2. BUDGET NO LONGER A DIRTY SECRET

Clients are more willing to talk numbers earlier in the process than before, a welcome change for operations teams who for years had to crunch costs and plan tours without real budget guardrails. Production teams agree that when spend is discussed at the front-end of planning, everyone wins.

CHRIS SCHUETT, LITTLE CINEMA

For sure the budget conversation is more often happening at the beginning—for too long it was this taboo number that came at the end. Nowadays it’s easier to ask the client, ‘is this $250,000 or a million dollars?’ And clients typically have a number or a range in their head, and I think they're becoming more aware of costs—many are starting to say ‘oh, wait a minute, maybe we don't have enough money for a three-day event. Maybe this needs to be one and a half days.” We tell them when an amount of money is not enough for the initial idea and we explain how we can stretch it a bit further and why. And that excites clients. That conversation is getting easier and it's coming sooner in the process—versus us going off for a week and working on a ton of creative and coming back to them with a budget and the client says ‘whoa, yeah, never mind.’

NITU DESAI, IDLEWILD

Regardless of if it's an RFP or a sold project, we always provide a high-low. Here's our full deck, here's the entire activation as we would produce it. Here's the low budget and then here's the all-in of what this entire deck is going to cost. The line items call out what is included in the low and obviously the highs. I will say that I’m seeing clients being way more active in budget conversations after something is sold. We'll have monthly or biweekly budget calls with them or email budget [updates]. For sure, a hundred percent, lots more transparency in budget conversations, which clients are actually wanting more than what I've seen in previous years.

SARAH SHULMAN, JACK MORTON

Clients have ops in mind earlier in the process than in the past. I’ll add that I do find clients are more interested in learning how it all works. There's a lot more chatter. Does it make it more efficient if we have a trailer versus a double-decker versus a tent versus a car? Can we hit more markets? Can we bring that cost-per-event down? Are we faster in and out? Can we have fewer staff if everything's hydraulic with flip-up doors versus haul everything out of the boxes and use hand trucks? Partly it's client enthusiasm for getting in that mix that brings in that ops conversation earlier than the blue sky creative.

MATT ANDREWS, HIGHMARK OUTDOOR

The sooner we all talk spend… the better. Everybody wins when we talk costs. That said, Highmark is easy to work with—we have a budget-friendly product and we’re all rental. We make it easy to budget for us and even easier to use us early on in the process. And the more we know about the program the more we’ll help agencies figure it out. Talking to all partners early about costs is the win here—but just with the end-user brands but with all the partners like us as well.

3. TIGHT DEADLINES FORCE OPS TEAMS TO ‘GET REAL’ WITH CLIENTS

The incredibly shrinking experiential marketing deadline has officially landed at the intersection of possible… and impossible. Never in the history of the industry have more agencies simply refused work when the timeline represents the risk of crippling ops teams, sacrificing quality of work—or both.

NITU DESAI, IDLEWILD

Three weeks to execute is the new norm for us. Many clients have set that cadence—'oh, well you did it in three weeks last time and somebody else did it in five weeks the time before that, so now we're going to come in two weeks out.’ Yes ,everyone at the agency wants to see the job done and wants to excel, but from a downstream perspective, at what cost?

JORDAN KAYE, ANALOG EVENTS

Clients got really fearful of the Covid cancellation fees they [incurred] in 2020 and 2021. And so I think that’s pushed deadlines—clients got focused on the latest possible time they give a yes or no on something. And so we started saying no to a lot of those clients or requiring letter of intent. That’s making clients go, ‘oh, okay, I need to actually put my money where my mouth is to make some work happen.’ We're a couple years away from this bubble bursting, unfortunately. We are at a point where we now have to say no to projects where it feels impossible.

GRAHAM FUGAZZI, AGENC

Ops has to balance pleasing the client with the actual possibility of an event happening and putting your name on it. There has to be that level set. There has to be that honest moment of ‘you're not going to get this if you do not make this decision today.’

ALEXA FOLI, AKJOHNSTON

Having an endless cycle creating new deadlines with substantial changes in between each variation isn’t working. At a certain point you just have to say: 'In order to be successful we need to move this into production or we risk the integrity of the project.' But then you risk the client wanting to start the whole process over—at that point we have to explain that we don't have time to do that either. So trying to find that balance between ‘we can't do that’ and providing solutions such as ‘if we make this change then we can still move forward.’

SARAH SHULMAN, JACK MORTON

I don't think every client wants to call us three weeks out, some of them need to call three weeks out. But I do have to add that I fully subscribe to the notion of the longer you have, the more you work. So to some degree you want to shorten the advance time because if you have six months, you're going to have six times more ideas and changes than if you have one month. So three weeks, six max—these are the new timetables. Our teams are getting more nimble and we’re operating faster and we have to evolve our “jack of all trades” capabilities. Everyone's becoming a bit of a specialist in everything and there are new tools, new templates, new everything.

MATT ANDREWS, HIGHMARK OUTDOOR

We see compressed lead times for sure, but our Highmark system was designed around meeting those deadlines—we have beams and columns and deck panels and wall panels to build structures with that all fit within a grid. We do our pulling prep on the backend so if something comes back from, say, Austin City Limits, our team is going through it to make sure it's all dialed in and it goes on the shelf ready to go. The idea is we can pull your design and put it on a truck in one step.

4. OPS LEANS INTO A.I.—SLOWLY

Ops teams are joining their agency counterparts in creative to lean into artificial intelligence tools, primarily for organization, quick digital “gut checks” and summarization. But the promise of A.I.-enabled budget calculations, margin optimization and tour scheduling is giving production departments more than a few reasons to embrace it.

WILL ECKMAN, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, THE EXPERIENTIAL GROUP

We’re using A.I. across production and creative, from getting outlines for how we're going to present something to researching programs. Being able to very quickly and effectively say, ‘I've got 17 of these, four of those, it's across five markets’… then extrapolate some very rough concepts and distill it all quickly … bang, bang, bang and I've got an answer in five seconds.

CHRIS SCHUETT, LITTLE CINEMA

Our ops and production teams are mainly using A.I. as a project-management support mechanism versus integrating it into events or activations. A few members of my team will use it to do very rough back-of-the-napkin calculations or will input a past project and say, ‘we need to find efficiencies or identify room for improvement.’ So it's more an interactive whiteboard to help ask and answer some questions, to validate some assumptions or take something and quickly understand whether or not it's realistic or possible.

5. HARD COSTS HAVE STABILIZED, LABOR COSTS HAVE NOTKAIT AT TOP OF SITE MAKE THE COPY THAT LINKS TO THIS JUMP SAY: 2025 COSTS

You want the good news or the bad news? Material hard cost spikes associated with Covid and supply chain have, for the most, part, stabilized (although ops teams are watching what new tariffs may do to them). But labor costs, often the largest buckets of event operational budgets, continue to increase… with no end in sight.

JESSICA MCCARTHY, AMPLIFY

Costs have stabilized, I would say. Yet there’s sort of an instability around whether or not materials are available to us. But I think there is truly an understanding that costs went up. Clients are experiencing it internally with their staffs across the board within their organizations. So they recognize that it can't be the same event for the same price as it was pre pandemic. But, to be clear, they're going to try.

JORDAN KAYE, ANALOG EVENTS

Systematically if you look at six agencies, if we're all producing the exact same event, all six of the budgets are going to look different. I budget things differently than you probably do—maybe you bill labor, you bill drawings, maybe we include our build drawings in our overall production costs. There’s a huge education piece that needs to happen with the client—we need them to be able to actually look through a budget and understanding it versus just looking at the bottom line of an event's million-dollar cost.

WILL ECKMAN, EXECUTIVE PRODUCER, THE EXPERIENTIAL GROUP

I would agree that costs are stabilizing—but I wouldn't say we've hit a peak on everything. I think inflation's still just going to be something we're dealing with and there are a number of things that affect that.

NITU DESAI, IDLEWILD

Yesterday's price is not today's price. Labor is where the significant increases are, not only from a fabrication standpoint but also who is handling a structure on-site, on-site staff and brand ambassadors and PAs and so on. The labor costs are shifting and they are not coming down.

LEE DOUD, JJLA

And the cost for insurance just keeps going up. I keep hearing, ‘this isn't covered under your policy’ and it doesn't quite make sense year over year. We obviously have to have insurance… we have to be covered on everything but I have to say that insurance is going to become even more of a major factor in budgeting.

MATT ANDREWS, HIGHMARK OUTDOOR

Glue and wood and metal and materials… those prices have stabilized. So has trucking to a certain extent if juxtaposed to the supply chain issues we went through post-pandemic. But I do hear you. Things can get expensive. So we're constantly looking at ways to rebalance costs—getting smarter about labor or seeing where we can shave a day or how we can lean into economies of scale and how can we do something in two days instead of three. We are always trying to get sharper with our planning. To have three or four plans actually. You usually get to Plan C or Plan D by the time you're on site.

6. EXTREME WEATHER NOW A FOCAL POINT FOR OPS

Hurricanes. Floods. Fires. Not only is extreme weather become a factor in planning, scheduling and venue selection—but it’s forcing ops teams to change where they activate, what they do, what they build and to what weatherproofing level they create everything to. (Many decisions now influenced by their insurance providers.)

GRAHAM FUGAZZI, AGENC

You have to take weather into consideration. Sometimes clients aren't thinking about weather and they just want to go into a market. We are putting measures in place so that we can be prepared. And that goes from not only the safety side, but also to materials used. How are we building this? How are we engineering this? What is the wind rating? You have to factor all those things in—whether the client realizes we’re doing it or not. There may be times when a client wants to go somewhere and you have to suggest a different market just entirely based on what the climate might be during that time.

JEN HERSCH, REDROCK

We watch weather one month out with daily reporting—and that's a service that we tell the client we offer. ‘I'm going to be able to tell you well ahead of time what we're going to be looking at.’ We’ll also talk early about the financial implications if the client makes a decision to move an event, because ultimately we never want to cancel. We will go through every single scenario, turn every stone to not have to tell the client we have to cancel. Last summer we had a festival we had to cancel that morning. We waited as long as possible, but the wind conditions were just too extreme and unsafe. So weather reporting is an investment that we haven't necessarily started to entirely pass on to the client yet, but we are investing in it as an agency to help us with client decisions.

ALEXA FOLI, AKJOHNSTON

And all of it impacts costs. So yes, we just discussed that many costs have plateaued—however the liability around events has changed so much and that coverage is going to continue to drive costs up. Any natural disaster that happens affects events and costs go up. Clients may think ‘that's not going to happen to us’ but that fact is… it affects all clients. Liability is not per-client. We all have insurance and those requirements, specialty assessments and costs have drastically gone up.

7. SUSTAINABILITY STILL A MIXED BAG IN 2025

Ops teams report that sustainability is still a frequent “topic of conversation,” but most say higher costs for renewable and reusable elements prevent even the most interested clients from putting mass efforts into practice.

JORDAN KAYE, ANALOG EVENTS

We're a sustainability focused agency. We got our certified B Corp. We made a conscious effort a little over a year ago to make sustainability a through-line of everything we do. Waste was always my biggest issue at events. We are trying to drive change and push the industry and push clients to care. And we've had clients that haven't cared that all of a sudden do. Some clients say ‘meh, just print it on foam core, we don't care.’ But if we tell them that we can print it on Falconboard and it's the same price… it's an easier sell.

ALEXA FOLI, AKJOHNSTON

We present sustainability to clients in the beginning—as in, ‘if you would like to make a conscious effort to do this, let's talk about it now.’ So we know early on if we should include those costs where we need to. Most of the time, once they see the additional costs they decide based on their initiatives and budgets.

NITU DESAI, IDLEWILD

True. Our sustainability conversations aren't going that deep. When we pitch, we ask clients the questions. Is this an [exhibit] that they want to keep? And if so, where? Will you reuse it? The other thing we do during the whole budget portion of the conversation is explain the cost pieces tied to sustainability.

LEE DOUD, JJLA

To add, I'm finding that a lot of the brands aren't signing on for sustainability, but the municipalities are. And so when we’re working with, as an example, the city of West Hollywood, it’s in the conversation from the start. And so it's interesting to see that juxtaposition with who is talking about it from the get-go and who is bringing it up at the last minute.

MATT ANDREWS, HIGHMARK OUTDOOR

We were sustainable before people we’re asking for sustainability. Our product is made out of steel and aluminum, the two most recycled things on the planet. And we're rental. We're all trying to help the planet out as much but, interesting enough, the event industry has not caught up to the sustainability pushes of the trade show world. Corporate exhibit teams have sustainability programs and are very focused on renewable materials and reusable experiences.