Beyond the Media Room

Collaborative Article: September 2026 

Influencers are already shaping how people discover brands, evaluate expertise and decide who deserves their attention.

Yet walk into many conferences or trade shows, and the infrastructure hasn’t quite caught up.

1. 1. 1. There may be a media room.
      2. There may be a news desk.
      3. There may even be a podcast studio.

But who gets access?

Traditionally, those spaces have been designed for the organization producing the event, established media outlets, sponsors or a relatively small group of credentialed press.

Meanwhile, somewhere on the show floor is an industry professional with an audience of 8,000 highly relevant followers, recording an interview on an iPhone with a GoPro nearby and one of those tiny Bluetooth microphones with the overly fuzzy windscreen.

It might not look like traditional event media. But that person could have exactly the audience a supplier has been trying to reach.

That’s the opportunity we believe the events industry should be paying closer attention to. 

Definition
Influence Doesn’t Have to Mean Celebrity

The word influencer still carries baggage in B2B. It can conjure images of enormous follower counts, sponsored posts and consumer brands.

But influence within the events industry looks different. 

Their value isn’t necessarily the size of the audience. It’s the relevance of the audience and the trust they’ve built with it.

Research suggests B2B marketers are recognizing that distinction. Ogilvy’s Influencing Business: The Global Rise of B2B Influencer Marketing found that 75% of B2B marketers were already utilizing B2B influencer marketing. Ninety-three percent of those surveyed said they planned to increase their use of influencers, while 67% reported that influencer campaigns had produced more impact than brand-only marketing.

Ogilvy’s research also makes an important distinction about what creates that influence: shared experiences within like-minded professional communities can create a level of validation and trust that is difficult for brands to manufacture on their own.

That makes influencer strategy much bigger than a consumer-marketing trend. It is increasingly a B2B growth conversation.

Field Note
What Cvent CONNECT Showed Us

One version of this strategy was visible at Cvent CONNECT 2026. Through its Hosted Creator Program, Cvent invited industry creators to experience the conference and tell stories from their own perspectives.

That distinction mattered. The creators weren’t all being asked to tell the same story.

One could talk about technology. Another could focus on community. Another could capture an unexpected hallway conversation. Each interpreted the event through the lens of the audience they had already developed.

From Marisa’s perspective as one of those creators — and someone who also regularly occupies the planner/buyer side of the industry — that access changed the role of the creator.

The creator wasn’t simply there to amplify the conference. They became another way into it.

Someone who couldn’t attend CONNECT could experience pieces of it through a professional they already followed and trusted. For an organizer, that potentially extends the event far beyond the people wearing badges.

Field Note – Connect Marketplace
What We Saw at Connect Marketplace

A few weeks later, we had an opportunity to explore that question from the supplier side at Connect Marketplace.

SPL incorporated podcast conversations into its booth experience. Planners, partners and other event professionals could sit down for recorded conversations rather than simply being approached for a sales conversation. Sometimes those conversations started with a topic pulled blindly from a fishbowl.

The questions weren’t what do you think about SPL? or tell us why you need an AV company. They were questions about events.

1. What happened when Plan B became Plan A?
2. What makes a great event partnership?
3. What’s something attendees never see but planners always notice?

   The point was to give people something interesting to talk about. And once that happened, something else followed: people stayed.
   

   The relationship with the supplier could begin with a story rather than a pitch.

Business Development
The View from Business Development

For Nate, that creates an important distinction. Business development at a trade show is traditionally measured through meetings, leads, scans, follow-up and eventually pipeline. None of those metrics should disappear.

But a creator or content activation can create a different starting point for those activities.

Vendelux’s 2026 B2B Events Report, based on a survey of more than 120 B2B marketing and events leaders, found that 86% of teams cannot accurately attribute ROI back to events. Ninety percent said events influence deals that never receive proper credit in their CRM.

Yet businesses aren’t walking away from events. Vendelux found that 80% of organizations are maintaining or increasing their event sponsorships in 2026, and more than 80% of leadership teams continue to view events as impactful to pipeline and revenue.

That creates an important challenge for suppliers: if we’re going to keep investing in events, how do we create interactions worth following — and eventually measuring?

Proposal
But Creators Need Somewhere to Create

There is also a practical problem the industry could solve relatively easily. Creators are being invited to conferences, but they are often left to build their own production environment once they arrive. The traditional media room wasn’t necessarily designed for them.

Imagine instead that a conference provided a creator studio. Not an elaborate broadcast facility requiring a production crew and weeks of post-production. A professional, accessible space where an approved creator could reserve 20 or 30 minutes, bring in someone they want to interview, press record and leave with the content.