Live Event, Experiential and Brand Experience musings

I spend most of my time in honest conversations with founders, MDs, hiring managers and C-suite leaders across events and experiential. When you sit in enough of those rooms, patterns start to emerge. Q4 didn’t slow down. It became more deliberate. More strategic....

Tie-ups and buyouts look good on paper, but there’s often a hidden cost. 2025 was the year of mergers and acquisitions in our industry, with multiple deals that caught headlines and reshaped parts of the market, from Unbridled’s merger with OrangeDoor, to Spiro...

Over the past few months, I’ve been speaking with agency owners, board directors and senior leaders across the events and brand experience world, and a clear pattern has emerged.   Everyone is talking about AI, but not in the doom-and-gloom way you might expect....

Predictions are funny things: most of them are either so vague they could apply to almost any year, or so dramatic they start to feel like astrology for agency leaders.   I sit in a slightly unusual position. My work takes me across the whole events sector and...

For years, I’ve been hearing the same story. “Experience doesn’t matter.” “We need new blood.” “ Hybrid is the future.” And yet, look at what’s happening right now. Employers are quietly, and sometimes not so quietly, realising they do need the people who’ve been...

Everywhere I look right now, senior leaders are going back to the office. Sometimes by choice, sometimes because the CEO has said “enough Zoom, get back in.” Either way, it’s happening. The days of senior execs permanently working in their spare rooms while running...