Are Events Really Worth the Spend?

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Let’s Take Another Look Behind the Curtain

"The drag of the morning after is just the universe's way of punishing you for having a temporary delusion of grandeur the night before."

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Everyone has been there at some point. We’ve all experienced the giddy anticipation of the upcoming event, with its uprush of new swag and important announcements. We’ve booked the hotel rooms, shipped the booth and signage, the product giveaways for the raffle in exchange of collecting contact info. We’ve packed our best business casual outfits and spent our days shivering inside of air conditioned conference rooms while the temperatures outside soared into the six digits. We’ve stood around with a warm beer in our hand, making awkward small talk with strangers. We’ve set our alarms early after a string of late nights and endure the dual pain of a throbbing headache and blistered feet. We’ve stood in the endless lines for everything from the Monorail to the bathroom.

And then, just like that, it’s over.

So, the team packs up its tradeshow detritus, pockets a handful of business cards and limps home exhausted to tend to its wounds and its laundry. Most team members spend the following week nursing a bad cold or another round of COVID. Meanwhile, the CFO fields a tsunami of incoming bills, but there are also many hidden costs behind the ones included on the expense reports – the travel time, the loss of productivity, the team’s best members wasting their energy and attention on logistics and repetitive product demos, the follow-up that may or may not happen.

Do buying decisions really rely on events like this?

Content Marketing: The Gift That Keeps on Giving

A lot of CMOs start asking themselves the same question the week after big blockbuster tradeshows: was it really worth the $100K+ price tag? Sure, some meetings happened with potential partners and customers, and maybe even some legitimate team-building at Dave & Busters. But ultimately, it took the entire company down a rabbit hole for months, and now it’s going to take another few weeks to recover from it.  And as the numbers start to climb, so do the comments about how the event was “nothing but marketing hype.”

The problem with event spending is that value of the investment often evaporates the moment the event is over. There is no lingering asset to point to, no tangible result to measure.

Maybe, just maybe, there is a smarter, more effective way to go about business development, rather than blowing six figures on a one-time event with limited half-life.

It may sound too obvious to even state it at this point, but we no longer live in the Madmen era. Most buying decisions these days do not originate in a tradeshow booth or over a 3-martini lunch. They start the same way everything else does, with a browser search and an AI summary.

For the amount you spend at one massive tradeshow, you could formulate and execute a highly strategic SEO/AIO campaign across multiple web properties, generating impressions, backlinks and credibility long after the publication date. Indexed content keeps surfacing in search engines for months, or even years. Applying your marketing budget to earned and sponsored content helps compound your investment because it helps with your SEO and AI summary results – not just for a day or a week but for the foreseeable future.

Perhaps even more importantly, earned and sponsored content help with visibility in AI summaries which is really where most B2B decision makers are getting their information. LLM-powered search and chat tools cite and synthesize from a variety of published media sources beyond the corporate blog.

So, how do we get ourselves included in AI summaries?

Earned editorial has always been viewed as a trust signal that helps to build third party credibility beyond overtly self-promotional tactics like tradeshow booths and advertising. But in the era of AI, its value may extend even further.

A research report from MuckRack, “What is AI Reading?” (May 2026), analyzed 25 million links from AI responses to find out how the top three generative AI systems (Open AI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude and Google Gemini) cite sources when answering prompts.  As it turns out, earned media remain the foundation of AI citations, with approximately 99% of the links cited coming from non-paid sources, and journalism (e.g. news sites and journalistic media coverage) accounting for 27%.

In terms of specific media outlets, journalism citations are distributed across thousands of outlets, with one exception: Axios appears in ChatGPT's top three cited domains across 13 of 17 industries. That said, top journalism sources do not appear in the top three most cited sources for any industry, largely due to paywalls and/or legal restrictions on content usage. Many traditional, high-quality information sources are actively blocking AI bots from crawling their data. Outlets such as The New York Times, Reuters, and The Economist have implemented strict blocks or are threatening legal action over copyright infringement and lost web traffic. Nevertheless, these types of journalistic sources are viewed as highly credible, and will perhaps become even more coveted as the internet is flooded with AI slop.

Interestingly, not all gen AI platforms cite the same way, or in the same volume. ChatGPT cites sources in 96% of responses, averaging 5 citations per response. On the other hand, Claude cites more selectively in only 55% of responses, but averages 13 citations when it does. And Gemini cites sources in 82% of responses with an average of 8 citations. In terms of favorite sources, ChatGPT’s number one cited domain is Wikipedia, Claude’s is PubMed Central, a free database of scientific research. Gemini’s is Reddit, which is perhaps unsurprising given the company’s $60M per year data licensing deal with Google.

In fact, Google’s core search ranking algorithms heavily prioritize what they call "Hidden Gems," or real human experiences, product reviews, and personal anecdotes. Because corporate blogs and content are flooded with low-quality, search-engine-optimized (SEO) articles, Google’s Gemini summaries treat platforms like Reddit, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram as spaces where "real people" give genuine advice. However, the AI struggles to separate a highly upvoted but factually incorrect post from verified, expert consensus, which is already starting to erode the platform’s reputation.

Another key take-away is that the type of question asked shapes what the AI platform cites. Industry trend queries cite journalism in 46% of responses. But when asked how to do something, AI leans on reference content and brand-owned material instead. Industry trend questions tend to cite newer sources, often published in the last six months, while how to queries often cite sources that are more than two years old. Among journalism citations with known publish dates, 57% were published within the last 12 months. The remaining are spread across the following three or more years.

In conclusion, it clearly makes more sense to invest in content with this kind of lasting visibility rather putting all your resources into booth banners and swag. The B2B buying journey typically begins long before the event, with a self-directed research process that begins online. AI-generated answers and summaries are increasingly the first touchpoint and can be used to support the process at all levels of the sales funnel.

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