You have seen this room. A genuinely good speaker is on stage saying something worth hearing. There are three hundred chairs set up. Fifty or sixty people are scattered across them, spread out across a sea of empty seats. The people who are there are paying attention (a speaker who's killing it will still hold a room) but it still feels bad, because the room itself feels abandoned.

You have seen other versions of this too: The exhibitor floor that is just salespeople talking to other salespeople, because the people they came to sell to are nowhere near a booth. And the calendar collision the night before, where five different companies are each hosting a dinner or a happy hour off the back of your event, and everyone is pulling the same people in opposite directions.

The root cause of theses issues is that the organizer never did the exercise of identifying who is coming and for what reason, mapping out each group's likely behavior, and then adapting the event plan to match what those people will actually do once they're all in one place at one time.

For most large events, people don't come for the talks. They come because everyone they want to see is in one place at one time. Your event is the excuse.

That is not a criticism. If your event has become a force of gravity that people structure their year around and capitalize on, you have built something truly amazing that few to no organizers ever achieve. But to optimize an event like that, you still have to know why people are coming, where they'll be, and what they'll be doing when. Skip that and you get the failure modes: empty rooms, empty trade floors, bad speaker experiences, poor sponsor ROI, calendar collisions, and more.

For anything over ~150 people, attendees show up for primarily one of two reasons:

Content: People are there for what's happening on stage and on the floor. They want to learn something specific, see a demo, understand a market, hear from people they can't otherwise access. The program is the product, and they work it. I have seen these rooms and they are wonderful: people in seats, walking the floor, asking questions, fully present. In my experience they skew toward industry conferences with a real technical core, where people came to get sharper at the actual job.

People: People are there because everyone else is there. You have done the hard and valuable thing of getting the right crowd into one city on one set of dates, and now they are going to use that. They will take meetings, host their own dinners, do one-on-ones, and quietly skip most of your agenda. Some won't even buy a ticket. They will just fly in because they know the density is there, and run their own schedule around the edges of yours.

This matters because the rest of the industry is quietly telling you that people-driven is becoming the default. In recent benchmark research from Bizzabo, 83% of attendees said networking opportunities influence whether they register at all, and 87% of organizers rated networking as very important to an event's success. Bizzabo's Alon Alroy put it bluntly, explaining “content alone no longer drives attendance; people are coming to build relationships.” If most of your attendees are deciding to come based on who else will be in the room, you are closer to people-driven than you probably want to admit.

And almost nobody is planning for it. In the same research, only 53% of attendees said the events they went to even offered structured networking. The demand is defined. The planning is not. That gap is the whole opportunity.

An event so good that people plan their year around it, fly in whether or not they buy a pass, and host their own side events off the back of it, is not a problem to be solved. It is a triumph. The only question is whether you build for the event you actually have.

Here is the practice that everything else is downstream of, and it only takes a couple of hours. Before you lock in all your event details, sort your confirmed and likely attendees into three to five personas that cover at least 80% of the room. For each one, write down who they are, why they're coming, what they want to walk away with, which sessions they'll actually attend, when they'll arrive, when they'll leave, and even which hotel they're probably in. You will be roughly 80% right, which is more than enough to design against.

One clean way to predict behavior is to plot two things you already know about each person: their seniority and the scale of their company. The following 2x2 shows the projected engagement (on- or off-track) for each of these personas:

The people you most want in the room are the ones least likely to be in it. Plan for that, don't be surprised by it.

Once you have your personas and their journeys mapped, every downstream decision gets easier and most of them get made for you: which room is which size, how many chairs go out, who speaks on what and when, what activations happen at what time, and what you honestly tell your sponsors to expect. Build a project in Claude or ChatGPT, drop your attendee list in, and have it bucket people for you.

This affects everything equally, including the speaker experience, the attendee experience, and the organizer's own sanity. But it lands hardest, and most expensively, on sponsors.

When you sell a sponsorship, you sell the headline: this many attendees, from these companies, with these titles. The sponsor signs based on that picture. Then they show up, build a booth, staff it, and discover that the trade floor does not look like the headline at all because the most valuable people in your personas, the senior-plus-scaled group, are exactly the ones who are off-floor in meetings the entire time. The honest reality of an exhibitor hall is that a large share of the foot traffic is other sponsors' salespeople, working the same floor for the same reason.

If you over-promise and under-deliver, your renewal is already dead.

I have watched companies spend six figures on a booth and an activation, staff it for two days, and meet almost no one they came for. And all badge scans tell you is who came by; they tell you nothing about pipeline. The only honest measure of a sponsorship is qualified conversations, pipeline generated, and follow-up that converts, which is the whole argument behind the Wine Rule, and it depends entirely on the sponsor reaching the right people.

So be honest, and under-promise. Tell a sponsor the truth about who actually walks the floor versus who is in back-to-backs. The data backs the caution: organizers still report real difficulty proving event ROI, and even when attendees do connect (92% say they follow up with someone they met) about a third of those follow-ups go nowhere. Activity is not outcome. If a sponsor's goal is pipeline, the right move is often not a bigger booth. It is steering them toward hosting an endorsed side event, or helping them pre-book meetings so the booth becomes a home base rather than a hopeful trap. If their goal is genuinely brand, then go big on the activation and measure impressions, not meetings. Either way, you want your sponsors to win, because a sponsor who wins is a sponsor who renews.

If you have a people-driven event, you cannot stop side meetings, and you shouldn't try to eliminate them. But you do have levers to shape how much attention stays with your program, and you should choose them deliberately rather than pretend the pull isn't there.

The carrot. Make organizing through you better than organizing around you. Offer official endorsement as part of a sponsorship: a side event the conference blesses, schedules in a non-conflicting slot, promotes, and helps fill. Now the energy that was leaking out of your event is branded as part of it.

The stick. Plenty of conferences do this: find out a company is running an unsanctioned side event during your hours and they don't come back. It works, but it spends goodwill, so know what you're trading.

Friction and geography. Where you host structurally determines how much can happen around you. A sprawling city makes side events trivial. A small town with a handful of venues (i.e. Sun Valley, Davos) structurally contains what can be done, by whom, and when.

The room itself. This is the cheapest lever and the most ignored. If you've mapped your personas, you know a morning keynote will pull a crowd and the 2pm slot won't, because people scatter into meetings after the opening. So pull the chairs. Have staff ready to take a 300-seat room down to 150 between sessions. Have staff who can gracefully usher a thin crowd toward the front so fifty people read as a tight, engaged group instead of fifty people lost in a cavern. The energy of a room is a design decision, not an accident. Never let a good speaker drown in empty chairs you could have removed.

Make the room always feel full. That is a staffing choice you make in advance, not a hope you hold on the day.

The instinct when you want a rich event is to add a main stage and a second stage and workshops and demos and a podcast booth and private meeting rooms and a networking lounge and a ball pit and a beanbag corner. It sounds abundant. What it actually does is shred attention and pull people in fifteen directions at once.

When it comes to event design, having ten options is as bad as having one.

Two things break when you over-build. The first is collisions. The entire value of getting the right people into one place is the chance that they run into each other — who they sit beside, who they pass in the hall, who they end up next to in line. Spread people across ten zones and you engineer those collisions out of existence, which lowers the ROI for everyone. The second is decision paralysis. When someone faces the 12:30 choice between a sound bath, a networking lunch, a vendor demo, and a one-on-one, the honest outcome is often that they do none of it well and feel scattered doing it.

Here is the rule I'd hold to: At any given moment, an attendee should have about three options: Thing A, Thing B, and the always-present secret third option of disengaging (slipping into the hallway or finding a spot to do their own work). Thing A and Thing B might be two talks, or a talk and a breakout, or a session and structured networking. The disengage option is always there whether you offer it or not; you just don't want to be actively competing with yourself for the other two. Go back to your personas and map the day for each one. If at any moment a persona faces five reasonable things to do, that's a design failure.

Define it. Build around it.

Decide, before you plan anything, whether your event is content-driven or people-driven, and then have the humility to build for the answer instead of the answer you wish you had. If it's content-driven, pour yourself into the program: the right talks, the right depth, a calendar worth showing up for. If it's people-driven, stop pretending the agenda is the point and start acting like the host of the best room in town.