We never agreed on the meaning of the word immersive, did we?

If we did, if there was ever a moment when it was defined such that it referred to something specific, quantifiable or testable, that meaning has been so thoroughly forgotten that it might as well have never been defined at all. Still, we continue to use it relentlessly, flooding our portfolios, agency creds, Instagram captions and award submissions with a word that could describe anything from a theatre production to a dinner party.

Immersive belongs to a litany of words, including bespoke, curated, and luxury, that have colonised event industry language. Each one promises specificity while delivering obscurity and suggests expertise, but the only barrier to using them is the courage needed to do so. These words are the primary culprits in the linguistic framework for an industry that’s learned to talk around what it actually does. Immersive ranks at the top of this list and is the most far-reaching and ambitious, yet committed to the least in practice. 

Immersive has become ubiquitous in our self-presentation. Portfolios boast of immersive celebrations without clarifying what actually makes them immersive. Instagram captions are written and deployed with the unwarranted confidence of people who’ve stopped questioning what the words they use mean, or even whether it matters at all if the accompanying visual is aesthetically pleasing or scroll-stopping enough. Case studies feature immersive in the opening sentence, doing the heavy lifting that being specific and just describing the work should do. Details can be assessed, judged, and found lacking, but immersive floats above critique and accountability, a cloud of implication that sounds impressive without saying anything at all.

Agencies and suppliers scramble to showcase their expertise in creating immersive experiences, and here the circular reasoning reaches its zenith. We claim expertise in immersive experiences because we create them, and we create them because we claim expertise. Nobody needs to define what immersive experiences are or demonstrate they have actually created one, because our expertise is self-evident from the fact that we’re claiming it.

This is the same reasoning that supports most luxury markets when you strip away the packaging. Luxury handbags are expensive because they’re luxury, and they’re luxury because they’re expensive.

Immersive is a disguise that signals sophistication while concealing nothing at all.

It’s a word that suggests vision and innovation, but only needs the user to believe, or pretend to believe, that they have understood its meaning.

Comfort in repetition

Scroll through your toxic social media platform of choice and count how many times immersive appears, then try to determine what the word is actually telling you in the context in which it’s being used.

You’ll find it attached to multi-million-pound productions involving a huge cast and crew operating in bespoke environments. You’ll also find it beneath pictures of a corporate Christmas party with a mirror ball and a photo booth. Both use the same word to describe wildly different endeavours. The word has become a badge of ambition, sophistication, and innovation that needs no proof. It implies value without having to demonstrate it.

The word serves as a creative shorthand for those unable to explain what they actually do. If you can’t describe your recent event in a way that makes it stand out in an extremely saturated market, say it’s immersive. If you’ve created something truly impressive but within the bounds of what could be called ‘a great party, say it’s immersive. If you’re charging exorbitant sums for your service and are struggling to explain what your client is paying for, it’s immersive. Problem solved, meaning avoided.

When you can describe anything as immersive, you don’t need to spell out what makes it special, what makes it yours, or what justifies paying for it beyond using language associated with perceived value itself. The word suggests vision or innovation while avoiding specifics, implying you’ve considered the ‘experience’ deeply without any real pressure to do so.

If it’s a word you’ve used, you might have noticed that every time you do, there’s a tiny flicker of hesitation, a moment of awareness where some part of you quietly observes, “I have no idea what I’m promising here.” 

The same applies to bespoke (which should be a baseline expectation in service if not in material output), curated (which now refers to making choices, not deeper, thoughtful and intentional selection), and luxury (a pricing signal, not a quality marker).

The more something is described as bespoke, curated, luxury, or indeed immersive, the less we’re inclined to believe it.

The cost of ambiguity

Immersive has become a way to say we aren’t just organising parties or events. It implies we’re creating rich experiences, designing worlds and thinking beyond tangible elements like catering or floristry. The word elevates event management, read as mundane admin and logistics, into event or experience design, a superior craft where every detail serves a grand vision. But with everyone describing their work as immersive, the line of distinction is barely visible.

What makes this especially insidious is that the word’s vagueness offers an economic advantage. When clients describe their desire for something special or memorable, we might interpret this as a signal to pitch our ideas as immersive, allowing both parties to convey ambition without committing to specifics. If your work is immersive, you position yourself at a price point that justifies fees inflated by the creative effort involved, beyond mere coordination. The word enables everyone to operate in productive ambiguity. The client feels sophisticated for requesting it, you feel proud for providing it, and the silent pact of mutual delusion is complete. And because there’s no objective measure of immersion, there’s no accountability if the delivered output is little more than a very nice event.

This is why immersive just won’t go away, despite those of us who have recognised its emptiness. It’s surreptitiously used to signify which market tier you operate in without explaining what sets that tier apart or why you belong there, and its continued proliferation further accelerates its growth. When every event is captioned on Instagram as immersive, regardless of what is delivered, the word itself maintains its own illusion. Clients browse portfolios and agencies’ feeds where everything is described as immersive, and the word becomes the expectation of a certain standard of work.

What’s sad about it all is how much this inflation of language may have replaced, to some extent, genuine creative ambition. Why bother trying to create something immersive when you can just label it as such? Why risk experimentation when playing it safe earns the same terminology, Instagram engagement, and financial reward? Using the word immersive should push us towards having to create real immersion.

We’ve built an economic system where meaningless language is more profitable than meaningful work.

Algorithmic immersion

Attempts to restore the word’s meaning reveal everything we need to know. We bolt on modifiers like truly immersive, fully immersive or completely immersive, as if emphasis could repair what overuse destroyed. Or we build elaborate taxonomies, using tangential words like experiential or transformative, hoping they’ll bring clarity when, in these cases, they’re used to mean exactly the same thing. Each is just another way of circling around the void, proof that we’ve run out of language to describe what we actually do.

Then add AI into the mix, which industrialises the word’s inadequacy. LLMs trained on reams of events content, which is to say years of ambiguous, aspirational marketing copy, have learned that immersive is something we value, so they generate more of it. Now we’re deluged with LinkedIn slop promising immersive celebrations, Substack essays analysing immersive trends, and websites touting immersive event design. LLMs don’t understand what immersive means (join the club), they just recognise its regular use alongside other relevant terms and reproduce the pattern in a nightmarish, self-replicating loop of vagueness.

We’ve developed machines that can replicate our lack of understanding at an unprecedented scale, which would be impressive if it weren’t so damning.

The more AI-generated content reinforces words like immersive, the more we use them, and the more we train future models to do the same. This loop exposes our limitations more than the AI’s. If ChatGPT can write copy indistinguishable from your own, maybe the algorithm didn’t learn from you, maybe you learned from it.

Lost in translation

All this linguistic inflation leads to real professional consequences. I recently encountered a specific situation that might resonate. A potential client approached me after attending what they called an immersive event, saying they wanted the same. Upon further investigation, the event they described looked like a great party, but little more than that.

This made my job more difficult. I either had to meet their inflated expectations and deliver something immersive (even if they had mentally budgeted for something more straightforward) or gently recalibrate their understanding of the word without making them feel foolish for using it, and without insulting the event they referenced or underplaying my own abilities. That conversation, a delicate dance of diplomacy around a word that says everything and nothing, is time that could have been better spent.

If we can’t name what we’re doing, we lose entirely the ability to assess how well we’re doing it. We can call an event immersive if the environment is so complete, so all-encompassing, and the details so cohesive that disbelief is suspended and guests forget where they are. But the same goes for a planner who books a DJ and hires a photo booth. The word doesn’t guarantee any real delivery of its promise, particularly if everyone uses it regardless.

Every time we use immersive instead of something truer, we lose the opportunity for precision. Was it theatrical or intimate, participatory, multi-sensory, narrative-driven? Each of these words conveys something specific. Each sets an expectation and paints a picture. Because of its overuse, immersive says nothing more than that someone, somewhere, decided it was the word to use.

What is immersive?

It seems obvious, though rarely acknowledged, that immersion is a binary concept. Something is either immersive or it isn’t.

An event can’t be somewhat immersive any more than you can be somewhat pregnant or somewhat on fire.

The word describes a complete state. The condition of being so absorbed in an experience that you forget you were in one at all, where the constructed reality becomes, temporarily, reality itself.

So who or what is immersive? Punchdrunk is. You spend three hours wandering through a multi-storey building where every room is a detailed set, actors ignore your presence while performing scenes you have to discover, where you choose your own path and may see a completely different show from the person next to you. Secret Cinema is. You arrive in costume, inhabit a role, and the experience begins before you arrive, with the boundaries between audience and performance dissolved. You Me Bum Bum Train is. You’re alone, disorientated, unsure of what’s happening next, thrust into scenes in which you must participate and cannot opt out. These experiences, to some extent, all demand surrender, commitment, uncertainty, a bit of jeopardy and the feeling of forgetting that you’re at an event at all. 

A brand event or private party, however stylish or ambitious, likely operates within different constraints and ultimately serves different purposes. A host wants to be celebrated. Guests want to socialise, connect, have conversations, eat, drink and leave when they choose. No one wants to forget they’re at a wedding or surrender control of what happens next. In these contexts, immersion is both unlikely and undesirable.

This doesn’t make them inherently lesser. An exquisitely designed event with theatrical elements, a cohesive aesthetic, and careful attention to guest experience is highly valuable and worth whatever the client pays. It doesn’t need to transport guests to another realm, to be immersive, to be excellent at what it is and justify its worth.

One of the many issues here is that if immersive now sits at the top of a false hierarchy, it implies that immersion is the highest goal an event can pursue. In reality, it’s one mode, among many, suitable for certain events and totally unsuitable for most others. We’ve borrowed a word that describes something rare and specific and applied it to events that succeed precisely because they don’t dissolve the boundary between reality and constructed experience.

This may have warped our thinking. Instead of improving how we design events and parties to reach their goals, we pursue thinking that fundamentally contradicts them. Successful celebrations rely on guests knowing exactly where they are, who they’re with and why they’re celebrating.

The most damaging aspect is how this de-skills us and prevents us from articulating the true value of our work. If we can’t call something “an exceptionally well-designed dinner party” without feeling it sounds inadequate, and instead describe it as an immersive experience to justify our output, creativity, or price, we’ve lost the ability to defend and promote the work we do. A dinner party, executed with skill, imagination, and precision, is immensely valuable on its own terms. Suggesting it’s something else entirely only diminishes it, and us.

Saying it like it is

If we’re able to abandon this hollow language, the result is almost always more compelling. “A theatrical dinner where actors guide guests through a narrative across multiple rooms” is far more persuasive and engaging than “an immersive dining experience”. The honest version is more effective. It’s specific, visual, credible, sets clear expectations, and justifies the fees charged for it.

We must choose words that retain meaning and that our younger selves, before years immersed (!) in client management taught us to speak in abstractions, would recognise as actual descriptions of actual output.

Immersive is corrosive as much as it is meaningless. It’s made us stop thinking clearly about what we create, why it matters, and, by extension, worse at doing it. It’s allowed us to hide behind weak vocabulary, sound ambitious without being ambitious, and charge premiums for work we can’t quite articulate the value of because we’ve stopped trying to articulate anything at all. We’ve let a single hollow word replace the difficult, necessary task of understanding what makes our work ours.

Deep down we know, and have always known, that what we do isn’t immersive.

The question is whether we’ll continue pretending it is or begin describing it truthfully, even if it sounds less impressive, even if we have to admit that we plan parties; exceptionally detailed, beautifully executed, valuable parties.

Event planners once feared the empty dance floor. Today, the greater anxiety is the untouched plate.

This isn’t the consequence of uninspiring menus. Event catering is improving, not declining—no one misses the featherblade of beef days. Instead, the blame lies with the manufacturers of Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro.

The spread of GLP-1 drugs is creating a new type of event guest, indistinguishable from others in every respect save the one that matters most to caterers. They are, at best, unmoved by the food put before them, and at worst, actively disinterested.

For these guests, the core wisdom in hospitality that abundance meets appetite and consumption validates success, collapses. To caterers and hosts used to measuring generosity by clean plates and topped-up glasses, uneaten food registers less as indifference than rejection, however unintentional.

The scale of the issue

Current data suggests that ~3% of UK adults, or 1.6 million people, used GLP-1 injections for weight loss in the past year. With the launch of oral versions next year, uptake is expected to accelerate. A future where 10% of adults take these drugs is increasingly plausible, meaning caterers would face twice as many dietary requirements to accommodate as they do today1.

Working on the assumption that nine out of ten guests are not medicating, that tenth guest still must be taken into account in your planning, especially if not evenly distributed. Imagine pitching a six-figure wedding and the bride mentions that several close relatives are on Ozempic. What should the response be?

UK data is limited but US adoption of GLP-1s skews to affluent demographics. Nearly a third of users report household incomes of $200k+. Caterers serving ‘luxury’ events face disproportionate exposure. Big-budget events will be where this shows up first and most visibly.

Reassurance that GLP-1 guests are in the minority will do little to comfort when hundreds of pounds per head are being spent and the client is picturing her nearest and dearest pushing food around their plates.

The problem is a structural one. In an industry whose value proposition is built on consumption, even a few who are unable to consume distort the picture. If clients see untouched plates across the room during dinner service, it’s those plates they’ll notice, not the clean ones.

Caterers’ margins may not rest directly on the food itself, but the client’s perception does. A scattering of those untouched plates could easily be perceived, in the client’s eyes, as money poorly spent. A small number of appetite-suppressed guests can easily unsettle pricing psychology when it becomes evident enough to affect a client’s perception of value.

A quick clarification: at private or hosted events where food and drink are provided free of charge, the economic impact is largely perceptual. Events that rely, even in part, on F&B sales face a sharper and more direct challenge, but that lies beyond the scope of this article.

Beyond portion control

So what can caterers actually do about this?

From a menu perspective, there are some relatively simple practical solutions. Recipes can be lightened for guests with lower tolerances to high-fat or fried food, and portions can be reduced in size. Better still, plated dishes may give way to family-style or buffet formats, allowing guests to self-regulate and avoid the need to confront predetermined portions.

It’s also widely reported that GLP-1 users drink less alcohol alongside their reduced food consumption. With non-alcoholic offerings already improving, a token elderflower spritz won’t cut it anymore. Further promoting and elevating low-ABV or alcohol-free options will become as important as menu adjustments.

Yet this doesn’t answer the broader question of whether GLP-1 use should be treated in the same way as traditional dietary requirements at all. The answer matters because it shapes everything from how it’s discussed with clients to how it affects service.

My suspicion here is that they shouldn’t. This rests on the notion that traditional dietary requirements are, for the most part, declared by guests upfront. Guests will inform us, in advance, of their need for a vegan or gluten-free meal. However, a GLP-1 user is less likely to disclose their status, but would want to feel just as welcomed and considered as someone with a classic dietary requirement.

This changes our entire approach. Where dietaries were once declared and responded to, GLP-1 use is a ‘likely-present’ circumstance that must be anticipated. As their share of guest lists grows, their accommodation will shift from an exception to an expectation.

If not now, when?

When should caterers begin adapting?

Now.

Even if clients have yet to raise the subject, a ~3% GLP-1 adoption rate means we’re already serving these guests, whether we’re aware of it or not. As the barrier to entry drops from injections to pills and uptake accelerates, we likely have 12-18 months before knowing how to best cater to GLP-1 users at events becomes a baseline assumption vs an innovative differentiation.

Until we reach that point, there’s a competitive advantage to be sought, and though modest, it’s real. When two caterers pitch for the same event today, the one who can speak confidently to GLP-1 accommodation will appear more attuned than their competitor. That gap will only widen as uptake increases. Before long, every caterer will have worked this out, and the question will be who is leading the conversation and who is playing catch-up.

The consequences of waiting to adapt could prove detrimental. Caterers won’t lose every pitch, but it’s not unthinkable that they may lose one where the client views this as a significant issue. Clients may forgive many things, but indifference to something they really care about is rarely one of them.

This is less about chasing trends and more about recognising that a growing segment of the population will soon relate to food at social occasions differently than before. It would be prudent for caterers to position themselves as those who saw it coming, rather than those who are scrambling to adapt.

Beyond the plate

Events have always been about display as much as consumption, and elaborate food service was never purely functional. It has always been a theatrical performance of abundance that guests participate in through eating, and its meaning stems from what surrounds the food as much as the food itself. It’s the presentation, the pacing, the service, and the small details that make people feel looked after.

Food was always the conduit, never the outcome, and the wedding cake proves it. The tradition endures not because anyone needs cake, but because the act of cutting it marks an occasion and creates a shared moment. Appetite suppressants build on this reality, stripping away, for the guests taking them at least, the pretence that value lies only in the food itself.

This doesn’t diminish the importance of great food. Most guests derive satisfaction and pleasure from it, and most will continue to do so. But when even a small proportion cannot engage with catering’s most tangible deliverable, language is needed to explain what else is provided.

The challenge is for caterers to serve events where both the majority, who engage fully with food, and the minority who do not, feel equally considered.

A final test

If a client called tomorrow and said, “loads of our guests are on Ozempic, how will you feed them?” What would your answer be?

If it’s“we’ll give them smaller portions”, you’ve missed the point.

If it’s “the food is so good they’ll eat it anyway”, you’ve misunderstood it.

If you can’t answer at all, you’re unaware of it, ignoring it or yet to address it. Either way, you’re behind where you need to be.

Caterers who can already answer this question and can respond with more than menu tweaks will hold the advantage, for now. Not because GLP-1s are going to upend the industry, but because a supplier’s ability to navigate complexity signals authority and sophistication. Anticipate this new landscape thoughtfully, and what might have been an awkward conversation becomes instead, proof of foresight and expertise.

Welcome to event planning in 2025, where Instagram1 fluency is quietly overtaking actual competence as the primary measure of success. We’re witnessing a fundamental reordering of priorities that is reshaping how events are conceived, executed and valued.

Events are no longer designed solely for those present in the room and are now staged equally for a secondary audience of those scrolling at home. This shift may have been inevitable but its implications for the craft and credibility of event planning are only now becoming clear, and they are more profound than we have yet acknowledged.

Rules of engagement

The mechanics of how event planners build successful businesses have been entirely inverted.

Reputation was once cultivated through word-of-mouth referrals, repeat clients and industry relationships built over years of consistent execution. Now it increasingly derives from follower counts, viral moments and the ability to produce an endless stream of visual content.

Couples planning weddings navigate Instagram feeds, not preferred supplier lists. The proliferation of content creators in addition to, and increasingly in place of, photographers at weddings, crystallises this transformation. Brides don’t want to wait three months for their wedding album; they want reels ready for posting the next day.

Event planners are adapting by becoming content creators themselves, feeling the mounting pressure to generate a continuous flow of behind-the-scenes footage, inspo visuals, styled shoots and process videos.

This evolution has established an entirely new metric system against which success is calculated. Traditionally, planners measured their worth through client satisfaction, repeat business, industry reputation and so on — metrics that, at least roughly, correspond to actual professional competence. Now, under these new rules, success is increasingly measured through content performance.

The most successful planners will be those who understand not only how to orchestrate an event, but how to reshape it into shareable content.

A skills inversion

We are living in a total inversion of expertise. It’s a phenomenon that extends beyond event planning but our industry is a textbook example. Planners fluent in algorithms, the cadence of content creation and grammar of online storytelling are rising to the top. Meanwhile, those who have mastered the actual craft of event design, planning, and execution but lack content fluency are being edged to the margins.

The issue here is that these are two entirely different skill sets operating on principles that not only have little in common but are often directly at odds.

Instagram thrives on manufactured spikes of attention, peak moments and scroll-stopping aesthetics driven by an algorithm that rewards brevity, drama and arresting visual impact. Events, by contrast, succeed in continuity. Great events emerge slowly and organically over time, with energy that breathes naturally in the crucial white space between bigger moments.

The most memorable events are rarely defined by individual moments of Instagram-worthy climax, but by the accumulation of small perfections.

It’s the seamless flow of service, the imperceptible building of atmosphere and the sum of a thousand invisible decisions that create conditions where meaningful connection or celebration can occur.

The market, however, is increasingly rewarding planners who understand the former whilst devaluing those who may be more skilled in the latter. The consequence is that events are now littered with content checkpoints or staged moments of artificial intensity, designed less for guests than for the lens.

Some planners now spend significant amounts of time on-site during events, unfocused on logistics or guest experience, instead capturing content for their own channels. They have learned to view events through two competing lenses:

1. What enhances genuine connection or celebration in the room

2. What will generate compelling content for their presence online

Increasingly, it’s the second lens takes precedence as the metrics it feeds (view, followers, leads) long outlive the event itself.

The irony is as stark as it is inevitable. The more events are engineered to look exceptional online, the less exceptional they will feel to those actually attending.

The very experiences that these events planners are showcasing as content are diminished by the sheer imperative to present them as content in the first place.

Content distorts craft

When content creation becomes the primary driver of event design, every element of traditional event craft is warped beyond recognition. Everything we once worked towards in service of an event’s guests is reconfigured to serve a secondary audience that’ll never set foot in the room but whose approval is now treated as more valuable.

Venues are selected not with guest experience as the primary consideration but for their inherent aesthetic impact. Beautiful, historical venues are chosen to host events despite acoustics so poor that guests can barely talk to one another. Floor plans are drawn for symmetry when viewed from an impressive aerial drone shot, rather than for the guest’s lateral perspective in the room.

Photo opps now dictate the design process, regardless of what operational bottlenecks they may create. Floral arrangements grow increasingly elaborate, creating stunning tablescapes that make across-the-table conversation impossible. Even the choreography of catering service is now influenced by the aesthetic considerations with model waitstaff hired not for their attention to detail or ability to attend to guests’ needs but for their scroll-stopping looks.

This constitutes a total redefinition of what events are meant to accomplish:

Guest-focused event design understands space as a carefully orchestrated environment for human interaction

Content-focused event design reduces space to vignettes optimised for visual extraction over the actual experience of being present within it

What we must protect, and perhaps what’s most at risk, are what we might call the unfilmable qualities of great events. Whether it’s the ambient temperature of a room that keeps guests comfortable or preserving sight lines such that everyone can see a speech take place; these are essential elements that resist documentation but create the conditions within which genuine connection and celebration can occur.

These qualities require expertise and experience to conceive and execute. Even though they exist to serve guests’ actual experience, they are invisible to the camera and are therefore deemed irrelevant to content performance metrics.

If we focus only on what can be documented online, we risk losing sight of what actually underpins great events in the first place.

Professional dilemma

It would be dishonest to outright condemn this transformation without acknowledging both the genuine dilemma at its core and the legitimate value it has created. Event planners are not driving this change so much as adapting to a new economy of attention, and in many aspects, social media has solved problems the industry had long struggled with.

The case for a visual portfolio is undeniable. Event planning is an industry built on trust in the intangible. Clients routinely hand over substantial sums for a product that exists largely in the planner’s imagination until the moment the event actually takes place. Social media provides an effective and free platform that allows planners to demonstrate their competence rather than merely describe it. When a planner can show a prospective client what to expect, rather than just tell them, they bridge a key gap in communication.

Instagram has democratised access in ways that benefit both planners and clients.

A talented planner without connections, experience, or indeed, a marketing budget, can now assemble a portfolio that competes with established names. Clients, in turn, can discover planners whose aesthetic aligns with their vision, regardless of geography or traditional referral networks. The platform, for all its distortions, does reward genuine creativity and taste.

And yet, it is precisely because of these legitimate uses that the distortions are so insidious. If clients are hiring planners on the basis of Instagram presence and explicitly demand “Instagrammable” events, content creation transforms from an optional marketing activity into a core professional competency.

What was once additional to the craft is now central to it.

For corporate and brand events, the importance placed on content creation represents an intensification of existing priorities rather than a disruption of the status quo. These events have always been designed to communicate beyond those physically present and the shift towards content-focused design in these contexts should be considered as evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Private events present a more nuanced challenge to professional integrity. When a couple books a content creator for their wedding, or more broadly, sets out to design their celebration as fit for social media consumption, they are making conscious decisions about how they want to experience one of the most important days of their life. This leaves planners at risk of delivering exactly what was requested by the client and, at the same time, neglecting the fundamentals of what actually makes a great wedding.

Are we witnessing a natural evolution of client needs we should simply meet at all costs?

Or, are we seeing the systematic erosion of actual competence in favour of new skills that may suit the zeitgeist but have little relationship to the quality of our service?

The question at the heart of it all is:

Do we want content creators who plan events, or event planners who create content?

The lines are already blurred. There are planners today who understand algorithms better than event logistics, who know how to create viral moments but struggle to produce an event that feels organised or well-executed. Yet they succeed in the market because they’re answering to a measure of success that clients think they want, even when those measures don’t correlate with our understanding of what makes a great event.

Reclaiming the craft

The industry stands at an inflection point, facing a choice between two distinct futures. We can continue on the trajectory of optimising events for the feed and produce a generation of content creators who happen to plan events. Or we can use this as a moment of clarity to reassess and articulate what makes an event genuinely worth attending, ensuring those essential qualities are preserved and prioritised even as we adapt to this new technological and cultural reality.

The solution is obviously not a blanket rejection of social media and content creation— now permanent features of a landscape that successful planners must navigate skilfully. Instead, we have to insist that content creation serves our craft rather than replaces it.

This requires an honest conversation about what we’re aiming for. Rather than measuring success only through content performance, we’d do well to develop more sophisticated methods of evaluating our events’ immediate impact and lasting value that transcends social media engagement. An event that generates viral content but leaves guests feeling underwhelmed, disconnected or, at worst, manipulated, has clearly failed, regardless of its online success.

For clients, this transformation demands a more nuanced understanding of what it is they are actually asking planners to accomplish. A planner's Instagram grid and follower count may reveal aesthetic sensibility and marketing nous, but that bears no relationship to their their ability to manage complex logistics, navigate real-time crises or perhaps most importantly, create the environmental conditions that allow a memorable event to take place.

The most successful planners in this evolving landscape will be those who recognise that the most compelling content emerges from genuine experience, not the reverse.

They’ll create events that exist fully in the room first and translate to the feed second, because authentic experience remains the most compelling content of all.

The camera may eat first, but if it devours the entire feast, what remains for guests to consume? The industry's challenge, and opportunity, lies in learning to nourish both appetites without starving either one. Planners who master this balance will not only survive the current transformation but define the profession’s future, proving that the most shareable moments come from events worth sharing, not designed for sharing.

Ultimately, success, however measured, should be whether guests leave an event feeling that they’ve experienced something meaningful. Content will follow naturally from that foundation, but only if we remember to build it first.