Episode
Should Your Event Team Report to Demand Gen Instead of Marketing?
- Published
- Sep 18, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1294
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Summary
Most event teams are filed under marketing and measured on attendance. That's not a strategy problem. That's a reporting structure problem — and it's costing you pipeline. Huong Nguyen has produced enterprise tech events for 13 years: NASA to ServiceNow to co-founding Zoomtopia. She knows what events look like when they're treated as a logistics function, and she knows what they look like when they're wired into demand gen. The difference is not effort. It's where the team sits and what they're held accountable for. Plus: the vent nobody in the industry talks about out loud — what happens to your F&B and room block when your client has surprise layoffs and the hotel won't budge. And yes, she's the one who moved an entire conference to a parking lot overnight after the pipes burst mid-keynote. In this one: Why demand gen — not marketing — is the right home for your event team, and the one game answer that makes the case in under 10 seconds How to negotiate hotel contracts that protect you when your client's headcount gets cut without warning (the clause most planners skip until the F&B bill lands) The event insurance line item most planners overlook until it's too late — and the AV equipment bill that proves it Why designing for emotion first and logistics second isn't a soft strategy. It's the pipeline strategy B2B event teams are still missing. If your event team is still reporting into a marketing org that measures success in badge scans, this is the conversation to send up the chain. Subscribe so the Aftershow lands in your feed the second it drops — that's where Huong gets into what it actually cost to build Aletheia and what every planner thinking about vibe coding their own event tech needs to hear first. Send this to the event leader who's still trying t…