Community Without Waste

I enjoy watching AI-powered digital assistants take over operational processes that don’t require judgment or a unique perspective. Working in cybersecurity content marketing the transformation is increasingly more evident to me as my grunt work gets automated.

There are still plenty of kinks to work out. And we all need to get better at matching the problem to the tool. But increasing delegation is inevitable, given how every iteration of generative models is getting faster and more flexible in execution of tasks.

Big picture, if I had to make a five-year prediction, I’d say cybersecurity marketers will have more time to think deeply about human connection. This is the kind of thinking that requires sensitive behavioral adjustments to compensate for the unpredictable.

AI will never ever predict with 100% accuracy human behavior regardless of the amount of data it has at its disposal. 

And in that vein, in-person events will take up a larger percentage of marketing budgets. Demand for community without agentic AI interference will become so deeply ingrained in our way of living that we won’t be able to function without it. The craving for something novel will only get stronger as AI makes B2B cybersecurity marketing more commoditized and transactional

If you work in field-marketing, that should be exciting.

But don’t get too excited.

As events become more important, they will also become more scrutinized. Leadership will ask harder questions about ROI. Finance will look more closely at every line item. And the old excuse — “That’s just how events are” — will not be good enough.

In the old days, there’s be acceptance for low performance, such as half-empty rooms, generic swag, overbuilt booths, and bad food. Nobody would dare criticize booth staff who were physically present but emotionally checked out. And of course, let’s not forget the dinners where the wrong people showed up and the paid happy hours that felt busy but produced nothing meaningful.

The question is no longer: how much waste can we tolerate?

The question will become: can we design events so well that almost nothing is wasted?

I think we can. Not because every event goes perfectly but because you can design the experience in a way that you will always come out ahead, even if things go wrong.

Think of how a great kitchen runs. It wastes nothing — the bones go into stock, the trimmings become the staff meal, the carrot tops turn into garnish. Not because the chef is cheap. The opposite. They respect the ingredients too much to let any of it die in a bin, so every part gets pointed at something that matters. That's the whole mindset here: zero waste isn't about spending less, it's about making sure every dollar lands on something your guests actually feel.

The trick is to stack the deck by building in more potential upside than downside, and then the math works in your favor no matter how the day turns out.

Psychology, diversification, venue, people, activities, seduction, and generosity are all force multipliers.

Anyone can buy a list and promise you bodies in seats. That's not understanding your audience. That's renting strangers.

What you actually need to know is how your people behave. Three things, specifically:

1. what activities they enjoy,

2. what content genuinely excites them, and

3. what venues they respect.

Get those three right and the rest of the plan almost writes itself. Get them wrong and you can spend a fortune throwing a party nobody wanted to attend.

Think of it like cooking dinner for someone you're trying to impress. You don't serve what you love. You find out if they're vegetarian before you fire up the brisket.

Once you understand the audience, build a spread of formats. Don't limit yourself to conferences and summits. Conversely, don’t just do roundtables and workshops. A portfolio beats a single big event bet, the same way you'd never sink your whole retirement into one stock because someone on the street said it’s a sure thing.

A small executive dinner, an intimate workshop, a flagship summit, a casual happy hour — different formats catch different people in different moods. Just make sure every single one is executed for your crowd, not for the generic crowd in the stock photo on the venue's website.

The venue and the food are not the boring part

The room matters more than your spreadsheet thinks it does. It should feel comfortable and a little prestigious. Not so crowded that people are shouting over each other, with enough space for someone to peel off and have a real conversation if the moment calls for it. A jammed room kills the very thing you're paying for.

And the food. Please, the food.

People forget what was said at your event within a week. They will remember, with eerie precision, whether the catering was good or whether you handed them a sad rubber chicken and a warm soda.

The French treat the table as a kind of memory — what you feed someone says something about how you see them. Skimp here and you've told every guest exactly what they're worth to you, and you didn't have to say a word.

Now think hard about who represents the company in the room. Are they sociable? Do they actually like people?

We've all seen the old playbook — the "booth babes," the attractive staff hired to draw a crowd at male-heavy conferences. Sometimes that's just lazy, and increasingly it's the wrong read on the room entirely. Ask whether your audience wants that, or whether it makes them roll their eyes and keep walking.

Here's a better example. A cybersecurity startup just won the industry's top booth design award two years in a row—with Lego sets. Not an LED wall. Not a glowing cosmic installation. Legos. Visitors sat down and built custom security workflows by hand while bigger-budget booths blasted them with screens from across the aisle.

Turns out attendees didn't want to be ambushed by another flashing universe on their way to the coffee. They wanted to touch something, build something, and actually talk to a human.

It's easy to confuse "flashy" with "engaging."

The giant installations looked modern, but they functioned like walls, the kind loud enough to walk past, but too slick to approach. The Lego booth was a doorway. Hands busy, guard down, conversation flowing.

I see this everywhere in events marketing. We assume bigger and shinier means more engagement, so we out-spend instead of out-think.

Loud isn't the same as memorable. Sometimes the simplest, most human thing wins—not because it looks impressive, but because it works.

The right hook depends entirely on who you're hooking:

• OT and engineering practitioners often want something hands-on. Let them build, tinker, touch.

• Hackers want a challenge — a live capture-the-flag, a puzzle, a chance to show off their skills in real time in front of peers.

• CEOs and C-Suite usually want a stage and a sparring partner. Give them a panel where they can debate, disagree, and be seen thinking out loud.

Same budget, completely different design. Match the format to the person and the room runs itself.

Another rule of zero waste: don't reach for more than you need. More attendees, more activities, more sessions — none of it is free, and most of it dilutes. A tight room of the right people beats a packed room of the wrong ones every time.

And do not pitch aggressively. When you've finally gotten your dream buyer into a high-quality room, a hard sell feels cheesy and a little desperate — like a guest who corners you at a wedding to talk multi-level marketing. You spent all that money to earn trust. Don't blow it in the first ten minutes trying to close.

At larger events, leave room for relief. Subject-matter experts and serious practitioners are the backbone, sure. But a little entertainment — someone funny, a game, a break in the technical density — is what people actually remember. The deck-and-podium grind is forgettable. The moment they laughed is not.

Be mindful of who's actually on your list, and find a way to make each one feel like more than a badge scan. This goes well past the goody bag. The real value is in how you nurture people after the event, when the lanyard's in a drawer and everyone else has gone quiet.

Budget for postage. Send something small to the people who mattered — even a $5 or $10 gift, mailed with a real note. It's not about the object. It's the signal: we paid attention, and we're not cheap.

That last part is the whole game, because here's the thing about your brand — it gets discussed in rooms you'll never be in. Somebody you forgot to follow up with mentions you over coffee three weeks later. If the lasting impression is "nice event, but kind of cheap and petty," that one careless cost line just bought you a disproportionately negative return. You saved nine dollars and lost the deal.

Half-funding an event is worse than skipping it. A cheap, petty, under-resourced event doesn't just fail to land — it actively tells your market who you are. So either commit, or stay at the office and put the money somewhere it can actually work.

People will tell you virtual events solve all of this. They can be wonderful for scale, and I'm not here to bury them. But be honest about who gets away with virtual-only: it's usually the brands that are already prestigious enough to summon a crowd by name alone — the big tech logos that can drop into a region with a webinar and still fill the seats. For everyone else, virtual is a supplement, not a substitute. Most of the time you still have to show up, feed people well, and shake their hands.

Maybe not literally. But if you understand your people, diversify your bets, feed them like you respect them, resist the urge to pitch, and follow up like you mean it — you'll find the waste mostly disappears on its own. What's left is the part worth paying for: the conversation in the room that no algorithm can have for you.

If I could choose one thing to absolutely get right from this list of zero-waste suggestions, I would recommend focusing on psychology and really understanding your people.

If you create an environment where people don't feel comfortable, nothing else will matter — the great food won't matter, the attentive salespeople won't matter, and even the follow-up nurture will feel inauthentic, because the experience as a whole will fail to speak to the practitioner audience and what they really care about.

 Remember: these people took time off work and spent money on travel. They want to go home with something meaningful and lasting. You need to understand the activities they enjoy, what content excites them, and what they want to get out of an event. That is the one takeaway you should get right above all.

The question I'd leave you with isn't how much we should spend on events. It's the one nobody asks until the post-mortem: what will people say about us in the rooms where we're not present? Design backwards from that answer, and the budget takes care of itself.