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.