Are we now trying to measure too much at our events?

Last week I moderated two debate series at Event Konnector. Great rooms, sharp people, the kind of conversation that gets more honest the longer it runs. It got as passionate and heated as the "is ai going to take my job conversations". 

In both sessions, I asked the same question: how is everyone actually tracking and measuring ROI right now?

The conversation didn't stay theoretical for long. It went straight to facial recognition. Emotion tracking. Cameras at the entrance that don't just check you in, they try to read what you feel while you're there.

Not because anyone in the room thought that was a good idea. Because a lot of them said their events are already doing it, or being pitched on it hard, and they're worried about what it's costing them on the other side.

The instinct isn't wrong. The execution might be.

I've spent this entire year telling event and experiential professionals that you have to prove what your event produced. I'm not walking that back. If you can't prove your event's value, you lose the budget conversation, and I've written about exactly that.

But there's a difference between proving your event worked and surveilling the people who showed up to find out.

The clearest data on this comes from stadiums and sports venues, where biometric adoption is furthest along, and it's a preview of where the rest of the event industry is headed. Nearly half of stadiums and live sports venues, 47 percent, now list biometric technology as a top initiative. Facial recognition at entry, biometric concessions, systems built to identify and track attendees in real time, already rolling out across the NFL, MLB, and major European football leagues.

Here's the problem. The fans on the other side of that camera are telling researchers something very different from what the vendors are telling venue operators. In the same research, 40 percent of respondents said they feared venues would misuse their data. Another 35 percent said they were specifically wary of increased monitoring.

Read that again. Even in the sector adopting this technology fastest, and with the most to gain from frictionless entry, close to half the audience doesn't trust what's being done with their data. Corporate events and conferences are earlier in this curve, which means planners still have a choice about which direction to take it in.

The tech doesn't even hold up

Set the trust problem aside for a second. The technology itself has a track record, and it's not a good one.

HireVue, one of the biggest names in AI-driven candidate screening, discontinued its facial coding tools after an FTC complaint alleged the system disproportionately misread candidates based on speaking style and tone. Google, Microsoft, and Nielsen all retired their own emotion recognition features around the same time, for the same underlying reason: the tech doesn't reliably do what it claims, and it does it worse for some groups of people than others.

That's not a fringe concern. That's three of the largest companies in tech deciding their own emotion recognition products weren't good enough to keep selling.

If the companies that build this technology don't trust it enough to stand behind it, an event organizer trying to justify a marketing budget shouldn't be the one betting on it instead.

And it's already getting expensive

This isn't hypothetical risk either. Mobile World Congress, one of the largest trade shows in the world, was fined 200,000 euros for requiring facial recognition for identity verification without proper consent. Illinois has one of the strictest biometric privacy laws in the country and keeps expanding enforcement. New York City now requires any venue using biometric technology to disclose it, and bars them from selling that data. GDPR treats biometric data as a special category with its own rules, full stop.

The regulatory net is tightening in real time, in multiple countries, at the exact moment more event technology vendors are pitching biometric tracking as the answer to proving your event worked.

You don't want to be the planner who solved a budget problem by creating a legal one.

What this actually means for your measurement plan

Here's where I land, and it connects directly to the framework I teach inside CPES.

Purpose comes first, always. Before you touch a single piece of measurement technology, you have to know what you're actually trying to learn, and why. If the honest answer is "we want to know if people were engaged," that's a real, answerable question, and there are ways to answer it that don't require reading someone's face without their knowledge.

Behavior is measurable without biometrics. Did they visit the booth they said they'd visit. Did they take the meeting. Did they convert. Did they come back next year. Those are the signals that actually connect to business outcomes, and none of them require a camera trained on someone's expression.

Emotion matters in event design, deeply. It's the second pillar of everything I teach. But designing for emotion and surveilling for emotion are not the same discipline. One is a decision you make when you build the experience. The other is something you do to the people who showed up trusting you.

The event and experiential professionals who are going to win the next five years aren't the ones with the most invasive measurement stack. They're the ones who can prove their event worked using a framework attendees never had to worry about, because purpose, behavior, and outcome were built in from the start, not extracted from someone's face at the door.

You don't need to track what someone feels to prove what your event produced. You need to know what you were trying to produce in the first place.

If this resonated with you at all, check out the CPES.