SiGMA Rome is just around the corner. Over 30,000 attendees, hundreds of companies, massive stands, expensive parties.
And I keep wondering what the actual ROI of all this is.
Conferences were supposed to be about products, partnerships and business. Somewhere along the way, they became a competition of marketing budgets.
Multi-storey stands, dozens of screens. The bigger, the louder, the better. Meanwhile, the product behind all that glamour can remain mediocre for years.
For newcomers, it's convincing. Big stand, famous brand, crowds of people. Must be a serious company. While smaller companies with genuinely great products struggle to get noticed.
The funny thing is, the best conversations rarely happen at the stands. They happen over coffee, dinner or drinks. We build entire exhibition halls just to do our best networking outside them.
After years in iGaming, I've had plenty of honest conversations with executives, including those running some of the industry's biggest companies. Many admit they can't really measure the return on a particular stand. Some have stopped trying.
It's become a habit. Brand awareness. Street credibility. Market presence. Because if everyone else is there and you're not, someone will ask why.
And then there's networking itself. After 30 conversations, a dinner and another mandatory party, I feel like a lemon that's been squeezed twice. You get home, start following up, and half the people who were so excited about working together suddenly disappear.
But here's my favourite contradiction. We work in an industry that measures every click, conversion, acquisition cost and retention rate. Yet spending €100,000 on a conference without a clear ROI is somehow perfectly normal.
The same people will fight you over a €300 monthly discount on your services.
I'm not against conferences. One unexpected conversation can pay for an entire trip, and meeting great people is genuinely valuable. But conferences should help businesses grow and give smaller companies a chance to be seen, not just reward whoever has the biggest marketing budget.
What bothers me most isn't even the money. It's how easily we've learned to confuse scale with value. And not just at conferences.