Marketing leaders face growing pressure to justify large event budgets and demonstrate measurable business impact. While digital marketing offers direct attribution and immediate analytics, live events and brand experiences often rely on fragmented metrics, anecdotal feedback, and inconsistent reporting. Without clear standards, event organizers struggle to protect budgets, evaluate true performance, and prove tangible return on investment to executive stakeholders.
The Event Marketing Measurement Association (EMMA) tackles this challenge by uniting brand marketers, agencies, and event technologists to establish standardized measurement frameworks and industry benchmarks. In this executive Q&A, Dax Callner, President of EMMC, discusses the urgent need for consistent evaluation standards, the role of cross-industry education, and how reliable data helps safeguard and expand event programs.
Q: Event and experiential marketing budgets are under increasing scrutiny. Why has measuring the real business impact of live events historically been so difficult for brands and agencies?
Dax Callner: There are a few reasons for this. One is about the people who work in events and why they got into it. Many people don’t come from a marketing (and certainly not a marketing analytics) background, there’s just simply a lack of knowledge around marketing measurement in the industry. The other reason is that, unlike say, a digital ad, events don’t usually have a single objective. They usually need to accomplish many things for many audience types, and answer to stakeholders who have sometimes divergent priorities when it comes to the event. So there’s a lot of complexity to manage.
Q: EMMA focuses on building a shared measurement language across the entire events ecosystem. What are the biggest risks companies face when they rely on inconsistent or isolated event metrics?
Dax Callner: The need for consistency is critical – it allows for benchmarking and comparing event performance and impact results. Without consistency you can’t credible compare one event to another. At the same time, events aren’t identical, so some variance in measurement is expected. At EMMA we recommend a core set of foundational metrics that should be universally and consistently applied, but don’t preclude measurement teams from including one-off metrics as needed based on the uniqueness of each event.
Q: How does EMMA balance the diverse needs of corporate brands, creative agencies, and event technology providers when developing unified measurement standards and benchmarks?
Dax Callner: Great question. Where we are today is the result of literally years of debate amongst EMMA leaders, to get to standards that are universally applicable. It’s come down to three beliefs that underpin why events are important – and which I’d say are relevant to all of the types of organisations you’ve mentioned. First: events should deliver value to attendees. I’d say that is inarguable. Second: events should drive behavioral change. And third: events should impact perception of the brand putting on the event or experience. If we can agree on these three principles, we can also agree that we need to measure them!
Q: Practical education is a central pillar of your association's mission. How will initiatives like the Measurement Certification Course help marketers move from basic attendance tracking to sophisticated impact analysis?
Dax Callner: First I might slightly challenge your question. “Attendance tracking” isn’t even universal when it comes to how people measure nor is it relevant for all types of events. But to answer your question: the industry has a knowledge gap and it also has a continuous flow of people from in and out of marketing entering the business of events. EMMA’s measurement course is designed to address the knowledge gap head on – and to give new and seasoned event people a set of actionable tools and approaches to measure their events. We know how critical measurement is to defend event budgets and to drive continuous improvement, now we are democratising access to the “how” of event measurement.
Q: Looking at the evolution of marketing mix modeling and cross-channel attribution, how can event leaders ensure their offline engagement data aligns with broader enterprise business metrics?
Dax Callner: I am assuming the term “offline engagement” means events…but let’s not forget that there are other marketing channels that aren’t online. Broadcast TV ads. Billboards. Venue sponsorships. And so on. So just considering digital marketing and its ability to track people across touchpoints doesn’t give us the full picture. But I would also argue that as sophisticated as cross-channel attribution seems to be, it’s nowhere near perfect. Why? Because human decision making is unpredictable, emotional and driven by all kinds of untrackable factors.
But with that said, it is worthwhile to understand what people do at events and to consider their event experiences a part of a continuum of touchpoints that may ultimately result in a sale. However I am not a fan of event attribution, especially if the conversion of a prospect at an event happens months or years later. So I think it’s worthwhile to collect the data and to hypothesise about what is driving ultimate conversion, but from a measurement standpoint I’d much rather we evaluate the impact of the event then and there, and use that data to predict potential sales results.
Q: As experiential marketing continues to integrate advanced technologies, what strategic advice do you have for teams looking to build an effective, data-driven event measurement program from the ground up?
Dax Callner: My advice begins not with technology but approach: Get clear on objectives. Make sure they are measurable. Establish KPIs per objective and targets (what success looks like). This is a fundamental, ground-up measurement strategy. Without this clarity, it doesn’t matter how amazing your tech stack is.
Technologies are tools and they are pretty good at collecting what we call “performance data” – essentially what people do before, during and after an event. And while some innovative tech can get a general sense of how people feel during an event, we still need the most basic tool of all: the question. Whether you survey people or interview them, the best known method for understanding what people think is to ask them. Where this becomes useful is when you ask many people the same questions – giving you quantitative data to assess impact and drive future decisions.
But I would also emphasise that qualitative data – things like individual comments on a survey – are crucial. I’ve worked on programs where one person said something in a survey response that was so insightful…it changed everything.
So, if you are starting from scratch, get clear on objectives and start with a survey or other approach to get perceptions of the event from attendees.
Proving the value of live experiences requires shifting from vanity metrics to rigorous, standardized performance frameworks. When brands, agencies, and technologists adopt a shared measurement vocabulary, event teams gain the transparency needed to validate spending, optimize activations, and demonstrate real bottom-line contributions.
As data expectations across the marketing landscape rise, establishing credible benchmarks is vital to the long-term health of the experiential sector. Organizations that prioritize impact-focused measurement will not only protect their current programs, but also secure the strategic confidence and budget required to innovate and scale future brand experiences.
To learn more visit https://www.eventmeasurement.org/