Events

An event is a gathering of people at one time and usually in one place, with a program someone has prepared. It differs from other media in three ways. It engages all the senses: people see, hear, eat, shake hands, and see that others are there too (social proof). It has time: you give an ad three seconds, but you give an event a day. And the participant came on their own, often paid, and gave up part of their day; nothing else in the promotion mix gets that level of consent. In Marketing, events sit alongside advertising, PR, and personal selling.

The scale is bigger than it looks. According to a study by the Events Industry Council and Oxford Economics (2026 edition, 2025 data), business events (conferences, trade fairs, incentives, corporate meetings) counted 1.65 billion attendances; attendees are counted per event, so someone who went to five conferences may be in the number five times. Direct spending reached $1.3 trillion, 12.2% more than in 2019.

Marketers know it: in the Bizzabo 2026 State of Events survey, 78% of organizers named conferences and summits their company’s most effective marketing channel. Take that with a grain of salt: it comes from people who run events, and 40% of them struggle to prove return on investment (ROI), compared with 70% a year earlier. Events are powerful and expensive, so this whole class rests on one question: what should the event do, and how will we know? Two cases from my work will keep coming back: Judo Heroes Camp (13 editions since 2014, a capacity of 65 kids in the 2027 edition) and HOPI Inspires 2026 (HOPI’s corporate conference, whose script is a run sheet with seven columns).

You can sort events along many axes, but for an organizer only one is useful: who pays, and for what. A conference is paid for by attendees and partners, who buy knowledge and contacts. A trade fair is paid for by exhibitors; the visitor is the product. An internal event is paid for by the company, which buys team cohesion. A product launch is paid for by the brand, which buys media attention. A camp is paid for by parents, who buy a week of care and training. A tournament is paid for by the federation, the city, and sponsors; spectators bring ticket money and emotion. A festival is paid for by visitors and sponsors; what’s sold is the experience.

Sport is a league of its own. The 2024 Ice Hockey World Championship in Prague and Ostrava drew 797,727 spectators over 17 days, an average of 12,464 per game, the most in history; the previous record was also held by Prague and Ostrava (741,690 in 2015). O2 arena seats 17,413 for hockey. In November 2020, the same arena hosted the European Judo Championships (40 countries, 345 athletes) in the middle of COVID restrictions: same venue, different economics. More in the Sponsorship chapter.

Prague is a congress city and one of the few places where we have Czech numbers. According to the Prague Convention Bureau (PCB) and ČSÚ (the Czech Statistical Office), more than 5,000 events with over 850,000 delegates took place here in 2025, and Prague finished sixth out of 4,728 cities in the ICCA ranking (led by Lisbon, Paris, and Barcelona). International events made up 43%, and the 50-to-500-person segment grew the most. For comparison, 2024: 5,139 events, more than 804,000 delegates, an average of 2.27 days, and fifth place in ICCA; according to the PCB, the industry still hadn’t returned to pre-COVID levels. Festivals: Rock for People reports growth from 37,000 (2023) to 50,000+ (2025 and 2026), and in the COVID year 2021 it ran with a permitted capacity of 7,000; Colours of Ostrava hasn’t published attendance since 2016.

The most common organizer mistake is starting with the venue, the date, and the band. You know the right order from the Internet chapter: Target (what we want), Audience (for whom), Message, Channel (the event is the channel), Form (conference, camp, tournament), and Result (how we’ll measure it). Write the purpose in one sentence in the form “for whom · what it does · how we’ll know.” Example: “For parents of judokas aged 9 to 15: a week of training and care after which they recommend us to others; we’ll know from the ratings and the share of kids who come back.”

Event goals fit into seven words: sales (leads and orders), relationships (clients who stay), recruiting, knowledge, community (people who come back), content (what we can get out of the event to last a month), and money (when the event itself is the product). Each one comes with a number: registrations vs. capacity, the share of registrants who showed up, ratings, number of leads, number of clips and articles, revenue vs. costs. That way, ROI isn’t pieced together after the fact from impressions: the data is collected from the first registration on (see the timeline).

The purpose also decides what won’t be at the event. If the goal is relationships, there won’t be presentations; if it’s content, there will be five minutes for filming after every block; if it’s community, there will be an evening with no program. Whatever doesn’t serve the purpose is a cost.

Money flows into an event through seven channels, and few events have all seven. Ticketing is price times capacity, with pricing tiers (early bird, standard, last minute) and segments (student, VIP, group). Partners don’t pay for a logo on the screen but for access to people: meetings, speaking slots, data, content; more in the Sponsorship chapter. Merch is both margin and advertising: a festival sells its T-shirt, a camp includes it in the price, and the kid wears it to practice all year. But the print shop wants a minimum order and every size; whatever doesn’t sell is inventory. Catering and the bar are a big source at festivals and parties, which is why people pay with tokens or cashless. Post-event content (recordings, transcripts) brings in money mostly indirectly: the organizer gives it away for a registration and gets contacts for partners and for next year’s edition. Grants keep sport and culture going, and floor space rental is what feeds trade fairs.

The biggest numbers show how far ticketing can go. Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour (March 2023 to December 2024) grossed $2.077 billion from 149 shows for 10.1 million fans, roughly $13.9 million per show and over $200 per fan from tickets alone. The Paris 2024 Olympics sold 9.5 million of 10 million tickets, and 12.1 million with the Paralympics, a Games record.

Selling tickets isn’t free. The Czech service smsticket takes 5% of the ticket price, pays out within 24 hours, and provides a check-in app. In the US, Eventbrite charges 3.7% + $1.79 per paid ticket plus 2.9% of the order for payment processing, and nothing for free tickets; other countries have different pricing. The third route is your own registration with payment by bank transfer or through a payment gateway (Stripe, Comgate): no commission, but you handle payment matching yourself; see Internet. Revenue streams also differ in when they arrive: ticket sales and partner deposits finance the event, while the bar and content only bring money in during and after.

The Czech ticketing market has changed a lot over the past three years. The biggest player today is the Estonian group PLG: in 2023 it bought a majority of GoOut, then Ticketstream, and in June 2025 it bought Ticketportal from the media group Mafra; it plans to move all its brands onto a single platform by the end of 2026. Alongside it is Ticketmaster, owned by the American company Live Nation, which entered the Czech market in 2017 by buying the company Ticketpro. Tickets for the O2 arena are sold officially only by Ticketmaster and Ticketportal. Both sides pay. The organizer pays the seller a commission on the ticket price, at PLG usually 5% to 10%, depending on the contract. Commissions are negotiable: the 2026 contract between the Český Krumlov Municipal Theater and GoOut sets it at 4.91%. The buyer pays a service fee on top, at GoOut 3.5% of the ticket price, at least CZK 10 and at most CZK 500; smsticket charges buyers CZK 10 per order. More important than the percentages is who owns the customer. Under GoOut’s privacy policy, the platform and the organizer are separate controllers of personal data, and the organizer only gets the buyer’s email for its own marketing with the buyer’s explicit consent. So it’s mainly the platform that builds the audience, and it then sells reach back to organizers: according to its website for organizers, PLG sends newsletters to 1.7 million subscribers and sells promotion in them as paid packages. If you want to reach this year’s audience again next year without paying for reach, you need marketing consent at checkout, a tracking code on the ticket sales page, such as the Meta Pixel, or your own registration.

Demand can move the price too. Dynamic pricing changes the price depending on how many people are buying at the moment, just like airline tickets. The most famous dispute is the sale of tickets for the Oasis tour at the end of August 2024: after hours in Ticketmaster’s queue, fans saw tickets that were supposed to cost £135 going for £350. But in September 2025, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) found no evidence that dynamic pricing had been used. It was tiered pricing: standing tickets were sold at two prices, the more expensive ones came up once the cheaper ones sold out, and nobody told the people in the queue. On top of that, “platinum” tickets cost almost 2.5 times as much as standard ones, even though in some areas of the venue they offered nothing extra. Ticketmaster committed to announcing tiered pricing 24 hours in advance, showing the price range while fans are still in the queue, and not using misleading ticket labels. In sports, FIFA went furthest. It chose dynamic pricing for the 2026 World Cup partly because with a low fixed price, scalpers would pocket the difference and the money wouldn’t go back into football. In March 2026, the cheapest openly available ticket to the final cost $4,185, more than seven times the cheapest ticket to the 2022 final, and some tickets rose 25% between sales phases. But dynamic prices can also fall: at the 2025 Club World Cup, FIFA overestimated demand and then cut ticket prices sharply. In July 2026, the European Parliament called on the Commission to consider banning dynamic pricing at live sports and cultural events. The Commission is due to propose the Digital Fairness Act in the fourth quarter of 2026.

The rest of the market is resale, the secondary market for tickets that have already been bought. The resale marketplace StubHub has been one company with Viagogo since 2020 and has traded on the New York Stock Exchange since September 2025. Czech law does not generally ban reselling tickets at a higher price. But since January 6, 2023, under the Consumer Protection Act, it is always a misleading practice for a trader to sell consumers tickets it bought with automated software, so-called bots, to get around the per-person ticket limit. So organizers protect themselves. The O2 arena visitor rules say that a ticket resold without the organizer’s consent or for more than the printed price is invalid. Promoters use rotating QR codes or tickets in the holder’s name. Ticketmaster’s Czech site offers fan-to-fan resale in which the original ticket is canceled and the buyer gets a new one. At the 2026 World Cup, FIFA steered fans to its own resale marketplace and took 15% from both the buyer and the seller. Outside the official channels, fraud thrives: during the 2024 Ice Hockey World Championship in Prague and Ostrava, the police caught at least 700 fake or multiply sold tickets, and the losses reached about CZK 2 million. Elsewhere, the rules are getting tougher. In November 2025, the UK announced a ban on reselling tickets for more than the original price including fees, but in May 2026 the government put it forward only as a draft bill for further scrutiny. In the US, since September 2025, the Federal Trade Commission has been suing Ticketmaster and Live Nation, alleging that they ignored brokers getting around ticket limits and, by its estimate, collected $3.7 billion in resale fees from 2019 to 2024.

An event budget has two parts, and the line between them decides both price and capacity. Fixed costs you pay no matter who shows up: venue, stage, tech, speakers, band, production, graphics, insurance, website. Variable costs grow with every participant: food, bed, T-shirt, name badge. The break-even point is the number of participants at which revenue covers costs: fixed costs divided by the difference between the price and the variable cost per person. A model example, not the camp’s real budget: fixed costs CZK 250,000, variable CZK 8,000 per child, price CZK 12,750; the margin per child is CZK 4,750, and break-even is 53 kids out of 65. That’s why empty seats hurt organizers more than discounts.

Three rules. Price isn’t calculated as costs divided by capacity, but from the break-even point at a realistic occupancy; if you count on a full house, you’re planning a loss. A contingency of at least 10%, and a list written in advance of what gets cut first if revenue falls short: decorations and gifts first, then the band, never food and safety. Cash flow: the venue and the hotel want deposits months ahead, ticket money comes in gradually, partners pay on invoice; next to the “how much” column, your spreadsheet needs a “when” column. What people forget: VAT, music royalties (OSA, the Czech collecting society for music), liability insurance, a medic, cleaning, licenses for photos and music, transporting the equipment, and your own people’s time, which is the most expensive of all.

Where budgets stand in the industry: according to Bizzabo 2026, 40% of organizers expect their event budget to grow, 40% expect it to stay the same, and 20% expect a decrease; 45% of event teams have one to three people. The trade fair industry is more cautious: in UFI’s 37th Global Exhibition Barometer (July 2026, 466 respondents from 59 countries), only 26% of companies expect activity to grow by more than 5%, compared with 44% six months earlier. The money is there, but it wants to see what it gets in return.

A timeline is planned backward from D-Day. T-12 months: purpose in one sentence, a date without clashes (school breaks, public holidays, championships, competing events), a venue you’ve seen in person, a rough budget, a contract with the venue. T-9: speakers, performers, partners. T-6: website and registration open, first pricing tier. T-3: full-on communication, tech booked, catering, accommodation, photographer and videographer. T-1 month: run sheet, team brief, rooming list, name badges, printing, confirmations to suppliers. T-1 week: tech rehearsal, weather, stand-ins. D-Day: one boss, one phone, one script. D+1 to D+14: thank-yous, survey, content, final accounts, lessons learned, and the date of next year’s edition.

The most underestimated part is registration. According to Freeman, 84% of attendees decide to go to an event a month or more before they register; registration has to be open while people are deciding, and for a summer camp that means the fall of the previous year. According to Bizzabo, a dynamic form converts at 24.4% versus 11.6% for a static one; every extra field costs you sign-ups, so only ask for what you need for the event.

Communication comes in waves: the announcement (date, place, price, why), the program, social proof (who’s already going, ratings from last time), urgency (last spots, end of a pricing tier), practical information a week before and the day before. Each group (parents, attendees and their bosses, clubs, the media) has a different question and a different channel; see Media. Next year’s cheapest attendee is this year’s; the Judo Heroes Camp registration form lists “We were here last year” among the referral sources.

The run sheet (or cue list) is the only document that counts on D-Day. Each row is a program item with seven columns: Time, Dur (duration), Item (what’s happening), Screen (what’s on the screen), Audio (which mic, what music), Source (which computer it plays from), and Who (who’s on stage and who’s responsible). Excel can handle it, but the times have to be recalculated by hand after every change, and soon three versions are going around.

That’s why a good run sheet distinguishes three time modes. A sequential item starts where the previous one ended; its time is calculated from the durations. A fixed item has a hard time: lunch, shuttle, check-out, a live broadcast slot; if the items before it finish early, a gap shows up, and if they finish late, a red overrun. A parallel item runs alongside the main line and doesn’t move the clock: the band’s sound check, filming an interview during a break. A guest who talks 10 minutes too long would push lunch back; lunch can’t move, so something in between gets cut.

The HOPI Inspires 2026 script has exactly these seven columns, and its times are calculated from durations: change the length of one item, and all the following ones shift. What run sheets often leave out: setup, transitions (who introduces whom, music between blocks), loops during breaks, the countdown, and time for filming. These items also belong in the table with a duration and a name, or no one will keep track of them on D-Day. The same logic applies to streams and online conferences; see Streaming.

People. On D-Day, the event has one boss (the producer) who makes the decisions, and roles with names: director, host, registration, technician, photographer and videographer, medic, hostesses, shuttle driver. Briefing the day before, and a phone list on paper too. For guests, everything that matters goes into one overview: what they get at registration, what they’re entitled to (drinks, wellness), meal and transport times; one example is the public HOPI Inspires 2026 website with the program, transport, teams, and drinks. What isn’t in the overview, the team doesn’t promise guests.

Venue. Walk the attendee’s path: parking, signage, registration, coat check, restrooms, the hall, refreshments, emergency exits. The bigger the event, the more the flow of people matters, not the decorations. Two hotels with a shuttle between them mean a timetable in the run sheet. Tech. Read the venue’s tech sheet before you send out presentations: how many microphones there are and what kind (handheld, headset), what resolution and aspect ratio the projector has (on a 16:10 screen, 16:9 slides will have bars), and whether the HDMI at the connection point also carries sound or the audio runs separately, for example into XLR. The rules from the HOPI Connect studio apply in a hall too: always test the sound, use wired internet, charge the mics after every use. Plus a backup laptop with the same files.

Food. A meal is a program item with a fixed time and the most common source of complaints. Waves by name badge color, three serving points instead of one, drinks on tokens, free soft drinks. Allergies and diets are collected at registration, not at the serving counter. And food for the crew: a production team that hasn’t eaten since six in the morning makes mistakes at six in the evening.

Risk isn’t managed with fear but with a spreadsheet. A risk register has five columns: what can happen, how likely it is, what impact it will have, what we’ll do (plan B), and who decides. The last column matters most: who has the authority to stop the program, close the entrance, or evacuate the hall, decided in advance.

Two cases that changed the industry. Love Parade, Duisburg, July 24, 2010: 21 dead and 652 injured. The site, with a capacity of 250,000, had a single entrance and exit, a ramp connected to a tunnel; people kept pushing forward even as police called on them to turn back. The investigation described “crowd turbulence,” not panic: people weren’t running, they had nowhere to move. Lesson: a single entrance is a risk in itself, and capacity is calculated at the narrowest point. Astroworld, Houston, November 5, 2021: 10 dead, more than 300 injured. The limit was 50,000; scans showed 37,858 people plus an estimated 5,000 without tickets; the plan didn’t account for crowd surges. The first report of breathing problems came at 21:16, a mass casualty event was declared at 21:38, and the concert went on until about 22:10, another 32 minutes. The Texas governor’s task force concluded that the problem wasn’t overcrowding but failures in crowd management; in 2023, a grand jury indicted no one. Lesson: without a person designated in advance who’s allowed to cut the sound, the concert won’t stop.

Numbers to remember: at 1 to 2 people per m², a crowd moves freely; at 3 to 4, the risk is low; at around 5 people per m², a crush becomes a danger; at 6 to 7, the crowd behaves like a fluid; at 8 to 10, people fall and can suffocate standing up. That’s why density is measured at the stage and the entrances, not tickets sold. For smaller events, the same applies on a smaller scale; see the checklist.

An event is the most expensive content you’ll ever make, and in sport that goes double. In the Social Media chapter, we covered three phases (a shot list before, a content team during, slicing it up after), and in the Media chapter, the PR package with the goal of sending it within half an hour of a medal. Here I’ll add what happens on site. A journalist or photographer at a tournament needs four things: accreditation (who can go where), a press center with wired internet, power outlets, and start lists, a mixed zone where athletes walk past the media after their match, and results right away, not after the ceremony.

A judo tournament runs on a fixed rhythm: the draw the day before, elimination rounds on several tatami in the morning, and the final block with the ceremony in the afternoon. That sets the content plan: Czech results throughout the morning (the judo velín sends them to me as push notifications from the International Judo Federation’s API: draw, morning, medals, summary), the athlete’s reaction after the match, photos from the IJF gallery with the photographers credited, and all of it in one email to journalists, with the goal of sending it within half an hour of a medal. The photographer and production are two people with two briefs, and both belong in the event plan.

Post-event content is a product in its own right today: according to Bizzabo, 82% of organizers produce on-demand content, and 53% make at least some of it available only after registration, in exchange for contact details. On the Bizzabo platform, people watch live virtual sessions to 71% of their length on average (46 minutes; this is vendor data, so take it with a grain of salt). When content has a set time and a host, people stay; so slice recordings without a set time into clips. Sort out rights before the event: consent to filming in the registration terms, photos of children only in closed channels, a credit on every photo, licensed music. The brief for the photographer and videographer is in the Production chapter.

Judo Heroes Camp is a summer camp for young judokas, boys and girls aged roughly 9 to 15, from clubs all over the Czech Republic. It started in 2014 on the initiative of judokas from USK Praha; since then there have been 13 editions, and more than 750 kids have gone through it. It’s organized by Judo Heroes, a registered institute (a Czech nonprofit legal form), registered as a club with the Czech Judo Federation. The 2027 edition runs August 15 to 21 at Sporthotel Kácov: six nights, 65 kids, price CZK 12,750, covering accommodation, full board, training, supervision, the program, and a T-shirt. I lead it on the organizational and promotional side; Radim Knápek, a longtime member of USK Praha, leads the sports side.

The product is the daily schedule, which is why it’s on the website: 7:30 wake-up, 7:45 warm-up, 8:30 breakfast, 9:30 judo, 11:00 games, 13:00 lunch and rest, 15:00 conditioning, 17:00 pool, 19:00 dinner, 20:00 randori, 21:45 lights out. Guests from the Czech national team join the program and demonstrate new techniques and sparring. Registration is a custom form: required are a parent’s contact details and the child’s name, date of birth, club, and T-shirt size; optional are weight, belt, and the question “How did you hear about us?” (the options include AI and “We were here last year”). After submitting, parents get a confirmation and payment instructions, and practical information before the camp.

Community is the part you can’t buy. Ratings for the 2026 edition: 4.9 out of 5 from 21 responses; 100% of parents would recommend the camp, and 90% plan to come back. Asked what their kids liked most, parents most often mention the training, the games, and friends. Every edition has its own T-shirt and group photo in the archive on the website; during the camp, parents get a daily photo report and have a WhatsApp channel with photos and video. So the camp also works as marketing: the registration form lists both “A friend’s recommendation” and “We were here last year” among the referral sources.

Formats. The pandemic didn’t kill virtual events; it just put them in their place. On the Bizzabo platform, 63% of events are in person, 33% virtual, and only 4% hybrid; a hybrid is two events for the price of three. Webinars are growing: 61% of organizers report rising webinar attendance. Takeaway: in-person events for relationships and experience, webinars for knowledge and reach, recordings for everyone else; see Streaming. Smaller and curated. In Prague in 2025, the 50-to-500-delegate segment grew the most, and most events last one day. There aren’t fewer events; they’re just more targeted.

Sustainability stopped being a matter of morality and became a standard. ISO 20121 (Event sustainability management systems, 2012) grew out of the British BS 8901 with input from the London 2012 Olympics sustainability team, and it was used, for example, at the COP21 conference in Paris in 2015; Paris 2024 served twice the share of plant-based food compared with London 2012 and Rio 2016. For a smaller event: no printed program, local food, a shuttle instead of cars, reusable cups, and one sentence in the final accounts on what was measured.

Data and AI. According to Freeman, 21% of attendees and 25% of exhibitors have used AI to find events; even the Judo Heroes Camp registration form lists “AI (ChatGPT, Claude…)” among its referral sources. A model handles transcription and translation. What doesn’t change: people go to events for the people. Technology should remove the line, not replace the handshake. The Trends chapter goes further into automation and tools.

An organizer decides in this order: the purpose in one sentence, with a number that will be measured; the event type, based on who pays; revenue streams and break-even, and only then the price; the timeline, backward from D-Day; the run sheet with seven columns; logistics as the attendee’s journey; the risk register with the name of the person who can stop the event; and content planned in advance. Judo Heroes Camp and HOPI Inspires are two sizes of the same thing: same spreadsheet, different number of zeros.

Pair exercise: design an event for your club, school, or company. Purpose in one sentence (for whom · what it does · how we’ll know), type, three revenue streams with an estimate, five run sheet items with durations, and three risks with a plan B and the name of who decides. Eight minutes, then one or two pairs present, and the rest ask just one thing: what will be measured?