The short version
People-first event marketing treats attendees as consumers first, people filtering crowded feeds and full inboxes, and builds the whole event lifecycle around what they need, who they trust, and the moments that bring them back, rather than around the inventory an organizer has to sell. Across six interviews, leaders at Informa, Clarion, Freeman, Henry Schein, and UFI describe the same shift: away from broadcast, inventory-first tactics toward a people-powered model spanning sponsorship, registration, experience, and retention.
Key takeaways
- Audiences behave like consumers across every industry, behavior beats segmentation. (Amanda Gochee, Clarion)
- Design sponsorships around audience needs so all three sides win, and renewals follow. (MK Granados, Informa)
- Peer influence is the most powerful registration driver; let the community carry the message. (Liz Irving, Clarion)
- Advocacy is a system: remove friction, then give people a story they can personalize. (Chris Skeith, UFI; Traci Stephenson, Henry Schein)
- Only 40% of attendees call events memorable vs 78% of organizers, capture intent at registration to close the gap. (Ken Holsinger, Freeman)
- Retention, renewal, and advocacy are one loop: capture intent, deliver moments, measure, repeat.
Over our last six Sevinar conversations, we sat down with revenue leaders, research heads, and CEOs from Informa, Clarion, Freeman, Henry Schein, and UFI. Different industries, different scales, different continents, and on the surface, different subjects: sponsorship, registration, retention, experience design, global advocacy.
Play all six back to back, though, and something clicks. They basically start finishing each other's sentences.
Underneath the tactics and the case studies, every one of these leaders was circling the same idea from their own angle. The event industry is quietly walking away from the broadcast, inventory-first playbook and rebuilding itself around people: what the audience actually needs, who they actually trust, and the moments that actually bring them back.
Here's that story, in six lessons.
Lesson 1
Your audience is a consumer first
Most of us start from a comfortable assumption that our audience is unique. Healthcare is nothing like insurtech, a technical energy conference has nothing to teach a dental convention, and so on. Amanda Gochee, who runs marketing across Clarion's multi-industry portfolio, has watched enough campaigns in enough sectors to call that what it is. A trap.
That's the foundation the whole story sits on. The dentist, the actuary, the grid engineer, before they're any of those things, they're a person with a crowded feed and a full inbox trying to filter it all. What pushes them to register, show up, and tell a colleague stays remarkably consistent across industries. What looks like industry uniqueness is usually just the same human being wearing a different badge.
So her advice is to stop asking "what should we do next?" and start asking "what patterns are we missing?" Borrow what works from outside your category, because that's often where the best ideas are hiding, but understand why it works before you copy it.
She's also blunt about where teams break down. The data-to-action loop has three steps, see what the data says, pull the learning out of it, then act, and almost everyone stalls on the third one and calls it "being thorough." The signals have usually been sitting there for months. The only real question is who's willing to move on them.
Lesson 2
So start with needs, not inventory
If your audience is a consumer, then the oldest habit in event sales runs backwards. Most teams open the season asking, "what inventory do we have to sell?" MK Granados turns it around: "what does our audience need right now?" Change the question, and you change everything downstream, from what you build to who buys it to whether they come back.
Her north star is what she calls the win-win-win. The attendee gets real value, the sponsor gets real ROI, and show management gets defensible revenue. In that model renewal isn't a closing move, it's just what happens when nobody had to lose.
The rest follows from there. Rather than sell audience size, she sells segments, because the right 200 people will out-renew a generic ten thousand every time. Rather than a booth and a badge scan, she builds sponsorship journeys: pre-event content, curated introductions, a post-event white paper or webinar that keeps the relationship warm. And she plans the post-event handoff before the contract even closes, because a sponsor who never gets a clean way to nurture the relationships they built at your show is already halfway to a "no" next year.
Her last point is the one most orgs skip. Put someone in charge of the community, give them real responsibility for loyalty and retention, and actually measure it. Relationships that belong to everyone belong to no one.
Lesson 3
Peers are your most powerful channel
This is where the story turns from what the audience needs to who they'll actually listen to, and Liz Irving doesn't hedge on it. Not the keynote, not the paid campaign, but the colleague who leans over and says, you have to be in the room for this.
Her whole approach is people-first and, honestly, humble. Listen first, design second, and what she's listening for is whatever will make people feel something. Which is why she argues the pre-event story has to change: lead with the connections attendees will make and the moments they'll take home, not the session grid. Clarion wraps its events in themes like ITC's "Wonderland of Possibilities" for exactly this reason, because a story lights up attendees and sponsors in a way an agenda never will.
Amanda Gochee gives Irving's point its receipts. Peer influence is a universal pattern ("Rachel's going, I gotta go too"), and it shows up on the P&L. At DTECH 2026, a peer-to-peer campaign mobilized more than 11,000 professionals and drove roughly 2,000 additional registrations and $365K in visitor revenue. At ITC Vegas, 64% of participants turned into active advocates and generated over 2,000 referral-driven actions.
Lesson 4
Make advocacy effortless, and community-owned
Believing in peer power is the easy part. Operationalizing it is where most teams fall over, and two very different leaders showed us the two halves of how it's actually done.
Chris Skeith runs UFI, the global association for the exhibition industry, and for Global Exhibitions Day 2025 (GED's 10th anniversary, UFI's centennial) he had to turn a worldwide community into a media channel. His big lesson was that friction kills everything. No downloads, no design work, no corporate approval chain, just one-click personalization across 17-plus social channels.
Simplicity was the unlock, but shared ownership was the multiplier. He kept the theme "Exhibitions Unleashed Potential" loose enough that an organizer, an exhibitor, and an attendee could each read their own meaning into it, and that was the whole point, because when people add their own story they stop being an audience and become advocates. From there he let regions speak their own language, watched the real-time data show which platforms worked where, and did something most campaigns never reach: he turned that inward pride into outward influence, using the momentum to activate governments and ministers on behalf of the industry.
Traci Stephenson pulls off the same idea under the hardest conditions you'll find. Marketing THRIVELIVE to healthcare pros means fighting packed patient schedules, thin social presence, and strict compliance, so the standard playbook simply doesn't apply. Her answer was a nine-tactic system, and nearly all of it runs on people. She treats the field sales team as the primary marketing channel, since they're already in those offices every day. She recognizes the office managers and admins who actually handle the sign-ups. She hands local champions a one-page kit so they can rally their own practices, and activates speakers, exhibitors, and employees as referral advocates, each with an incentive tuned to what they care about. It's advocacy engineering, and it helps power an event that scales into tens of millions in annual sales.
Lesson 5
Design for the moments that matter
You can market a perfect event into a full room and still lose the audience if what happens inside doesn't deliver on the promise. This is the part of the story with the hardest data attached, and Ken Holsinger brought the number that should be taped to every organizer's monitor. Pulling from Freeman's Trust Report, he laid out the experience gap: 78% of organizers believe attendees leave with memorable moments, while only 40% of attendees agree. Average retention, meanwhile, sits around 30%.
It's a design problem. Organizers pour their attention into the things they control, staging, lighting, production, while attendees are quietly grading something else entirely, whether they learned anything, met anyone, or left with something they could actually use. His fix is almost too simple. At registration, ask one question: "what is your primary objective for attending?" That single data point lets you segment the pre-event emails, personalize onsite, and check afterward whether you delivered. Events that started asking it saw a 38% lift in satisfaction.
The stakes only climb from here, too. Attendees who hit "moments that mattered" are 85% more likely to come back, and by 2030 Millennials and Gen Z, 92% of whom say they build trust best face-to-face, will make up nearly 60% of the workforce. That's the exact world Liz Irving designs for. Her push for connection over spectacle, emotional promise over agenda, is the design-side answer to Holsinger's research-side warning. Face-to-face is the most trusted, most credible channel we have, but only when the invitation and the experience are the same promise.
Lesson 6
Close the loop
A good marketing engine ends where it started, feeding the next cycle, and every leader in this series described that same loop in their own words. Holsinger measures whether the moments that mattered actually landed, then validates it with a post-event survey against the intent he captured at registration. Granados plans the post-event handoff before the contract's signed, so the data and the relationships keep moving and the renewal builds itself. Gochee insists none of it counts unless someone acts on what the data shows, which is the exact step where most teams quietly stall.
The thing worth noticing is that retention, renewal, and advocacy aren't three separate programs. They're one loop seen from three seats, the attendee's, the sponsor's, and the marketer's. Capture intent, deliver the moments, measure the gap, act on it, and this year's community becomes next year's channel.
The through-line
For a long time the event business treated marketing as broadcast: build the inventory, blast the list, fill the room. What Granados, Gochee, Irving, Skeith, Stephenson, and Holsinger are each describing, from their own corner of the industry, is the model quietly replacing it, events as communities of people who trust each other, and marketing as the work of understanding those people and getting out of their way.
The inventory-first event asks, what do we have to sell? The people-powered event asks, what does our audience need, who do they trust, and what moment will bring them back?
Answer those three, and the room mostly fills itself.
Frequently asked questions
What is people-first event marketing?
People-first event marketing starts from the attendee as a consumer, a person filtering crowded feeds and full inboxes, and builds the event around what they need, who they trust, and the moments that bring them back, rather than around the inventory an organizer has to sell. Across six interviews, leaders at Informa, Clarion, Freeman, Henry Schein, and UFI describe this same shift from broadcast tactics to a people-powered model.
What actually drives event registration?
Peer influence and relevance drive registration more than reach. Audiences behave like consumers across every industry, so the decision to attend usually follows a trusted peer (“Rachel’s going, I gotta go too”) rather than a broadcast ad. Clarion’s peer-to-peer campaigns drove roughly 2,000 extra registrations and $365K in visitor revenue at DTECH 2026.
How do you increase attendee retention at events?
Capture each attendee’s intent at registration by asking their primary objective for attending, then deliver against it and validate afterward. Freeman’s research found only 40% of attendees say events are memorable versus 78% of organizers, and that attendees who experience “moments that mattered” are 85% more likely to return; events that asked the intent question saw a 38% lift in satisfaction.
How do you get event sponsors to renew?
Design sponsorships around audience needs so all three parties win, attendee, sponsor, and organizer, instead of selling raw inventory. Sell defined segments rather than audience size, build sponsorship journeys that extend before and after the event, and assign someone to own the community and its retention. Informa’s MK Granados frames the goal as the “win-win-win.”
What are the biggest event marketing trends for 2026?
The through-line is a move from broadcast, inventory-first marketing to a people-first model across the full lifecycle: treating attendees as consumers, activating peer advocacy, designing experiences for connection, and engineering retention by capturing intent. Sponsorship, registration, experience, and retention increasingly operate as one loop rather than separate programs.
About Snöball
Snöball is a peer-to-peer referral marketing solution that turns an event’s audience into its #1 growth channel. By mobilizing attendees, speakers, exhibitors, and members to share personalized campaigns across their social and professional networks, Snöball helps event organizers and associations drive measurable, advocacy-led registration growth. Snöball is trusted by leading organizers and associations, including RX, Informa, Clarion Events, and IAEE. Learn more at snoball.events.
