I've sat through a lot of budget conversations this year, and nobody argues any more about whether events are worth the money. That debate has settled. The question now is harder: given we're spending, where does the money go?
For years the answer was everywhere. A stand at the big industry show, a presence at the regional one, a breakfast here, a panel there, and a badge on a conference nobody quite remembers agreeing to. The logic was that if our buyers might be in the room, we should be in the room too.
That logic is falling apart, and the numbers show why.
The money is up, the calendar is not
Event Marketer's EventTrack 2026 report found that 86% of B2B marketers plan to increase event spending this year, and a third now rank events and experiential in their top three areas for more spend. That part is a familiar story. Experience keeps growing while other channels shrink, and PQ Media puts global experiential spend up 8.3% to US$138.9 billion in 2025, on track for another 10% this year.
The number underneath is more interesting. Of the marketers increasing their budgets, 55% are holding the number of events flat. That's more money behind the same number of dates in the diary, with the extra weight going into fewer moments rather than more places.
The format data shows the same thing. 58% of companies say they'll attend more small events, the kind with fewer than 200 people, up from 45% two years ago. The industry spent a decade chasing scale, and now some of the smartest spenders are choosing to go smaller. Nobody is cutting back, they're just placing fewer bets and putting more on each one.
Why the "show up everywhere" model broke
The everywhere model always had a flaw, which is that it treated presence as the goal. Get the stand built, get the staff there, get the logo seen, and the job was done. Success meant turning up, and what happened after that was rarely measured.
Anyone who's worked a mediocre stand knows how that ends. You spend real money to be ignored next to forty other companies doing the same thing. The badge scans look fine and the pipeline never moves, and because the cost was spread across a dozen events, nobody stops to ask which ones were working.
Spreading budget thin feels like the safe option. A thin presence in a lot of rooms is easy to sign off, and almost impossible to defend when someone finally asks what it returned.
What "bigger and sharper" asks of you
Concentrating budget sounds easy, and it isn't. Once you decide to do five events instead of twelve, each of those five has to carry more weight. A bad stand at one of twelve is a rounding error, while a bad experience at one of five is a fifth of your event budget gone.
So the brief has to get a lot harder before any money is spent. What's this specific experience for? What do we want a person to do, feel or decide by the time they leave? Who exactly are we trying to reach, and what would make them stop in a room built to distract them?
Answering those questions is most of the work, and we've been saying for years that presence isn't a strategy on its own. Budgets are finally catching up with that. When you can only be in a handful of rooms, each one has to be designed with a specific job in mind.
It's also where the money starts to make sense to the people who control it, because a well briefed experience is easier to measure as well as easier to remember. The usual industry benchmark for trade shows is a return of around 4.5 to 1 when the leads are followed up, and you only get that return when the event was built with a clear job and a clear next step, which a stand and a bowl of branded sweets doesn't have.
The uncomfortable part
Concentrating spend also exposes you. When you were everywhere, a weak event disappeared into the average. In five rooms there's no average to hide behind, so every event gets seen and judged on its own.
I think that's why the shift is healthy. It forces the question thin budgets let marketers avoid for years, which is whether the event was any good. The brands moving this way aren't spending less. They're just no longer paying for rooms that don't earn it.
If you're planning next year's calendar, I'd start by picking fewer rooms and putting the effort into making each one worth walking into.