This article is based on written responses from RainFocus Chief Marketing Officer Ashleigh Cook to questions from Greg Kihlström for The Agile Brand Guide’s Expert Mode series.
Most of us still judge the flagship event by how many people showed up. Those numbers are easy to collect and easy to explain.
They’re also measuring something attendees care less about every year. RainFocus’s own 2026 Mid-Year State of Events Report shows the average attendee went to 4.2 sessions in spring 2026, down from 5.3 a year earlier. Over the same period, participation in scheduled meetings climbed sharply. (The report is vendor research, built on a survey of roughly 100 events and marketing professionals plus RainFocus platform benchmarks.) Ashleigh Cook, CMO at RainFocus, argues that marketing leaders should stop treating events as places where content gets delivered. In her view they’re places where buying decisions speed up, and they should be planned and measured that way.
Registrations Were Never the Goal
Cook doesn’t throw out registration and attendance targets. She just puts them back where they belong, as leading indicators for something bigger like retention, upsell, or new business. Her case for the flagship comes down to one question: “Where else can you connect live with decisionmakers and influencers and triangulate the buying group based on their event behavior?”
She also sees the in-person event as one of the richest data sources a marketing team has.
In-person events help a brand develop trust with buyers and enable a brand to collect more meaningful data on a buyer than ever before (level of interest based on meetings, products of interest based on demos participated, topics of interest based on session participation, feedback from the event, etc.) Flagships also give the opportunity to connect with your most strategic client accounts and further develop those relationships.
For a CMO, that changes what the event budget is buying. If the flagship is a brand moment, the questions are about production value and attendance. If it’s a place to observe a whole buying committee in one room, the questions get more specific. Did the five people who’ll sign off on the renewal actually show up? Which product demo did the CFO’s delegate sit through? Most companies collect some of this already, but it rarely reaches the account-based marketing team. The useful step is to agree before the event which behaviors count as signals and who’s responsible for acting on them within a week. That kind of event behavior is also first-party data people chose to give you, which is increasingly hard to get anywhere else.
The Meeting Is the New Session
Asked what the shift from sessions to meetings changes about how an event gets built, Cook described a program that’s being reorganized around conversation.
We are definitely starting to see shorter keynotes based on attention spans and then offering more breakout sessions, workshops and panels that offer opportunities to hear from peers and facilitate those connections. We’re also seeing more organizations move towards structured meeting programs and technology to enable that rather than leaving those moments to spontaneous, unmeasured interactions. This definitely flips vanity metrics on its head and pushes organizations to be focused on the meetings as meaningful interactions (percentage of strategic accounts participating, number of meetings, number of executive touchpoints, velocity and conversion following) vs. badge scans and session attendance.
The phrase that matters here is “spontaneous, unmeasured interactions.” The hallway conversation has long been the part of an event everyone values and nobody can account for. Cook’s view is that it should be scheduled and recorded like anything else.
That has budget consequences. Money that went to keynote production and a long session catalog moves toward meeting space and scheduling tools. It also moves toward the account executives and product experts who sit in those meetings, plus whichever executives you can get onto the calendar. And the scorecard changes too. Out goes “sessions attended per person.” In comes the share of strategic accounts that took a meeting, the number of executive touchpoints, and what happened to those deals afterward. If your events team can’t report on those things today, that’s the gap to close before next year’s planning cycle.
Generational, or Just Everyone?
The pitch for this piece was about younger attendees. Cook was asked directly how much of the change is generational. Her answer was that some of it is, since digital natives tend to expect tech-enabled experiences and smaller, more intimate formats. But much of it applies to everyone, and she points to AI as a big reason.
Previously, conferences and events were the main ways that stakeholders would get educated on various topics; now that is definitely shifting toward on-demand answers that stakeholders can use in their day to day.
Put plainly, if a buyer can get an answer from a large language model at their desk, they won’t fly across the country for a 45-minute session that covers the same ground. What they can’t get from a chatbot is a conversation with a peer who’s already solved the problem. Cook says audiences “want more connection as there’s more content available than ever before.”
RainFocus sells enterprise event technology, so we also asked Cook when the right answer is fewer or smaller events, or none. She said it depends on the organization’s goals, the audience, and where those people are in the buyer’s journey. Her clearest advice was “Don’t design the event for your internal stakeholders.” Some audiences want an intimate format. Others want one large event where they can get all their meetings done at once. She ended by arguing that “a best-in-class platform enables the organization to collect all of these data points in real-time to empower better decisionmaking.” That’s a fair point, and an expected one from a platform vendor. The part CMOs should take away is the first half of her answer. Decide what the audience needs before you decide what to buy.
What RainFocus Changed at Its Own Flagship
Cook pointed to RainFocus’s own flagship event as a working example. The changes weren’t limited to younger attendees. They were aimed at an audience with less attention to spare.
Going into our flagship, we have reduced the number of sessions and how long those sessions are. We have reduced the duration of the keynotes as well knowing that attention spans are more limited than ever before with more distractions from their day jobs. Shortening the keynotes has allowed us to focus on the breakout sessions more and ensures we have more representation from the audience’s peers with case studies, roundtables and interactive workshops.
RainFocus also added a longer midday break for networking and meetings, and built a structured meeting program so attendees could book time with product experts. Every one of those interactions is recorded, so the company can attribute it later. In the evenings, attendees choose from special-interest activities instead of a single default party. Session recommendations are personalized with AI so people aren’t “thumbing through a massive session catalog that may or may not be relevant for them.”
Most of these changes cost little. What they need is someone willing to tell internal stakeholders their keynote slot is shrinking, which is usually the harder conversation. Cook didn’t share numbers on how the changes affected pipeline or retention, so treat this as a design pattern to test rather than a result to copy. If your keynote runs past an hour and your session catalog needs its own search bar, you’ve got a place to start.
Cook’s advice for anyone planning next year’s calendar is to start with the job each event is supposed to do. Is it there for awareness, consideration, evaluation, or retention? Once that’s settled, design for the audience at that stage instead of the product roadmap. She thinks that’s part of why smaller events have taken off: “They are more agile programs that can be designed around near term goals of accelerating buying group members based on where they are in a deal cycle.”
The metric she’d hold an events team to is one most of us don’t track yet. “We have found that showing the velocity and conversion rate boosts when buying group members attend events are critical measures of success,” Cook said. It means comparing deals where the buying group came to your event with deals where it didn’t, on how fast they closed and on conversion rate. It takes some work with sales ops to set up. But it’s the number that will tell you whether the flagship is worth what it costs, which attendance never did.