Sponsorship without strings, and what that costs us
PartnersProgramme Team
Twelve partners have signed on for the inaugural edition, which covers production, live captioning and post-event editing. That is the entire budget. Nobody involved in running this is paid.
Because sponsorship pays for everything, it is worth being precise about what it buys.
What it buys
Diamond and Platinum tiers include a session slot that the sponsor fills. It appears in the agenda labelled as sponsored, in the same visual treatment as every other session, and the sponsor decides what goes in it. If they want to run a product demo, that is a legitimate use of the slot they paid for.
Beyond that: logo placement, an expo booth, stream branding, and a lead list.
What it does not buy
No influence over the CFP. No influence over who judges. No influence over any session other than their own. No early access to the speaker list, no veto over a talk that mentions a competitor, and no say in which talks run opposite theirs.
We have already turned down one enquiry that came with conditions attached. It was not a difficult call, but it was a real amount of money, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
A capped room changes the pitch
The event is limited to around 250 seats and every attendee is reviewed. That is a very different proposition from an open webinar, and we are upfront with sponsors about which way it cuts.
If you are buying raw impressions, this is the wrong event, and we will tell you so on the call rather than after the invoice. If you are trying to reach the people who actually evaluate and sign off on supply chain tooling, a few hundred of them who applied to spend a day on the topic is about as concentrated as this audience gets.
Leads are opt-in, per sponsor
This is the part most sponsors push back on, so here is the reasoning.
Attendees choose which sponsors may contact them, individually, when they are confirmed and again at each booth. Sponsors receive only those people. No sponsor ever receives the full attendee list, and no sponsor receives the session recordings.
That produces short lists. It also produces lists where every name actively asked to hear from you, which is worth considerably more than a scraped badge dump that generates three replies and forty unsubscribes. We would rather sell a smaller, honest number.
The numbers get published
Two weeks after the event, every sponsor gets the actuals: seats filled, live peak, per-session attendance and retention, booth visits, opt-in rates. Not projections — what actually happened.
If we fail to fill the room, sponsors will see that in writing, and so will anyone reading this site. A first edition with no track record should expect to be held to its own numbers.