Ashleigh Cook, CMO of RainFocus, explains why events are quietly one of the richest first-party data sources in marketing, and why most companies are still treating them like a one-off expense instead of a data engine.
I’ve done 180-some episodes of this podcast, and somehow we had never once talked about events. That’s a gap, because it turns out events might be one of the most underrated sources of first-party data in the entire marketing stack.
Ashleigh Cook is CMO of RainFocus, and before that she spent years at Forrester and SiriusDecisions studying what actually separates high-performing organizations from everyone else. Her answer, after years of research: alignment between sales, marketing, and product, with events sitting right at the center of that alignment because of the sheer density of behavioral signal they generate.
Here’s the thing. A single multi-day conference doesn’t just get you a booth full of business cards. According to RainFocus’s own data, it generates over 800 minutes of engagement per individual attendee. That’s check-ins, session attendance, booth visits, one-on-ones, all stacked into a few days instead of spread across months of digital touchpoints.
Why Are Events One of the Best Sources of First-Party Data?
Most brands still treat their event data as an afterthought, something that trickles to sales weeks after the show ends, by which point the moment has passed. Ashleigh’s argument is that this backwards thinking is costing companies a massive amount of usable signal.
“The average event generally consolidates or is comprised of anywhere between five and 20 touch points that are condensed into a single experience. When you think of how long this could take in terms of capturing those data signals digitally, that could take months for many brands.”
— Ashleigh Cook, CMO, RainFocus
Compress months of behavioral data into a few days, and you get something advertising rarely offers: a concentrated, high-fidelity view of a buyer’s actual interest, not just interest inferred from a click.
“A multi-day conference generally will generate over 800 minutes of engagement for an individual. And that’s an incredible amount of opportunity and exposure that a brand has to engage and ultimately win over a loyal customer.”
— Ashleigh Cook, CMO, RainFocus
Layer on the fact that buying committees have grown. Ashleigh cited research putting the average number of buying group members involved in a purchase decision at over 22.
“The number of buying group members that are involved in a decision process has actually increased to well over 22. What’s unique about events is when you go to one, you generally see clusters of individuals or colleagues that go to those events.”
— Ashleigh Cook, CMO, RainFocus
So you’re not just getting one buyer’s signal at an event. You’re often getting the whole committee in one room, generating data at the same time.
Why Has Event Data Historically Been So Siloed?
If events are this valuable, why has this data been so underused? Ashleigh traced it back to the wave of point-solution buying around 2020 and 2021, when teams grabbed whatever tool solved their immediate problem without stepping back to think about the data architecture underneath it.
“Folks were scrambling to purchase point solutions that would solve for their immediate need. And what was missing was taking a step back and thinking more holistically about the data, what you ultimately need, and who are the right stakeholders to involve.”
— Ashleigh Cook, CMO, RainFocus
That’s a pattern I’ve seen play out across marketing tech generally, not just events. Everybody buys the shiny point solution, and three years later nobody can get a straight answer out of their stack because none of it talks to each other.
How Should Brands Personalize the Event Experience?
Personalization at events starts before anyone walks in the door, according to Ashleigh, and the biggest unforced error brands make is asking attendees to fill out the same registration form every single year.
“What we’ve found with customers is when they come to your event, if they’ve attended a previous event, they don’t want to give you the same information over and over. You shouldn’t be asking for the same fields unless something has meaningfully changed.”
— Ashleigh Cook, CMO, RainFocus
She compared it to the classic doctor’s office experience of re-filling out an intake form you’ve filled out a dozen times before. Nobody enjoys that, and it’s a completely avoidable friction point if your data is actually centralized.
Then there’s the stuff that goes beyond friction reduction into genuine delight. Ashleigh told a story about RainFocus’s head of events noticing that an attendee had a long, exhausting day, and knowing from prior data that he loved Taco Bell.
“One night when they knew that he had a long day, they delivered Taco Bell to his room because they knew that was one thing that he really enjoyed and would give him a ton of satisfaction.”
— Ashleigh Cook, CMO, RainFocus
That’s a small gesture, but it’s the kind of thing that sticks with people. It says: we were paying attention, and we used what we knew about you for something other than a sales pitch.
Is AI in Event Marketing Actually Delivering Results Yet?
RainFocus partnered with the Event Leaders Exchange on research and found 69% of event leaders are now using AI in some form. But when they dug into the actual use cases, the results were underwhelming: mostly content creation and copywriting, not strategic application.
“The vast majority of those use cases were around content creation, copywriting, and supporting with optimizing the admin components of their roles.”
— Ashleigh Cook, CMO, RainFocus
Where RainFocus has actually moved the needle is in AI-driven session recommendations. When attendees at a large-scale event got recommendations powered by a partner brand’s proprietary AI feeding into the RainFocus platform, the results were measurable.
“They were actually 30% more likely to show up to a particular session or a meeting that was suggested to them.”
— Ashleigh Cook, CMO, RainFocus
A 30% lift in session attendance from a recommendation engine is a real number, not a vanity metric. That’s the difference between AI as a content-generation crutch and AI as something that actually changes buyer behavior.
I’ll add my own two cents here, because this tracks with everything I see across the industry.
“You can’t really do all of what we’re talking about here. You can’t have a true AI or data strategy if your data is siloed in five, ten different places. It has to be centralized.”
— David Finkelstein, Founder and CEO, BDEX
Every AI initiative I’ve watched fail traces back to this. Companies want the AI outcome without doing the unglamorous data centralization work first. There’s no shortcut.
The Tools Behind the Work
Ashleigh’s stack leans on ChatGPT, Gemini, and NotebookLM for day-to-day workflows and ideation, plus more strategic use cases like closed-loss analysis by vertical. Gong captures sales and customer conversations that feed back into marketing messaging and product feedback loops. RainFocus itself powers the company’s own annual user conference, which doubles as a live testing ground for new features. And Voxo generates AI session transcriptions and summaries in near real time, letting attendees turn what they just heard into a LinkedIn post before they’ve even left the room.
The Bigger Picture
The pattern here is the same one I keep coming back to on this show: the data has been there all along, the problem has always been architecture and intent. Events generate an unusually dense, high-quality signal about real buying committees, but only if a brand treats that data as an asset to be centralized and activated instead of a byproduct to be filed away after the fact. Companies that figure out how to fold their event data into the broader customer journey, in real time, are going to out-execute the ones still emailing PDFs of the attendee list to sales three weeks later.
Connect with Ashleigh Cook on LinkedIn or learn more about RainFocus.
This article was adapted from an episode of Deconstructing Data, BDEX’s weekly podcast on data-driven marketing. Tune in live every Thursday at 4:15 PM Eastern on LinkedIn.
About BDEX: For companies that need clean identity data to power their products, BDEX offers unmatched quality and execution. Visit bdex.com and click “Talk to an Expert” to get started.
Video
Watch the full episode on YouTube: First-Party Data Power: AI, Personalization, and Event Marketing’s Future
