Publishers started 2023 with the hope that event sponsorships would be a bright spot in their advertising businesses, compared to the slow start their other ad offerings experienced throughout the first half of the year. But as the second quarter comes to a close, some media executives said that their events were a much harder sell than initially planned.
What has historically been a marquee quarter for Apartment Therapy’s experiential business, president Riva Syrop said her team made the decision last autumn to push back its tentpole event Small/Cool from the spring — when it typically takes place — to October this year. During a conversation with Syrop on the Digiday Podcast in November, she said the decision to delay the event was made to avoid forcing advertisers to commit to a large-scale sponsorship before they knew what their budgets looked like for the year.
It turns out that was the right move: “We did not see an appetite for experiential [sponsorships] in Q2 at all. Not for individual pop-up things, not [for tentpole events] — not to say that they weren’t existing in the world, but we definitely did not find that that’s what our clients were looking for. At all,” Syrop told Digiday in a conversation this week.
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