The Event World’s Pivot From Fame to Substance. What if?

Slate Spark is planning three events for 2026. They are topic driven. In this moment of business pivot, I realized we have to take a hard look at the event templates that have worked in the past and make sure that we redesign them for the future.

The event industry data is clear. Celebrity draw peaked between 2017 and 2021. Since then audience satisfaction with celebrity keynotes has dropped. Attendees report feeling underfed. Demand for expert driven formats and niche specialists has risen. People want substance, not stardust.

Gen Z and younger millennials show up for the topic, not the person. They trust niche expertise more than celebrity. They want community. They want depth. They want relevance. They want rooms that feed them.

And events of every kind are ripe for this shift.

I was on a call yesterday talking through a Slate Spark event for next year, tossing around ideas the way my team does when our creativity is wide awake and alive, when my first thought was to drop an A list name onto the masthead and fill the room in ten seconds. It was my instinctive pivot to the old way of doing things. Name recognition works. It always has. And it lives inside the event world whether we admit it or not.

But something inside me shifted. Not judgment. Not criticism. A pivot. The kind of pivot where my brain says, Christine, pay attention, something bigger is happening here.

Because while the power of marquee names is real, maybe Slate Spark does not want to do this the old way. Maybe this is the moment for passionate humans who are building the next version of collaborative gatherings to question the assumptions we have carried from one event to the next for decades.

Here is the funny part. The woman who first came to my mind as the headline hook is someone I know. Someone I admire deeply. Someone doing extraordinary work in women’s health and women’s education. Someone whose integrity is not in question. Someone I would happily sit next to at dinner. But she works in her lane and our topic does not live in her lane. There is no alignment between her expertise and this conversation. And maybe I am lazy, but she was the first person who came to mind because she will take my call and she will fill the room immediately.

We are designing an event about women’s institutional organizations. The Girl Scouts. College sororities. Junior Leagues. The legacy membership worlds that have shaped identity and belonging for generations. (Stay tuned for more information)

There is no connection between that topic and the woman who first came to mind. None. So the only reason to put her on the masthead would be to borrow her name. Not her expertise. Not her alignment. Not her knowledge. Just her orbit.

And for me that is when the pivot became undeniable.

Why would anyone follow a marquee name into a room that has nothing to do with her work instead of following the head of the Girl Scouts of the USA or a sociologist who has spent decades studying women’s organizations or a researcher who can explain what happens inside these institutions and why they matter or why they fail?

Why do we default to the shiny object even when the object has nothing to do with the subject? And more importantly, what if we stopped doing that?

What if we marketed what was going to happen in the room rather than who might be standing on the stage? What if we cared more about the ideas being explored than the accolades of the person holding the microphone? What if the point was not to fill the room but to fill it with the right people?

What if what was happening in the room was the draw? What if the content itself was so innovative and compelling and informative, so groundbreaking, that I wanted to be there no matter who was standing next to me? What if the energy and the ideas and the collaboration and the revelations in that room were the thing that pulled me in, not the marquee name printed on the invitation?

We women have an excuse. For decades we have had so few women at the top that when one emerged we attached outsized meaning to her existence. Scarcity creates worship. Worship suppresses discernment. Suppressed discernment fills rooms for the wrong reasons. We clutch the rare visible women because we have been trained to clutch whatever representation we are given. Even when brilliance is present, alignment often is not.

This is not disrespect. It is misalignment. And it is fixable.

Experts with deep domain knowledge consistently outperform celebrities in learning, retention, impact, and transformation. Unknown experts produce higher insight retention. Better Q and A. More willingness to apply new concepts. Greater long term change. Fame does not correlate with usefulness. Fame does not correlate with applicability. Fame does not correlate with transformation.

A few months ago I went to a major magazine’s women’s event. Twenty five headliners. Two thousand five hundred dollars a ticket. A beautiful room overlooking the southwest corner of Central Park. One of the marquee names was a woman I admire. Each spoke for fifteen minutes. Some were interesting. A few were charming. One or two said something mildly educational. But I did not learn anything meaningful. It was a wasted day. A wasted two thousand five hundred dollars. A wasted opportunity.

The event was sold out. But I was the one who sold out. I followed the names instead of following the topic. And there were so many better ways I could have spent that time and money.

So what if we built a new model?

We define the promise of the room instead of the shine of the stage. We market the event like a movie premiere. Trailers. Teasers. Hints of what is coming. Insight about what will be explored and revealed. What will be challenged. What will be questioned. What will be attempted.

We curate speakers for alignment with the topic. For an event about women’s institutional organizations the natural headliners are the leaders of those organizations, the sociologists who have studied them, the thinkers who understand their architecture and influence.

We create status through participation. When a room is built for collaboration instead of observation the attendees become part of the value. You come for the contribution, not the proximity to fame.

We elevate the people who have done the real work. We value the curriculum as the headliner. We let the ideas lead. We let the content breathe. We make room for the experts who have walked the terrain rather than the names who stand adjacent to it.

Sponsorship becomes stronger too. Sponsors care about thought leadership and innovation and influence and alignment. They want to stand next to the next big conversation, not the next big celebrity. A sponsor pitch built around content is more powerful than a pitch built around a face.

This is not built on fame. This is built on the most important conversation happening in this space. You are sponsoring the content that will shape the next decade.

And Oprah herself has modeled this shift. She has said that the biggest pivot she made over the last thirty years was learning to say no to anything that was not in her lane. She is the perfect example of the old model. If Oprah attended your event you were set. You got the headlines. You sold out the room. But if the goal is not headlines or sellouts, if the goal is actual impact, then her example becomes something else entirely. A reminder that staying in your lane makes your work more powerful and makes the rooms you enter more aligned.

So here is the question. With everything happening right now in this new building from earth moment we are living in, with politics and AI burning the ground that used to be the pathways we took, what if those of us who are being marketed to and are paying to fill rooms for information took the time to assess the actual content first and based our buy and our time on what would create true collaboration and real change rather than the ability to say that we attended an event with a marquee name? Excuse me to the woman whose name I originally used as my example. I know she would understand the point.

What if we judged our choices not by the fame on the stage but by the value in the room?

What if we stopped worshiping scarcity and started building rooms that matter? What if we understood that the marquee names were the old currency and that meaningful collaboration is the new one?

And maybe if we are being truthful, part of the old model survived because it was easy.

When you sell fame you do not have to sell content. You do not have to explain the work or articulate the promise or build anticipation around what will happen in the room. You put a famous name on the invitation and the tickets sell themselves. But easy is rarely transformative.

And what if sponsorship alignment shifted too? What if the sponsors who came on board were not chosen because of who you know but because they are the perfect match for the topic and the future they want to create with their marketing dollars? Marketing is changing. Sponsorship alignment is a good place to begin.

I look forward to seeing new people aligned with my goals and my vision in the future. I will not be asking for your autograph, but I will be very interested in what you have to say.

- Christine Merser