Insights

What “Always-On” Paid Media Means for Events

By Jack Butler, group director, paid media

The typical event registration window is 3-4 months. Meaning for the rest of the year your forms will be closed, the campaigns are paused, and the paid budget has moved on to the next show. On the surface, that looks like sensible budgeting.  

The reason it’s not comes down to a simple piece of behavioral math. At any given moment, only around 5% of your addressable market is ready to act — the foundation of the 95-5 rule developed by the B2B Institute — while the other 95% are focused on other priorities.

When one of them finally does move into that 5%, they tend to shortlist the brands they already recognize. If your event only exists in their world during the promotional push, you end up introducing yourself at the exact moment you’re asking them to commit — and that’s the hardest time to make a first impression.

Always-on paid media is the answer to that: keeping enough of a presence year-round that your brand is already familiar by the time someone enters the market. Not full-scale spend everywhere, all the time — a modest baseline that never drops to zero. 

The Lesson From E-commerce

The easiest way to see how this works is to look at how major consumer brands run paid media. Take Nike: there’s the design side — new products, seasonal launches, new colorways — and there’s the platform underneath it, a standing brand presence and audience-tracking layer that never switches off. 

The visible layer changes constantly. The layer underneath stays exactly where it is. New products rotate through a base that’s always running, and because that base never resets, every launch builds on the one before it. The brand learns who bought and where they came from — and that picture only gets more valuable over time.

A typical event portfolio does the opposite. Three shows a year, each treated as its own island — new campaign, new tracking, a fresh learning period, audiences rebuilt from scratch every time. What you learned promoting the spring show doesn’t carry into the fall one, and you end up paying to repeatedly break the same ground.

“But Our Events Serve Different People”

This is a fair challenge, because a manager-level event, a director-level summit and a C-suite forum really are different experiences that call for different messaging. It’s reasonable to ask whether a shared base can do much when the audiences aren’t the same.

It can — and it has nothing do with collapsing the tiers into one message. Always-on doesn’t mean promoting a director-level conference to a manager or vice versa.

It means each of those audiences — manager, director, C-suite — keeps building and getting sharper year-round, tracked and refined continuously, so none of them start from zero the moment a show opens registration.

And because people move between those tiers over time, that continuous layer is also how you catch the shift. Today’s manager-level attendee is next year’s director — their engagement signals change, and your targeting can follow them into the next tier instead of losing them and having to reintroduce yourself as if you’d never met.

Differentiated audiences aren’t an argument against always-on; they’re the reason for it. A shared base is what lets you keep three distinct pictures in focus, rather than redrawing all three from scratch every cycle.

Same Budget, Spent Differently

A portfolio running in an always-on capacity can work into the same annual budget. The money is just distributed differently, creating a consistent base beneath the promotional peaks instead of pouring everything into a handful of disconnected windows.

The organizations that convert most efficiently during these windows are the ones that spent the rest of the year building that base. When the moment comes, they’re not meeting their audience for the first time but rather picking up a conversation that’s already underway. 

Getting the budget structure right is only the first piece. Making always-on actually work also means having the right content engine, audience infrastructure and measurement model in place before you flip the switch — and knowing how to handle it when multiple events are competing for the same audience at once.