Live Event, Experiential and Brand Experience musings

I spend my time speaking to owners, HR leaders and C-suite decision makers across events, experiential and MICE, so what follows isn’t theory. It’s what’s actually happening on the ground. Q1 2026 has been shaped by the after-effects of last year’s mergers, a spike in...

The fastest way to lose a great candidate? Write “competitive salary” on the job advert.   Because for some reason, plenty of employers still think it’s acceptable to write “competitive salary” or “DOE” (depending on experience) and expect people to jump through...

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. as in the conversations I keep having behind the scenes, owners are nervous. Everyone’s talking about AI. About remote working. About efficiency, automation, scale., and they’re right to. None of that is going away, and...

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....