Ask five marketing teams who owns the events line and you’ll get five answers, all of them delivered with total confidence and none of them the same. The argument sounds like a budget argument. It’s really an argument about which question the event is supposed to answer, and whoever wins gets to pick the scoreboard.

Two teams, two theories of the same room

Demand gen looks at a conference and sees a channel. Spend goes in, leads come out, you divide one by the other and compare the result to paid search. It’s a coherent way to think and it has the enormous advantage of being legible to a CFO.