How to Not Waste Your IBC Investment
IBC is one of the biggest line items in a media technology or broadcast company’s marketing budget. Stand build, travel, accommodation, staffing, collateral…by the time you’ve added it all up, you’re often looking at a six-figure investment for four days in Amsterdam.
And yet so many companies treat IBC like a single event rather than a campaign. They put their energy into the stand, the demo, the giveaway, and assume the story will tell itself once the right people walk past.
But here’s the rub: it won’t. Not because the technology isn’t good enough, but because a show floor is one of the most crowded narrative environments in the industry calendar. Every company on that floor is talking about innovation. Every company has an end-to-end solution. Every company is pushing boundaries. Take the logos off half the stands at IBC and you’d struggle to tell one from another.
If you want your investment to actually pay off, the work has to start weeks or even months before the show opens and continue long after it closes.
The problem with treating IBC as one moment.
A show floor conversation is forgotten within a week unless something reinforces it. A press release that lands the same week as three hundred competitors’ announcements gets buried in inboxes before most journalists open it. A great product demo, without a story attached to it, becomes a feature list rather than a reason to care.
The companies that get real value from IBC understand that the show itself is just the middle of the story. There’s a before, a during, and an after, and most of the value sits in the parts companies tend to skip.
Say something specific.
The first area where most IBC narratives fall short is language. Innovation, end-to-end, transformative, disruptive — these words have been used so often, by so many companies, that they’ve stopped meaning anything. If your messaging could be lifted onto a competitor’s stand without anyone noticing, it isn’t doing its job. At least not correctly.
The brands that stand out at IBC are the ones that can explain, in plain language, what specifically makes them different and why it matters to the person standing in front of them. That means not just training your staff on a tagline or repository of buzz words; rather, it’s the result of genuinely interrogating what your product does, who it helps, and what problem it solves that nobody else is solving in quite the same way.
It also needs to be a story your spokespeople and stand staff can actually deliver, consistently, when they’ve answered the same question forty times. A narrative that only works on a slide deck isn’t a narrative. It needs to survive being said out loud, by a tired engineer, to a skeptical journalist, at 4pm on day 3 of the show.
Build the story before you build the stand.
Most IBC PR activity clusters around the show itself, which means journalists are fielding hundreds of announcements in the same narrow window. That’s the worst possible time to introduce yourself for the first time.
Pre-show thought leadership gives you a way to start the conversation early and on your own terms. An opinion piece on where the industry is heading, a briefing with a key trade journalist, a preview of what you’ll be showing and why it matters – all of this means that by the time IBC opens, you’re not a stranger asking for five minutes of someone’s time. You’re a known voice they’re already interested in hearing more from.
During the show, the opportunity shifts to interviews, demos, and real-time content that captures momentum as it happens rather than reconstructing it after the fact. And once the show floor closes, don’t stop talking! Post-show recaps, follow-up features, and continued commentary keep the narrative alive, especially since so many other companies will just go quiet until the next show cycle.
Underpinning all of this is proper media planning. Knowing which journalists you want to speak to, what you want to say to each of them, and when you want to say it will organically create a campaign that builds on itself.
The follow-up is where the value lies.
Here’s the weakest part in most companies’ show strategies: the conversations and connections made at IBC are only valuable if someone follows through on them afterwards, and yet follow-up is consistently weak or non-existent.
Meaningful outreach makes the difference. That means do yourself – and your contacts – a favor, and skip the generic “great to meet you at IBC” email. Instead, reference a specific conversation you had, the pain point they mentioned, the question they asked, and propose a clear next step. Bonus: propose a hard time (or times) to meet and discuss further, rather than “let me know when you have some time to chat.”
If you promised something at the stand, that promise needs to be honored quickly. A demo, a white paper, an introduction to someone on your team, a case study that answers the exact question they raised, all of it should be ready to send within days, not weeks. Compile the materials before the show ends, not after you’ve landed back home and the moment has already cooled.
And the window of attention immediately after IBC is one of the most valuable and most wasted opportunities in the entire cycle. Connecting with the people you met on LinkedIn, sharing your own highlights from the show, and tagging the people and companies you spoke with all keep your name visible while everyone’s memory of the event is still fresh.
Make the investment work as hard as you do.
IBC will always be expensive. The stand, build, travel, dining out and schmoozing with others is never going to get cheaper. But the return on that investment isn’t determined by how much you spend on the show floor; it’s determined by how well you tell your story before you arrive, how clearly you tell it while you’re there, and how consistently you follow it up once everyone’s gone home.
If your last show ended the moment the stand came down, there’s a real opportunity sitting unused. We help clients build the full campaign around IBC, not just the four days in the RAI, so that the investment keeps paying off well into the months that follow.
Get in touch if you’d like us to support planning your IBC2026 campaign.
