that same building, at that same hour, a person sits in a booth at the back of a ballroom and speaks into a microphone, and two thousand adults stop talking and take their seats. This industry gave that job a name of its own. Voice of God. Not announcer, not host. God. The voice comes from nowhere, has no body, cannot be argued with, and is obeyed. Encore staffs that role hundreds of thousands of times a year, which makes Ben Erwin, in the most literal organizational sense available, the Voice of God’s boss.

And he is out in the aisle handing someone a business card.

What this business is

It helps to know what he inherited, because almost nobody outside the industry does.

The business starts in 1937 with a problem that has never really changed. A projector was expensive, heavy, and temperamental. A company that wanted to show a film for two hours could not justify buying one and could not thread one if it did. So a man named P. Ray Swank began renting the machine and the person who could operate it and delivering both into a room on a specific afternoon. Three things sold together: capital nobody wants to own, expertise nobody wants to hire, and logistics nobody can do themselves that today is part of the hidden formula that helps to create the magic.

That is still the business in 2026. The boxes are larger. Nobody’s marketing department owns an LED wall or a line array, nobody’s meeting planner can patch a console, and they need both for two days in a ballroom in Orlando.

The geometry of that problem determined everything that followed. The equipment must be in the room, and the room belongs to the hotel. Which means the most efficient way to run this business has always been to sign an agreement with whoever owns the room rather than with whoever is holding the meeting. That is where venue exclusivity comes from. It is not a private equity invention. It is the logical endpoint of a 1937 constraint.,

Scale arrived in stages, and mostly during downturns. Kelso & Company, a private equity firm, bought PSAV Presentation Services in 2007, one year before the financial crisis and the collapse in corporate meetings that followed it. Group business did not fully recover until 2014. A sponsor that cannot sell an asset buys instead, and in 2012 Kelso merged the company with Swank, its only real national peer and sold it to Goldman Sachs in 2013. Blackstone bought PSAV in 2018 and spent the next two years acquiring, including Hargrove in Washington and, in 2019, a company called Encore Event Technologies purchased from Freeman. In January 2021 the whole portfolio took that name and it has been strategically applauded.

Which brings the story to the part that is still moving. In late 2025 the company acquired Eclipse, a UK-based event production company, and then FIRST, an agency of more than eight hundred people, roughly three quarters of whom work inside client offices rather than at venues. Four months later the S-1 went to the SEC, proposing a New York listing under the ticker ECR. The filing shows 2025 revenue of 3.4 billion dollars, long-term debt of 2.3 billion, and one number that describes the shape of the market better than any of the others: revenue per event up nearly 88 percent since 2019, while the total number of events has declined potentially due to market trends where customers are investing in more immersive events and technologies that enable them, rather than a comparable increase in event pricing.

Fewer, but larger more complex events. That is the industry Erwin is taking public, and it is a different industry from the one that rented projectors.

What Encore has become, in plain terms, is a new type of connective infrastructure . Not a vendor in the ordinary sense, because a vendor is something you select. This is closer to the plumbing of the meetings economy: a standing layer of people and equipment installed inside 2,200 buildings, which activates whenever anyone in those buildings decides to gather. The planner does not choose it. She encounters it, the way she encounters the loading dock and the ceiling height. Nobody built it on purpose. It accumulated, one hotel agreement at a time, over eighty-nine years, until the only company that could serve a national customer across every property was the one that had signed with every property.

Infrastructure of that kind has a characteristic dynamic, and it is the one the industry complains about. Its counterparty is the landlord, not the occupant. Its revenue is transactional, event by event, room by room. Its relationship with the person holding the meeting begins when she walks through the door and ends when the trucks leave. Ninety years of arriving after every decision that mattered.

The whole of Erwin’s strategy is an attempt to reverse that polarity. The word he uses is closeness, and what he means by it is structural rather than sentimental.

That is the whole man, and it is worth understanding how a finance executive with no events background arrived at it.

The accident he has learned to narrate

Ask Erwin how a Wake Forest economics graduate ended up running the largest event production company in the world and he immediately disowns the tidy version. “I’ve gotten good at telling a story of how it all makes sense,” he says. “But I think my parents are probably better judges. And they would say it’s a little bit of an accident and a little bit of being open to opportunities that present themselves.”

What he does claim is a decision he made at twenty-two, and it is more specific than most origin stories. He turned away from investment banking and management consulting, the two default destinations for someone with his transcript, on the grounds that both were the wrong kind of room. “It felt outside of business. And I wanted to be in a business.” Then the line that explains everything after it: “I wanted to be in the middle of the fight. And you don’t get that seat by being outside it.”

So, the man in the booth is not performing humility. He is doing the only version of the job he ever wanted, which is the version conducted in the middle of the fight rather than adjacent to it. The finance credential got him the seat. It was never the point of the seat.

His college years read the same way once you know what to look for. Greek life, student government, club sports, a standing role in and around the Wake Forest athletics department without ever playing a varsity sport. He describes himself in that period, accurately, as “an organizer of people.” And before any of it, there was a smaller and more demanding room. He is the oldest of four boys in a family where his parents held high expectations for all of them. “That was my first crew,” he says. “How do you get all of those personalities to do what was expected of us?”

He has a word for what he was learning, and he uses it constantly inside Encore. Followership. Asked to define it, he locates it entirely outside the org chart. “It’s all the credibility that comes from soft skills. It comes from storytelling. It comes from authenticity. It comes from trust. It comes from building something people believe in that’s bigger than themselves.” Leadership, in his account, is not conferred by title. It is the observable fact of whether anyone is behind you.

The year the business went dark

He became chief executive in August 2020. Encore, then still trading as PSAV, had been a two and a half billion-dollar business before the pandemic. By the time he took the job, monthly revenue was running in the single millions.

“It was brutal,” he says. “Can I be CEO for the first time in a business that’s effectively dark?” He describes the period in three registers at once, and does not try to reconcile them: scary, heartbreaking, stressful. Then he adds a fourth that most executives would leave out of an on-the-record conversation. Liberating.

His reasoning is unsentimental. “I think it would have been harder to be a CEO of a successful business at a successful time, because you would have felt a bit more paralyzed by changing things. Where there would be this fear of, just don’t screw anything up. It’s all just working.” Instead, he found himself running something closer to a pre-revenue startup that happened to have thirteen thousand people attached to it, and he named the condition rather than hiding it. He called the next chapter a restartup, and told the company that its advantages, the talent and the experience and the accumulated craft, were intact while everything else was newly negotiable.

He set out four priorities. Three were conventional business strategy. The fourth was that Encore should be a place everyone wanted to work, an academy company for the industry, and he is direct about why that was the one that mattered. The company was asking people to stay on roughly half their take-home pay, in an industry that had become the rare thing both political parties agreed on. Face to face did not make sense. Las Vegas went dark. Hotel staff were improvising ways to lock ballroom doors that had never had locks.

“Our teams are sitting not together. We’re sitting at home. Our place of work is shuttered,” he says. The retention argument he made was not financial, because there was no financial argument to make. It was that there would be a company on the other side and they would want to have been part of it.

The metaphor he reaches for is a rock face. “We were all stuck on the side of the rock face when the thunderstorm came rolling in. We had to figure out what to do. And as scary and daunting as that moment is, when you get to the other side, you have a fundamentally different relationship with everybody that you just went through that with.” Then the operational payoff, which is the part a finance executive would notice first: “to regrow, you needed that muscle memory.”

He is describing his own workforce as an asset that could not be rebuilt from scratch, and a shared ordeal as the mechanism that preserved it. It is the same insight the events industry sells to its clients every day, applied inward under conditions where it was the only currency available.

Turning the infrastructure around

The strategy he can describe, IPO restrictions notwithstanding, is an attempt to make that installed layer work in the other direction. Thirteen thousand people, 2,200 venues, twenty-three countries, thousands of daily encounters with organizations trying to convene somebody. Historically all that value flowed toward the building. His proposition is that it should flow toward the customer instead, and that the building benefits anyway when it does.

He puts it as an obligation rather than a pitch. If he has the talent, and he is already standing in the places a customer is most likely to meet, then he ought to be able to give that customer more, in his phrasing, “leveraging the experience we’ve had together to earn your trust.” And if that happens, the venue partner still wins, because the customer walks through their front door knowing what to expect. It is a coherent argument. It also requires a company whose entire commercial history runs through the landlord to start behaving as though the occupant were the client, which is a harder cultural task than an acquisition.

Three things have to change for it to work, and Encore is visibly attempting all three.

The first is memory. Infrastructure does not remember anyone. His answer is that the teams should arrive already knowing what this customer wanted last time, in a different city, in a different building. He describes a system where an experience travels with a client across the network rather than restarting at every property. That is the difference between plumbing and a relationship, and it is entirely a data problem. Asked where the untapped value in the business is, he answers instantly, with a line his team has clearly heard before. “If Encore only knew what Encore knew.” Four hundred and fifty thousand events a year is the largest observational dataset in live events by a wide margin, and he calls the work of using it early to improve personalization.

The second is position. This is what FIRST is for. “In the case of FIRST,” he says, “it’s extending into their buildings.” The agency employs more than eight hundred people, roughly three quarters of them working inside client offices rather than at venues, which means they are present when an event is still an idea, before the city, the venue, or the format has been chosen. A company that has spent eighty-nine years arriving after every consequential decision has bought a seat in the room where those decisions are made. It is the single most significant thing Encore has done in a decade, and it is not about audiovisual at all.

The third is the calendar. The infrastructure was built for the tentpole, the large annual gathering that fills a ballroom and justifies the trucks. But the filing shows event count declining while spend per event climbs, which means the middle of the market is thinning. The volume is migrating to smaller, more frequent meetings that never touch a hotel and are therefore invisible to a venue network. You cannot serve those from a ballroom. You can only serve them from inside the client’s building, with someone on staff who knows they are happening.

He does not claim the field to himself. Told that the old rivalry with Swank has no modern equivalent, he pushes back. “While I sleep well, I don’t sleep perfectly.” He names production houses and agencies coming at the same customers from a different angle, notes that the barriers to entry are low, and calls the industry incredibly fragmented. What he claims is not dominance but consistency, sold to a customer base he describes as “overworked, taxed, and in greater demand inside their businesses than they’ve ever been,” in a market where freelance labor means an organizer often does not know who will actually turn up to run the show.

Whether any of it survives contact with a quarterly earnings call is the open question of the next three years. A public company carrying 2.3 billion dollars of debt has an obvious short path to revenue, and it runs straight back through the ballroom.

The AV tech is the star

The most animated he gets is not about strategy. It is about the person in the ballroom.

Encore runs a large voice-of-the-customer program, and the finding that delights him is that most respondents use it to name an individual employee. His customers, unprompted, want to tell him about a specific human being.

“It is an AV tech miking them up when they’re nervous,” he says. “It’s the last person they see before they walk on stage. It’s a producer that helped them create kind of the vision that they had in their head but didn’t know how to get it put to life in the ballroom. And it is, that’s our star. That’s our celebrity.”

Consider what that moment is. Everything else about the day was planned months ago and printed in a run of show. The mic check was not. A stranger threads a wire under a speaker’s jacket, stands closer to her than anyone has all day, feels that her hands are shaking, and improvises a sentence. Some version of: you’re going to be great. He does not know whether that is true. It works anyway.

She already had the slot. Her name was already on the screen. What she did not have was permission to walk out and be looked at, and permission cannot come from the meeting planner or the chief marketing officer, because they want something from her. It must come from someone with no stake in the outcome. That is the second unnamed office on this floor, alongside the voice in the ceiling: one grants the room the standing to assemble, the other grants the individual the standing to speak. We have built an entire industry on top of two ceremonies, and we file both under production.

There is a real ambition buried in that. The company hires out of hospitality schools and theater programs into a structured leadership program, and Erwin talks about human capital as the thing he most wants to discuss internally. The unresolved part is that the star system he admires belongs to the individual, while the consistency he is selling belongs to the network. His stated answer is that the experience should travel: the next Encore team, in the next venue, should already know what worked. Whether a company can industrialize the whispered reassurance before a keynote is the interesting problem, and it is not solved.

Rehearsal

Late in the conversation the subject turns to rehearsal halls, and to the observation that most organizations arrive at their event with the important decisions already frozen. Erwin does not hedge.

“You’re pointing on rehearsal is spot on,” he says. “You’re investing in all of this time and money and resource to get people together, and too often people underinvest in how they can have the biggest impact.” Then the thing that makes it more than agreement. “I also think it forces a whole bunch of conversations around what are we actually trying to do.” He reports that the single most common piece of advice his customer and operations teams give is the least technical one available: start talking earlier.

He is describing rehearsal as a forcing function for clarity rather than a production line item, which is the correct diagnosis and a slightly awkward one for a company that bills rooms by the hour. He points toward technology and AI as ways to give a client a sense of what is possible much earlier, before the budget hardens.

Told that a family-owned German agency called Vok Dams has independently arrived at the same embedded staffing model that FIRST practices and built a simulation tool to model events before production decisions are locked, he is interested and unguarded: he has not heard of them. Two companies with nothing structurally in common, one an eighty-nine-year-old American rollup preparing to list, the other an independent agency in Wuppertal, moving toward the same answer from opposite directions. That is not a coincidence about either company. It is a signal about the market both are standing in.

He ends nearly every conversation the same way, according to him and, he suspects, according to anyone who works for him. Before hanging up he asks what he can do for you. He did it at the end of this one.

He talks about growth carefully, in the manner of someone with lawyers, but the thing he wants to grow is not only the company. “There’s an opportunity not just to grow Encore, but to grow the importance of our industry,” he says, and then makes a claim about the people in it: they are strategically important, and they have not been given their due.

Asked what his fraternity brothers would make of all this; he does not perform modesty or confidence. “Half of them would be not surprised and half of them would be shocked. And I’d let you decide who we’re closer to me.”

The oldest of four boys, running his first crew, would recognize the man in the aisle. The bankers he declined to become at twenty-two would not.

Everything else in this business speaks from somewhere you cannot see. The voice in the ceiling. The contract the planner inherits with the ballroom and never signed. The provider chosen by somebody else, in a room she was not in. Erwin has spent twenty-five years choosing the opposite, on the stated grounds that a tower is only a window on a fight. He employs God. He would rather be interrupted.

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Ten things worth keeping from an hour with the man who runs the infrastructure under 400,000 events a year.

1. A window is a view of somebody else’s fight.

At twenty-two he turned down investment banking and consulting on the grounds that both were adjacent to business rather than inside it. His phrasing was that he wanted to be in the middle of the fight, and that you do not get that seat from outside it. Every job he has taken since has been a version of the same choice. The lesson is not that towers are bad. It is that proximity is a skill, it decays when unused, and you cannot acquire it later at a higher title.

2. Watch where the leaders stand.

He was twenty-four when the energy company he worked for came apart, and what he took from it was spatial rather than ethical. The people who built the thing were never anywhere near the actual business. That observation has governed a twenty-five-year career. When you are trying to read an organization, do not read the org chart. Look at where the senior people physically are on an ordinary Tuesday.

3. Leadership is measured in followership.

It is his word and he uses it constantly inside the company. Not authority, not title, not span of control. Whether anyone is behind you, which is an observable fact rather than a claim. He locates the whole of it in things that do not appear in a job description: credibility, storytelling, trust, and building something people believe in that is bigger than any individual in the room.

4. Your first crew is smaller than you think.

Oldest of four boys in a house with high expectations. He describes that as his first management job and means it seriously: how do you get four separate personalities to do what is expected of all of you. Most people’s leadership instincts were formed long before their first direct report, in a room with no title in it.

5. A crisis allows you time to change things.

He took the chair in August 2020 with the business effectively dark, and his read on it is counterintuitive and worth stealing. It would have been harder, he says, to become chief executive of a company that was working, because the instinct in that seat is not to break what is running. Catastrophe removed the fear of changing things. If you are waiting for a calm moment to remake something, you will wait forever, and the calm moment would not have let you anyway.

6. When you have nothing to offer, offer the truth and stay in the room.

What he had in 2020 was half pay and a promise. What he did was tell people exactly that, describe where they were going, and then show up every morning. Eleven thousand of them stayed. The mechanism was not incentive. It was presence plus honesty, sustained over a period long enough to be believed.

7. Shared ordeal is an asset, and it is the one you cannot buy.

His metaphor is a crew caught on a rock face when the weather turns. You would never choose it. But when it is over you have a relationship with those people that cannot be manufactured, and he was explicit that the muscle memory of the people who stayed was the thing that let the company regrow. Organizations that went through something together in 2020 are still spending that capital. Organizations that scattered are still paying to rebuild it.

8. End every conversation the same way.

He closes nearly every meeting, one-on-one, and call by asking what he can do for you. He is aware that his team finds it funny. He also traces how the meaning of the question changes across a career: early on it means solving somebody’s small problem, mid-career it signals that you are not only in it for yourself, and from the top it sets the terms of what a leadership job is actually for. A habit performed ten thousand times becomes a culture.

9. The person who grants permission is not the person who benefits from it.

Ask him who the star of his company is and he names the technician who mics up a nervous speaker ninety seconds before showtime. Consider why that works. The meeting planner and the chief marketing officer both want something from that speaker, which is precisely why neither can give her what she needs. The stranger with the wire wants nothing. That is what makes the reassurance usable, and it is a structural fact rather than a sentimental one.

10. Ask the question earlier.

The single most common piece of advice his customer and operations teams give is the least technical available: start talking sooner. He extends this into strategy. Putting people inside client organizations means asking what are you trying to accomplish while the answer can still change the plan, rather than at the mic when nothing is left to move. Most of what looks like an execution problem in this business is a conversation that happened too late.

Ben Erwin: Four bites inspired by the CEO who took over the largest event production company in the world the year the lights went out — and never left the floor

Edible portraits designed to capture who they are in a single taste.

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The Artifact. Every GatheringPoint interview leaves one object behind. The thing worth keeping, made into something you could actually wear.