Writing for SBC News, SBC Media Commercial Director John Cook explores the relationship between media and events as he explains how media can enable marketeers to make the most out of the industry shows.

In the iGaming industry, much of our calendars are dominated by the various different conferences and exhibitions dotted throughout the year. 

Whether it’s ICE in Barcelona at the start of the year, SBC Summit in Lisbon, or SiGMA in Rome rounding things off, we’re heavily focused on making sure our investment in expo booths and sponsorships gets a good bang for its buck. 

But even with the launch of new products or the emergence of new technologies, the industry’s default marketing impulse remains reassuringly traditional: we pack our bags, build massive stands and head to the expo floor.

For years now, marketing executives have treated events as the ultimate holy grail – a catch-all to fill the commercial pipeline, grow brand exposure and single-handedly guarantee that annual commercial targets are met.

There is immense value in face-to-face networking. This is a relationship-driven business, after all. Organisations such as SBC do a huge amount to ensure we get the right audience, but also that we curate the right environment for the right people to attend.

But the reality of trying to capture the attention of every single key decision-maker purely within the confines of an expo hall is a challenge which faces us all.

According to our recently-published SBC Insights Media Marketing Buyers Report, events are still the single biggest marketing spend in this industry. Yet, many organisations approach these events with a high-stakes expectation of ROI without doing any of the foundational legwork required to guarantee it.

To put it bluntly, the majority of event marketing strategies don’t perform as expected because companies treat the event as a standalone vacuum. They scream as loud as they can on the expo floor, alongside hundreds of competitors doing the exact same thing, and end up caught in and among the noise.

But to really make the most of conferences, you need to stop viewing the event as a three-day sprint, and instead, as more of a content-driven marathon split into three core areas: preparation, activation and follow-up.

Pre-event: time to lay the foundation

The number one killer of event ROI is a failure to prepare your audience before anyone even sets foot in the expo halls. We’ve all been there. 

In the run-up to the event, sales teams are working tirelessly for weeks to fill their diaries with back-to-back meetings. But how much of those meetings are spent actually explaining who your company is versus how you can help your partners. 

You must pre-educate the market weeks – if not months – in advance. You need to ensure that when a potential client sits down with you, they are already fully aware of your brand, your data and your core differentiators.

How do you break through the noise to secure those high-value slots in the first place? You give them a reason to care about meeting with you – you have to sew those seeds long before the event. 

So, rather than shouting about your brand colours or your “revolutionary” software updates, marketing should instead leverage independent, value-based media to prove you understand their specific pain points.

As a publisher, as well as being an events company, we have a huge network where core operators and target clients are engaging with not just our event space, but also our digital events, our news, our websites and our full spectrum of solutions. What better way to prepare an audience for your attendance at an event. 

If you can launch targeted content, research or lead-generation campaigns way ahead of the show, your audience arrives pre-educated, while non-viable prospects are filtered out.

The people sitting at your table will have fewer basic questions and far more sophisticated, commercially mature insights. You are no longer introducing a product; you are moving a well-primed opportunity from the mid-funnel towards signing on the dotted line.

Making the most of the conference

Prior to joining the iGaming space, I spent nearly twenty years working in financial services. In banking and fintech, marketing teams approach the events universe through a completely different lens, and it’s a framework that iGaming would do well to adopt.

In financial services, a successful event strategy follows a strict, logical progression. First, you use trusted media platforms to prove to the market that you deeply understand a systemic issue the industry is facing. 

Once you have established that macro-understanding, you can smoothly align your specific solutions to eliminate that exact bottleneck. Only then, once the ground is thoroughly prepared, do you have the commercial conversation at the event. 

It makes the decision-making process infinitely easier for the C-suite because the value has already been evidenced long before anyone sits down at a meeting table.

So how does this apply to iGaming? In today’s landscape, an example topic which features heavily in conversations is responsible gambling. Right now, there is immense regulatory pressure on operators to invest as heavily in player protection as they do in player acquisition.

If I were an RG technology provider looking to make the most of an upcoming event, I would complement my investment in the event with a marketing campaign of independence, which might include third-party research, lead generation activities prior to the event and brand reinforcement activities months before the show.

By the time that the event comes around, I’m not just another vendor pitching a compliance solution – I am an authoritative voice that they are actively seeking out to solve their regulatory headaches.

Post-event

The breakdown in the event lifecycle doesn’t just happen at the beginning; it happens on the Friday morning after the show closes. It happens in the airport lounge as you write those emails whilst waiting for your flight.

However, the majority of post-event follow-ups are remarkably uninspiring – a generic, templated sales email that says “Great meeting you at our stand, let me know when you’re free for a follow-up call”. It completely ignores the context of the conversation that took place at the event, and more often than not, lands straight in the virtual bin.

People want to be remembered, and more importantly, they want to know that you actually listened to the nuances of their operational struggles.

At SBC, our team has a deep focus on listening to our client’s needs. They understand the client’s target demographics – the who, what, where and why of their strategy – so that the post-event follow-up isn’t a generic pitch. It’s a precise, bespoke roadmap that is tailored to their specific needs.

From a personal perspective, an exceptionally powerful way to maintain top-of-mind authority post-event is to transition your event takeaways into thought leadership. 

Co-authoring a post-show analysis – such as “5 things we learnt” or a market discovery report – and distributing it via an independent media publisher adds immense value back into the ecosystem. It shows a continuous, sophisticated commitment to the market that a standard sales pitch simply cannot replicate.

Events are here to stay … but marketing is important

Events are not going anywhere, nor should they be. They remain the beating heart of B2B marketing in iGaming. But in an increasingly crowded marketplace, a partner that is able to demonstrate that they understand their clients needs and follow up on it shows a level of trust that generates a real impact. This trust will enable you to make the most of your event pipeline and investment.

The wall between industry media and industry events has completely crumbled – they are no longer separate line items in your budget; they are two sides of the exact same coin.

Media is the engine that drives pre-education and post-event amplification, while the event is the catalyst where those trusted partnerships are consolidated.

The companies that will stand out in 2026 are the brands that build an integrated lifecycle, those that can use media to establish expertise and own the narrative before the doors to the conference hall even open. 

If you want to cut through the noise, you have to stop trying to shout the loudest on the floor. It takes a full team to close a deal- Sales, Marketing, Management, and the wider company infrastructure – to support this success it takes a fully integrated media and events ecosystem to make that deal sustainable.

To find out more, email [email protected] – you can find out more about how the industry views the relationship between media and events via the SBC Insights Media Marketing Buyers Survey.