Attendee acquisition is becoming less about volume and velocity and more about relevance, intention, and fit. As economic uncertainty, AI disruption, and changing work patterns reshape how people decide where to spend their time, event marketers are being forced to rethink not just how they promote events, but who they prioritize and why.

In this roundtable discussion, Kimberly Hardcastle, Chief Strategist at Freeman, will explore several emerging shifts influencing how audiences decide to attend (and return!) grounded in Freeman research and current industry observation. The conversation will focus on how evolving expectations should be reflected in more strategic, selective approaches to acquisition. Topics will include:

• Strategic selectivity in who we invite and how we invite them. As budgets tighten and audiences face more friction, organizers must be more intentional about prioritizing high-value attendees and aligning outreach strategies accordingly. This includes rethinking audience segmentation, messaging relevance and the signals we send about who an event is truly for.
• Using AI to support smarter, more personalized acquisition. Rather than scaling one-size-fits-all campaigns, AI can help marketers tailor messaging, channels and timing to better reflect audience needs – creating experiences that feel personal before someone ever registers.
• Hospitality as an acquisition lever. What corporate events get right about comfort, care and intentional experience design and how these can be applied to B2B shows to influence who attends, how long they stay and whether they return.
• Post-event engagement as the start of retention. Why the most overlooked phase of the attendee journey is often the most powerful and how thoughtful post-show communication, content, and community-building reduce the need to “re-acquire” the same audience every year.

Rather than focusing on tactics alone, this session invites organizers to step back and examine how external pressures and rising audience expectations are reshaping what effective acquisition looks like. The goal is not “more marketing” but more intentional marketing, aligned with the audiences most likely to engage, attend and come back.

Joe Federbush, president, EVOLIO, will share new data from the just released whitepaper on The Attendee Acquisition Reality Gap. He will explain why  strategy, data, and execution are failing and and how to fix it.

Key Takeaways:

• Quality over quantity: Audience fit has overtaken audience size as the primary challenge.
•  70% of organizations are reporting email delivery challenges.
• Shallow growth: First-time attendance is up but repeat engagement is lagging.

Record years feel like proof of concept. For The Car Wash Show, 2024 was exactly that — peak attendance, peak revenue, industry-leading metrics. Then 2025 arrived with a different story: lower attendance, declining satisfaction scores, and a revenue miss that demanded a real answer.

This session is that answer. Tyler Day, Marketing Strategist at mdg and Kendra Johnson, Chief Experience Officer at the International Carwash Association, will walk through how they dissected the 2025 campaign and built a fundamentally different approach for 2026 — grounded in data, driven by audience insight, and executed with agility.

You'll see how they built a targeted win-back program for lapsed attendees, deployed behavior-based segmentation across the registration journey, redesigned the education experience based on industry research and attendee feedback, and optimized the campaign in real time based on how specific segments were converting.

The result was a 2026 rebound in attendance, revenue, and NPS — and a replicable framework for event teams serious about improvement.

This isn't a story about a great event. It's a story about what great event teams do when things go sideways.

Takeaways

• How to Diagnose a Down Year (Before You Spin It) - The specific registration metrics, satisfaction signals, and campaign performance indicators that reveal what actually went wrong — and how to build a strategic response instead of a narrative.
• Building a Win-Back Machine - How to identify, segment, and re-engage lapsed attendees with a purpose-built win-back strategy — including the message sequencing, offer structure, and timing that drove results for The Car Wash Show.
• Designing Programming for What Attendees Actually Want - How industry research informed a shift to operator-led education, peer-to-peer networking enhancements, and a new maintenance professional track — and how to make the case for experience investment internally.

The information exchange accelerates to a furious pace when the team shares takeaways.