How Opticon NYC is setting a new standard for brand presence in a world that won't slow down

Tara CoreyTara Corey
2. Sept. 2026

The more the funnel automates, the more a real room matters. Tara Corey on reimagining B2B events around spectacle, salon, and signal at Opticon NYC.

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I might as well just say it out loud: we are not great at events.

Not "we" as in Optimizely specifically — although honestly, I'd include us in that conversation, and I'll get to that. I mean the marketing industry broadly. We built a format for a world that moved at the speed of an annual planning cycle, and then watched the world stop cooperating.

We lock the event calendar twelve months out, which works well enough until you account for the fact that our product ships every two weeks — and nobody says that out loud in the planning meeting, but everybody in the room knows it, and everybody has learned to quietly design around it.

You write the session abstract in February for a stage in October. Vague enough that it will still be true by then. That is hedging dressed up as planning — and I say that as someone who has done it, at more than one company, across fifteen years of marketing.

The gap has never been wider than it is right now. Not because events got worse. Because the distance between when you commit and when you show up got a lot harder to paper over.

So here's the sequence, and I suspect it feels familiar.

Sponsorships get committed in Q1 for a Q4 event, because that's when the rate card is best and that's when the budget cycle lets you say yes. Venue, F&B minimum, booth build — that's the bulk of your spend, locked before you know what you'll have to say or show. Then the theme gets set. Then the abstracts. Then the deck freeze, usually two weeks out, which is roughly one product release cycle. Then you show up.

And in between all of that, the thing you're actually there to talk about changes. Sometimes twice.

The measurement is worse. We report registrations. We report attendance. We report badge scans — and we all know the badge scan number is inflated by the people who wanted the tote bag (because we all love a fresh, new tote bag). Then the list goes into the queue. And if you're honest about your own follow-up SLA, a meaningful chunk of those records don't get touched for two or three weeks — by which point the conversation the person actually had with your solutions engineer has evaporated.

You spent six figures to create a moment and then measured the tote bags.

I'm not describing someone else's team. I've signed those POs. I've defended that spend in a QBR with a number I didn't fully believe in. And if I'm being really honest, we at Optimizely have over-indexed on the format at the expense of the follow-up motion — which is exactly where the money is. I've learned that one the hard way.

The best events absolutely work. But the container they sit inside was designed for a market that doesn't exist in the same form anymore.

What changed for us with Opticon 2026

The shift with Opticon NYC started with a question that was more blunt than strategic: what is this actually for?

The default answer — the user conference — is a real format with real value. Everyone comes to one place, once a year, and we tell them what's new. It worked when "what's new" arrived once a year. It strains when "what's new" arrives constantly, and when the people you most want in the room are the ones who can least afford three days away from their team.

So we stopped designing one big room and started designing a spectrum.

I love a good alliteration, so: spectacle, salon, and signal.

Spectacle is the big moment — the one that earns attention in a city that gives none away for free, that makes someone stop, look up, and remember our name in a market where the noise floor keeps rising. Getting noticed is a legitimate job in B2B, and it's been chronically underfunded for years because it's harder to attribute than a paid search click — and that's something I walked into Optimizely already knowing needed fixing.

Salon is the small room. Fifteen people, a real problem, no slides, and someone senior enough to say something they'd never say on a stage. These are operationally annoying because 1) they don't scale, 2) they cost more per head than anything else we do, and 3) they are also, consistently, where the conversations happen that change what we build.

Signal is what we do with the rest of it — the fact that a moment in one room can travel, and that the person who couldn't fly to New York shouldn't be a second-class participant in what happened there.

Now, for the trade-off. Because there always is one.

We gave up the tidy number. One event, one attendance figure, one line in the board deck — that's easy to report. A spectrum is harder to report and harder to run. It's more operational load on a team that was already at capacity, and it means my leaders have to hold two formats in their heads at once instead of running the playbook they already know. I don't get to pretend that's free, because it isn't.

What to start, what to stop, where teams waste time

Start: Build a decision point into your event plan that sits after the money is committed but before the content is frozen. Ours is a standing review where the only question is "is this still the right thing to say?" It costs an hour. It has changed the answer more than onc

Stop: Reporting attendance as an outcome. It's a cost input. If the only number you can produce after an event is how many people came, you've measured the venue, not the work. Get to influenced pipeline, sourced meetings, and — my favorite unglamorous metric — time-to-first-touch on the follow-up. Cut that from eighteen days to two and you will change your event ROI more than any stage design will.

Where teams waste time: Debating the theme. I've watched smart people spend six weeks on a tagline for an event and six days on what happens to the people after they leave it. The post-event motion is where the money is. It's almost always the part that gets designed last, by whoever has capacity — and it's usually the smallest amount of capacity on the team.

I've been guilty of all three. I suspect a few of you have too.

The more the funnel automates, the more a real room matters

Every part of marketing is being asked to move at a speed its planning process wasn't built for. Content, campaigns, the stack, the org chart. Events are just where the mismatch is most visible, because you can't quietly re-plan a venue contract the way you can re-plan a nurture stream.

Which is why I keep coming back to the thing that doesn't compress: two people in a room, one of whom has a problem and one of whom has actually solved it. That is the least automatable thing we own.

As more of the funnel gets faster and more synthetic, the value of a real, specific, in-person conversation goes up, not down. We should be building more of them, not fewer, and we should stop treating the small ones as the leftover budget after the big one is paid for.

Tara Corey|SVP, Marketing, Optimizely

I once juggled on a balance board on stage while talking about marketing leadership. It was uncomfortable and slightly stupid, but I did it anyway — because the point of a live moment is that something could actually go wrong. If nothing can go wrong, nobody needs to be in the room.

So the question I'd put to you, honestly: if your event calendar for next year looks exactly like this year's, what is it actually responding to?

What's waiting on the trail

The best trail systems don't take everyone to the same place. Camp Opticon Online is built the same way with multiple tracks, each designed for a different kind of explorer. You will get to explore the terrain that fits where you are and leave with more than you came with.