The budget meeting, where every event has to earn its place again
Event budgets in 2026 are sorting into winners and losers, and which side a program lands on is often decided by the evidence carried into one meeting with finance.
Beat
The Business
Budgets, headcount, the trade show market and the conversations with finance that decide what gets funded.
Twice the events, the same headcount
Event calendars keep growing while field teams stay flat, and AI absorbs less of the gap than the pitch decks suggest unless you decide in advance which work it gets.
The job postings that show where event marketing is heading
A new cluster of event roles asks one person to own the contact database, tier the audience and reconcile attendance with the CRM, which is a precise map of where event data breaks.
The US trade show market in 2026: recovered on volume, not on value
Floor space and exhibitor counts are nearly back to 2019, but attendance and real revenue are not, which means exhibitors are paying pre-pandemic prices for thinner aisles and should plan their owned events around that fact.
Proving it to the CFO
The CFO is the executive most skeptical of marketing, and the field marketers who survive that skepticism build their evidence file months before anyone asks for it.