Opinion
I woke up this morning to the news of the Democratic landslide and found myself thinking about our industry, which does not usually take its cues from Election Day. Democrats won the House and the Senate, and voters under 30 went to them by roughly seven to three.
Whatever your politics, the mechanism is ours to study. In 2024, voters were sold a vision of what the next two years would bring. Last night they delivered their verdict on whether it had arrived. A promise people badly want to believe is the most expensive kind to break.
We make the same pitch every time we send out an invitation. We describe a room that does not yet exist and ask people to bet their time and money on it. Every organizer is a candidate, and every attendee is a voter who gets to render a verdict.
An event has a personality, the way a magazine does. Sooner or later, attendees decide whether that character is real, and whether it is the one they were promised.
We all know the event industry is going through a restructuring, and valuations are rising. There is a reason. In an age when anything on a screen can be faked, a room full of real people is worth more, and the money has noticed. Attendees feel it too. They trust the live event above almost any other source, which is precisely why a broken promise costs so much there.
And we are breaking more of them than we think. In Freeman’s research, 78 percent of organizers believed their attendees had a standout moment at their event. Only 40 percent of attendees agreed. The appetite is not the problem. Seventy-nine percent of 18-to-35-year-olds told Eventbrite they plan to attend more events next year. They want to come. They simply will not come back to something that was not what they were told it would be.
Somewhere right now, someone is planning the gathering that takes your niche, and your audience will go. Voters took two years to deliver their verdict. Your attendees will reach theirs by the time they leave, and then they tell their friends.
So do not mistake spectacle for the promise. Attendees come with objectives, and the events they return to are the ones that help them reach those objectives. Build meaning into the room, treat your audience with respect, and make it true.