The exhibitor wants your commitment. The organizer wants to close. And the corporate planner? They want data they probably don't have yet.

This session pulls back the curtain on one of trade show's most persistent disconnects: how exhibiting companies actually decide to purchase booth space versus how show organizers design the buying process. Spoiler alert: they are not aligned.

Featuring perspectives from both sides of the sales floor, the Show Floor Showdown puts trade show organizers and a corporate exhibiting planner in the same room to get honest about what drives decisions, what stalls them, and what data is missing from the conversation entirely.

You will walk away with a clearer picture of:

• Why on-site rebooking is hard to close (and what makes it easier)
• What metrics exhibitors actually need to make confident sponsorship and space decisions
• Where the communication breakdown lives and what organizers can do about it

If you have ever wondered why your on-site sales conversion is lower than it should be, this session has answers. And some uncomfortable truths.

Join Sean Wargo, CEO of Apogee Insights and longtime data and research leader, for a fireside chat moderated by Joe Colangelo, CEO of Bear Analytics.

Through his work at AVIXA, CTA, and across more than 20 years in technology research, Sean has built a career turning large, complex datasets into meaningful industry intelligence. His experience at AVIXA also gave him a firsthand view into the enormous amount of data created by events - and how much of its value often goes untapped.

In this conversation, Sean will share his perspective on what event leaders should be thinking about now: which data is worth collecting, how to turn fragmented information into real insight, what organizations should control themselves, and how AI is changing the value of the data being captured today.

The infrastructure organizations rely on has changed dramatically over time. We moved from physical wires and on-site servers to cloud platforms and digital systems. Now we are entering another shift as AI becomes capable of working across data, systems, and workflows in ways that were not possible before.

For leaders in the events industry, the question is quickly shifting from whether AI will become part of the business to how it should be built into the organization. As AI becomes more connected to event data and day-to-day decision making, leaders need to understand what it can enable and what needs to be in place for it to be trusted.

This session gives event executives and experience leaders a practical way to think about AI infrastructure, including the role of security and permissioning, and how the right foundation can turn AI from an interesting experiment into a real business capability.

Event and association marketers know they're sitting on more data than they use, but proving impact to leadership still feels like guesswork. This session brings together two of the technologies powering that shift — Gather Voices, for capturing authentic member and attendee voices at scale, and Snöball, for turning attendees into advocates alongside a marketer living the results firsthand.

Erin Lee, SVP of Marketing Strategy & Growth, will share how AdvaMed uses these tools together to move beyond vanity metrics and demonstrate real, measurable impact to executive stakeholders from advocacy-driven engagement to authentic testimonial content that shortens the sales and renewal cycle. Moderated by Megan Martin, Partnerships Lead at Bear Analytics, the conversation will get tactical: what to measure, how to connect disparate data sources, and how to tell a performance story that resonates in the boardroom.

Some of your biggest growth opportunities are already sitting in your data. In this peer working lab, your table works through three audiences hiding in plain sight and how to shape the value propositions and messaging that moves them to act.

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Sponsorship and exhibit sales shouldn't run on gut feel. This lab digs into the data behind pricing, packaging, and renewal decisions — helping you build the kind of evidence-based case that turns a "maybe next year" into a signed contract.

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Your sessions generate mountains of data — attendance, engagement, ratings, scan data — and most of it never makes it into next year's planning. This lab walks you through turning session-level data into a real content strategy: what to keep, what to cut, and what your audience is actually telling you they want more of.

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More channels, more content, more spend — but is any of it moving the needle? This lab focuses on connecting marketing activity to registration outcomes, so you can double down on what's actually driving butts in seats and cut what isn't.

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