At a major industry conference, it is easy for a brand to disappear among dozens of booths, screens, logos and activations. For PropellerAds, simply “showing up” has therefore never been the goal. Conferences are a way to show the market what the company looks like today, meet clients and partners in person, and create an impression that lasts well beyond the trip home.
Ahead of the next MAC, we spoke with Svetlana Leyton, Head of Events at PropellerAds, about why offline still matters in a digital-first industry — and why the real value of a good conference may only become clear six months later.
In digital business, almost everything can be handled online.
You can speak to a client, demonstrate a new technology, send a presentation, negotiate terms and launch a campaign without ever being in the same room.
And yet the biggest companies in the industry continue to build booths, fly teams across the world and spend months preparing for a few days at an industry event.
PropellerAds explains the logic simply: offline gives the market a chance to experience the company as a whole.
Not only the product, but the scale of its evolution, the new ad formats and technologies it is launching, the way the brand presents itself and the direction the company is moving in.
Svetlana Leyton says:
For us, conferences are first and foremost an opportunity to show the market what PropellerAds is today — how we are growing, which new advertising formats and technologies we are launching, and where we are heading as a company.
Trying to isolate one business function from another makes little sense.
A conference contributes to sales, PR, brand awareness and existing client relationships at the same time. But for PropellerAds, one element remains particularly important: the opportunity to meet people face to face.
The company makes a point of attending major industry events around the world, and MAC has long been one of the conferences the team regularly looks forward to returning to.
Face-to-Face Still Carries Weight in a Digital Industry
Performance marketing moves quickly.
Messages, work chats, tickets, video calls.
It is efficient, but it also makes many professional interactions start to feel interchangeable.
Offline communication works differently.
A few minutes of conversation can reveal how a client actually reacts to a new product, surface feedback they would probably never write in a formal message, and show how partners perceive changes inside the company.
For PropellerAds, that live feedback remains one of the strongest reasons to invest in conferences.
It does not always lead to an immediate sale.
But it helps maintain existing relationships and gives the company a much faster read on how the market is responding to new products and ideas.
In that sense, a conference is not simply another acquisition channel.
It becomes a large-scale opportunity to reconnect with the industry in real time.
Conference ROI Does Not End When the Event Does
One of the hardest questions in event marketing is deciding when an event has actually “paid off.”
Counting booth visitors is easy.
Knowing which conversation will turn into a deal three months later, or which introduction will eventually become a meaningful partnership, is much harder.
PropellerAds usually begins seeing the first results within a few weeks.
Negotiations continue, new contacts move into follow-up conversations and potential deals begin to take shape.
But the company prefers to judge the true return on participation over a much longer period — roughly six months.
That timeframe changes the way conferences are evaluated.
The few days spent on the exhibition floor are only the starting point.
What happened at the venue continues through later meetings, negotiations and partnerships. Measuring the result immediately after the booth comes down captures only a fraction of the picture.
Will People Remember You a Month Later?
When PropellerAds evaluates branding performance, the team looks beyond reach and inbound enquiries.
One of the most revealing indicators is far less formal.
Do clients mention the booth afterwards?
Do people still talk about the party?
Do they remember a particular activation?
Does it come up again in conversation months later?
Leyton says:
There are booths and side events in this industry that people keep talking about for years, and that is a great indicator of how powerful the format was.
In that sense, strong event branding works almost like a good story.
An attendee may no longer remember every meeting they had during two intense conference days, but they may clearly remember one unusual space, a specific design detail or the atmosphere of a particular event.
That is why PropellerAds also evaluates the quality of the impression itself.
Was the visual identity distinctive enough?
Did the activations work?
Was there a genuine “wow” moment strong enough to make someone stop amid dozens of competing booths?
But there is an important caveat.
Looking good is not enough.
Branding Has to Be Useful
The exhibition industry keeps raising the visual bar.
Booths get bigger.
Screens get brighter.
Activations become more elaborate.
At some point, the attempt to stand out can turn into little more than a competition in set design.
PropellerAds tries to avoid that trap.
According to Leyton, branding should not only impress people. It should also give them something useful.
That might mean a comfortable place to sit, an activity with real value, somewhere to escape the noise of the expo floor, or simply a space people genuinely want to spend time in.
The company applied that approach at MAC.
In 2026, PropellerAds created a lounge inspired by Central Perk from Friends, complete with the familiar atmosphere, a sofa and coffee.
The reference itself worked as a visual hook.
But what made the space genuinely effective was much simpler: in the middle of a busy exhibition, attendees had somewhere to step out of the flow, sit down, talk properly and hold a meeting.
At that point, event design stops being decoration.
It starts shaping the attendee experience.
Three Months of Preparation for a Few Days on Site
From the outside, an exhibition booth appears almost instantly. One day there is an empty section of the venue. The next, a complete branded environment stands in its place.
Behind that transformation are months of work. On average, PropellerAds begins active conference preparation around three months in advance.
The timeline depends on geography, the scale of participation and where the event sits in the broader calendar.
Some processes are already standardised.
The team has its own step-by-step preparation system, which means the operational side does not need to be rebuilt from scratch every time. But they deliberately avoid standardising everything.
A significant part of the preparation period is protected for creative work. The team thinks through the idea, the visual concept, the layout and the content of the space separately.
A good idea can come quickly, but high-quality execution almost always takes time.
That is why major projects are started as early as possible.
Why You Cannot Simply Repeat a Successful Booth
For event teams, there is an obvious temptation. If a concept worked well once, why not use it again at the next conference? Because that is exactly how a visual idea starts becoming invisible.
Industry event audiences are unusual in one important respect: many attendees travel to a large number of conferences every year. They see the same companies again and again.
Repetition is therefore particularly easy to notice. If a brand wants to show the market who it is today, its physical presence needs to evolve with the company.
For PropellerAds, that is one reason to keep making room for new ideas even when the event machine itself is already highly organised. The booth becomes more than branded exhibition furniture.
It becomes a temporary physical expression of the company.If the business is launching new products, changing its technology or entering a new stage of growth, people should be able to feel that in the offline experience as well.
A Conference Is Also a Live Test of How the Market Sees Your Brand
Event marketing offers another advantage that is difficult to reproduce in standard analytics. You can watch the market react in real time.
People stop — or walk past.
They gather around certain areas.
They take photos.
They ask questions.
They return later with colleagues.
They mention an activation again after the event.
All of these small signals show whether an idea actually worked outside the presentation deck and internal team discussions. That is why the most visually impressive concept is not always the strongest one.
The more important question is whether it creates a reason for people to engage. This is where the two objectives PropellerAds sets for conferences come together: showing the brand while creating the conditions for genuine human interaction.
Why MAC Stays on the Calendar
For an international company, choosing conferences always means choosing priorities. It is impossible to maintain the same level of presence at every industry event.
Teams have to decide where the right audience will be, which markets matter most for relationship building and where a meaningful offline presence is worth the investment. For PropellerAds, MAC has become part of that recurring calendar.
The company describes it as one of the conferences the team traditionally enjoys and looks forward to.
What is interesting is that the reason fits directly into the company’s wider philosophy around events. A conference is not valuable simply because it produces a large number of contacts over several days. It works when something remains afterwards.
A conversation that continues.
A new partner.
Feedback that changes a product.
Or simply an image of the brand that someone still recognises six months later.
That is why PropellerAds is likely to begin preparing for the next MAC long before most attendees start packing their bags. Because the few days spent at the venue are only the visible part of the work.
A good booth does not end when it is dismantled.
It ends when people stop talking about it.
