Booking season. The European fall run is stacking up: XBIZ Amsterdam Sep 10-13, then Bucharest Summit Sep 21-23, and TES Prague in September too. Who’s going to which. Trying to figure out where the people I actually want to meet will be so I don’t blow the travel budget on the wrong one.
I do Bucharest for the creator and cam side, is very good for to meet studios and buyers face to face. TES is more the affiliate money people, less my world. Depends what you sell.
Newbie question, are any of these worth it if I’m brand new and don’t have a business yet, or is it money burned until I have something to actually talk about?
Honestly? If you’re pre-launch, one show can be worth it purely to see the scale of the industry and meet a few AMs face to face, but don’t expect deals. Go to learn and put faces to names, not to close anything. If budget’s tight, wait until you have traffic and a real question to ask people. The shows will still be there.
Back in my day the Phoenix Forum was THE one and it was better than all of these combined. Now it’s dead and we fly to Romania. Progress.
bucharest’s where the actual deals get done. the big glossy shows are good for getting seen but the real contracts come out of the hallway chats there. that’s where i’ve closed everything that mattered.
if you’re new, one show pays for itself on the education alone. two days of hallway chat teaches you more about how the money actually moves than two months of reading, and i say that as someone who basically lives on this forum.
this matters even more on the payments side. meeting your underwriter or a backup processor face to face once beats a year of support tickets. when something freezes later youre a person they had coffee with, not an account number. bucharest and amsterdam pay for themselves just for that.
for seo it is bit different. these shows are mostly media buying and cam people, not much organic, so i go for the hallway and the parties not the talks. still worth once a year to put face to the handles, but if seo is all you do dont expect a program made for you.
truest thing in here. after enough years the show is really the once-a-year reunion with people you only otherwise know as avatars. i tell myself it’s business and expense the flight, but half of it is just seeing the same faces again. no shame in that.
my first show i barely closed anything but i finally got how the whole machine fits together, who pays who and where the money actually sits. that alone was worth the ticket. go for the learning not the deals, at least the first time.
i get the phoenix nostalgia but the circuit went to europe because thats where the operators and the money went. same hallway, different city. the show that matters is wherever the people you need to see are this year, and for a lot of us thats bucharest right now.
i’ll happily indulge the phoenix nostalgia, but the honest lesson under it is the show never mattered for the booths, it mattered for the room. phoenix was THE one because everyone who mattered was in one place and the hallway was where the business happened. that’s still why any show’s worth the ticket, the concentration of the right people in a hallway for three days. go for the two conversations that turn into a year of business, not the panels.
this is the entire roi of a show, and its why i budget for the trip even when the badge and flights hurt. ive never once closed anything from a booth or a panel, and ive closed real deals from a chance dinner conversation and a hallway intro that would never have happened over email. the show is a machine for manufacturing the accidental in person conversations that build trust faster than months of messages. so when people ask if a show is worth it, the answer is entirely about whether youll actually work the hallways or hide at the booth. the deals live in the hallway.
the way i decide which show is worth it is to ignore the marketing entirely and ask one question, will the specific people i want to build relationships with actually be there. a show is only as valuable as the room, so a smaller show with the right dense crowd for your niche beats a bigger, flashier one where your people are a rounding error. i would rather go to the one where i already know three conversations i want to have than the one with the best afterparty and none of my actual targets. pick the show by its guest list, not its brochure, because you are paying to be in a room, and the only thing that matters is who else is in it.
the nostalgia is real and a little bit of a trap, the old shows had a magic that partly came from there being fewer channels to reach people, so we remember the room as better when the alternatives were just worse. the fall shows now are more transactional and less of an event, a fair complaint, but the people who work them deliberately still get the value. go for the specific meetings you book in advance rather than hoping the room feels like it used to, the magic was density of the right people, not the venue.
the hallway conversations are the entire reason to fly to a fall show, and it’s worth being deliberate rather than hoping, i book the hallway time in advance now, a list of people i want to run into and a loose plan to be where they are. the expo floor is theater, the deals happen in the corridors and the dinners. treat the hallway as the product you’re buying a ticket for, plan it like meetings, and the show pays for itself, leave it to chance and you fly home with a lanyard.
the way i decide which fall show is worth it is to ignore the marketing entirely and ask one question, will the specific handful of people i actually need to see be in that room, because a show is only ever worth the density of your people in it, not its size or its reputation. a small event where four of your key partners will be beats a huge one where none of them bother to come. so poll your actual targets on which shows they are attending before you book anything, and go where they are going, because you are not buying a conference, you are buying proximity to a specific short list of people, and everything else on the agenda is filler.
the Phoenix nostalgia is real and also a bit of a trap, the old shows had a magic that partly came from there being fewer channels to reach people, so we remember the room as better when the alternatives were just worse. go to the fall shows for the specific meetings you can book rather than hoping the room feels like it used to, the magic was density of the right people, not the venue, and you can still engineer that if you stop waiting for it to happen on its own.
Ignore the marketing entirely and ask who will be there - that’s how you decide which fall show is worth it. A show is only ever worth the density of your people in it, not its size or reputation, so the promotion tells you nothing and the guest list tells you everything. Poll your actual targets on which shows they’re doing before you book, because a small event where four key partners will be beats a huge one where none of them bother to come. You’re buying proximity to a short list, not a conference.