So many events

Events are on my mind. I’m attending several over the next couple of months, in addition to The Rebooting’s own slate of upcoming gatherings. 

Today, I have a conversation with Christian Muche, the founder of Possible, a marketing ecosystem event held in Miami Beach from April 27-29. The Rebooting is a media partner of Possible this year for the first time. We’ll be doing a series of video interviews at the event and will hold an informal meetup. (For information, please leave your information here.)

Christian and I got into the weeds of what makes a great event, how he ended up in the business, why Germany seems to love tradeshows, and the pitfalls publishers fall into when they do events. 

First up, a message from new TRB partner Alumni Ventures.

Events are one of the earliest forms of media. The Champagne Fairs ran from the 12th to 14th centuries, playing a key role in the development of commerce by bringing together textile makers from Flanders, Italian merchants and Asian traders. There’s always a business in matching a buy and a sell side.

The sheer number of marketing industry events is astounding. I used to joke that you could set out for Las Vegas in early January and fill the year going from event to event, collecting lanyards and hotel points and slowly changing the composition of your organism with endless stale coffee, croissants and red wine. I have seen veteran sales professionals who show signs of this physiological transformation.

I used to find all this mildly scandalous. When does the work get done? What does the CFO think about all this? Why do data providers, not publishers, have yachts? Is drinking at a poolside bar on a Tuesday afternoon really working? I’ve lost much of that corporate moralism. All these events – OK, not all of them – serve a needed role, just as the Champagne Fairs did of bringing together the principals and middlemen of commerce. Meetings People need places to meet. Might as well be a lobby bar.

Industrialization follows familiar patterns. It intensifies production and then requires far more coordination than craft industries. Industry events are a direct outgrowth of the intensification of marketing. Complexity requires more coordination among a greater number of participants. And coordination is best done somewhere sunny and with a cocktail in hand. This is sometimes called a “dealmaking atmosphere.” Everyone ends up on a spreadsheet. For business events, the spreadsheet is driven by connections, leads and sales-pipeline movement.

The sheer number of vendor logos on sponsor walls at these events will give away the game: These gatherings are for the floating constellation of point solutions, tools and platforms that mechanize the marketing process. They need to connect with marketers, or if they’re not free their agencies, and also with each other, since coordination is multi-directional. “It’s a people business” is the pat response to whether so many events are needed.

Marketing is an ideal industry for events for several reasons, starting with the simple fact that marketers spend a lot of money, which is likely why the CFO keeps close tabs. And much of that money goes to distribution and increasingly technology platforms that do much of the heavy lifting of modern marketing. The marketers are the stars of the show – they have multiple halls of fame, remember – and often serve as the product. Get a density of marketers in a room, you have a business. Some people do it with programming, some with a John Legend concert. 

Marketing events start with the tentpole gatherings. I put on this list the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Possible in April, Cannes Lions in June and then Advertising Week in the fall (marginal). Possible is the newest entrant to this mix. I was skeptical of the need for another big marketing event when it launched in Miami Beach in 2023. It turns out I wasn’t alone. Martin Sorrell, the S4 boss and longtim WPP CEO who had a habit of grousing about how expensive Cannes is, had his doubts, too. 

"Martin immediately told me, 'Christian, we don't need another fucking event.’” Christian told me on The Rebooting Show. “Don't do this.'" 

On this matter, Sir Martin and I were wrong. Possible has established itself on the crowded marketing events calendar. It expects to draw 6,000 attendees this year and has taken over the Fontainebleau and expanded to nearby hotels. Possible has carved itself out as a US-centric event vs the global remit of Cannes. 

Christian is an industry events veteran. He was the face of Dmexco, a digital marketing conference in Cologne, Germany, that for a time was a critical part of the European circuit of marketing events, particularly for the ad tech industrial complex that powers these events.

With Possible, Christian is taking parts of a few events formats. There’s a festival-like aspect with a sprawling cabana scene around the Fontainebleau’s pools; a typical conference in the hotel; a hosted buyer model with arranged meetings; and more informal meetings in suites in surrounding hotels. At the center: A cacophonous lobby scene that would terrify an introvert while providing a target-rich environment for sales people, and we are all sales people.

One of the smart things Christian did with Possible was to enlist many industry leaders as angel investors in the event. It gave the right people the incentives to make the event a success. Miami Beach was another good choice. Even the most virulently anti-Florida New Yorker loves to come to Miami after a winter of no sunlight. It also allows for an indoor-outdoor approach that avoids the trap of many events: you go somewhere beautiful to be inside a windowless hotel ballroom with the a/c set to 65 degrees and those crazy carpets that make you dizzy if you stare at them too long. 

Possible is a big event but nowhere near the level of Cannes. It expects about 6,000 attendees this year. Christian swears he doesn’t want the event to become the size of Cannes or Web Summit. Those size events make meaningful connections more difficult, in his estimation. 

"It was obvious for me that the time of creating mass events is over,” Christian told me on The Rebooting Show. “If you're an event like CES or Cannes Lions, you have existed for decades, you have a lot of history. But with something new in your mind, you have to be different."

Possible’s adoption of the hosted-buyer model is another smart edition. This is a very old-school format I know well from my days at Digiday, where over a decade I spent an inordinate amount of time at hotel resorts where I’d be in work mode and others would come to breakfast in robes. Hosted-buyer models the events version of a controlled-circ publication. You guarantee the density of prospects by comping their ticket, hotel and even subsidizing flights. In return, they do speed dating meetings with vendors. This is the “Erik Estrada model,” and it works because the top job of events is matching a buy and a sell side.

“We had to go to the existing budgets,” Christian said. “We had to be so successful that companies and people will take money away from other events to spend with us."

Many publishers getting into events cast them as “live journalism.” That gives me concern. The programming on stage at a business event is important but not nearly enough. I used to joke that we could have a fireside chat between Jesus Christ and Bill Clinton, but if we screwed up the cocktail party, the event would fail. 

“You can bring great content on stage and great speakers because of your network, but what's beyond that?” Christian said. “People want business opportunities.”

That’s why events are a details business. Having proper networking space and opportunities is non-negotiable. Publishers that get into events will quickly learn that it is a details business and requires knowing the assignment.

But how much is too much? All markets get saturated. B2B events in particular can have great economics, which is why they attract so many participants, from events specialists to media brands hungry for new revenue sources. Even generalist news brands like Time and Newsweek are increasingly reliant on B2B events. 

You’d think AI would do away with the needs of all of this. Agents will be negotiating with agents, right? Christian is too diplomatic to say there are too many events. (“They all exist for a reason,” he says.) But he does believe many lack differentiation.

“I see people going to less events a year,” he said. “They're spending less time at events, and this will create some potential issues for some events that are not in the critical spotlight."Thanks for reading. Send me a note with your feedback by hitting reply.

Listen to my conversation with Christian

Thanks for reading. Send me a note with feedback by hitting reply.