Meetings and Connection Key for Events in 2026, RainFocus Report Finds

RainFocus’s 2026 Mid-Year State of Events Report finds event teams are hosting up to 3x more meetings than last year, while average session attendance per person fell from 5.3 (spring 2025) to 4.2 (spring 2026), signaling a shift toward networking/connection-first formats. Small events are also gaining momentum: small-event attendance is up 6.4% YoY with 69% more meeting participation at small events. The report frames this as an AI-enabled trend toward more trustworthy, human experiences and tighter linkage of event data to pipeline/revenue ROI, supporting RainFocus’s positioning in event marketing technology.

Analysis

This is more a validation of an existing budget shift than a fresh growth inflection. The investable takeaway is that event spend is becoming more attribution-sensitive: vendors that can translate attendee interactions into pipeline will gain share, while generic “attendance” platforms lose pricing power. That favors CRM-linked workflows (CRM, HUBS, MSFT) over standalone event tools, because the buyer now wants proof of revenue impact rather than just logistics.

The second-order losers are convention-heavy ecosystems: large venue operators, travel, and higher-cost event formats that depend on one annual flagship gathering. A migration toward smaller, more frequent activations usually lowers the average ticket per event even if total meeting counts rise, so revenue may fragment across more transactions instead of expanding materially. That is bullish for usage-based software and analytics, but not necessarily for net spend growth.

The contrarian risk is that the market reads this as “events are back,” when the real message is “buyers are demanding efficiency.” In a softer macro, the smaller formats are also the easiest to cut, so the apparent resilience could reverse quickly if sales cycles elongate or marketing budgets tighten. The cleaner catalyst is not the report itself but whether Q3/Q4 earnings commentary shows higher event-to-pipeline conversion and better attach rates for meeting data modules; absent that, this is mostly narrative, not earnings power.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Small tactical long ONTF for 1-3 months as the cleanest public proxy for webinar/small-event monetization; size modestly because this is still a narrative trade, not a hard fundamental inflection. Falsify if next quarter billings or RPO fail to improve.
• Overweight CRM and HUBS versus event-adjacent point solutions on any pullback over the next earnings cycle; the thesis is that attribution and workflow ownership, not event volume, captures the economic value.
• Avoid initiating fresh longs in convention-exposed travel/hospitality REITs on this headline alone; if group booking commentary weakens in the next 1-2 quarters, then consider a short basket in PK/HST/RHP as a second-order expression.
• Set an alert for management commentary on event-to-pipeline conversion rates in the next 30-60 days; if customers are not tying meetings to closed-won activity, reduce exposure to the event-tech complex.
• No high-conviction pair trade yet; if you need one, consider long CRM / short ONTF only if ONTF rallies on the print without corresponding guidance improvement, since the more durable moat is in the CRM layer, not the workflow wrapper.