O · chapter

Events & Experiential

What it is: how a brand creates synchronous, gathered, largely-human attention — owned conferences and dinners, third-party booths and sponsorships, webinars/virtual, and B2C experiential activations — plus the operational floor (safety, sustainability, accessibility, staffing) and the capture→route→atomize→attribute workflow that makes any of it pay.
The 2026 shift: "fewer, better events" — B2B spend moving from big-booth reach toward small owned/hosted intimacy (Forrester's fastest-growing type), while the whole discipline becomes the deliberate human counterweight to an agent-saturated, low-trust discovery world.
The hard truth: event ROI is genuinely broken — sales claims events drive ~30–40% of pipeline, digital attribution credits "Event" for ~8% (/). The direction is solid and independently triangulated; the precise vendor percentages are not. Report influenced and sourced, and let incrementality arbitrate.
Don't: treat the operational floor as light logistics, quote a vendor "300–500% event ROI" as fact, default hybrid as your format, or call any of this "agentic events" — no buyer-agent attends.

How this domain is organized internally — and the decision logic, runnable workflows, and agent angle — are in the full map.