CEMA Summit Celebrates 35 Years -

CEMA attendees are, first and foremost, event marketers sharing their best practices, experiences, and knowledge with one another.

This year marked the 35th anniversary of CEMA (Corporate Event Marketing Association, powered by PCMA), making the 2025 CEMA Summit, held July 27-29, an even bigger cause for celebration. More than 820 event marketers convened at the Fairmont Austin in Austin, Texas, for three days of leading-edge education and networking. Given Austin is the birthplace of SXSW and its particular brand of creative thought leadership, the city was the perfect backdrop for CEMA’s tech-forward programming — and no doubt contributed to the event smashing previous attendance records.

“We had the largest attendance of any CEMA Summit in the last 35 years,” said Brian Mason, CEMA’s vice president of strategy and operations. “This community wants to be together and share their knowledge with each other. At the core, CEMA is about event marketers sharing their best practices, experiences, and knowledge. When they come together, magic happens.”

The summit’s dynamic format mixes education sessions with on-site activations like Innovation Nation, where C-suite leaders share how their organ-izations have leveraged cutting-edge technology and creative partnerships to power through business challenges. Audience members cast votes in real-time for their favorite presentation. This year’s winner, Wicket Chief Operating Officer Jeff Boehm, was awarded a mainstage speaking slot for unpacking how his company’s facial-recognition technology works with Salesforce’s suite of cloud applications.

CEMA’s slate of educational programs was organized into three learning tracks: building brand, building career, and building team strategy. During the program, attendees heard from speakers including Vivian Eickhoff, the general manager of event production and studios at Microsoft, and Monique Ruff-Bell, TED’s chief program and strategy officer. “The reason our content worked so well this year is that the community built it. We have a strong educational committee that reviewed over 60 submissions to build the content program,” Mason said. “The CEMA community works because we learn from one another.”

Other program highlights in 2025 included an on-site demonstration of PCMA’s Spark AI local vendor-search tool, and a variety of wellness activities like hands-on cooking classes, sound baths, goat yoga, and live dance classes. This year’s summit also featured a 45-minute “AMA” (ask me anything) Town Hall where advisory board members from Atlassian and Moody’s and CEMA leaders answered event marketers’ questions in real time.

CEMA used the summit as an opportunity to launch the Top 100 Event Marketers campaign, which will recognize 50 Rising Stars — event marketers with less than five years of experience — and 50 Champions — event marketers with more than five years in the industry. Celebrating the professionals who drive business for some of the most influential tech companies on the planet is another way to bring the CEMA community together and encourage networking among event marketers, Mason said. Attendees were encouraged to nominate colleagues for recognition on site or in the days immediately following the event. Winners will be announced beginning this fall, and a formal awards ceremony will take place next August at CEMA Summit in Toronto, Canada.

Another new twist at the 2025 Summit was the first-timers program, which enabled 380 new attendees to mix and mingle virtually in the weeks and months leading up to the event. “Nicole Kovac on our branding and messaging committee built a program that connected individuals before the program started. Each small group was hosted by a CEMA member or advisory board member who they met at the reception,” Mason said. “They also stayed connected throughout the event. This really gave the first-timers a true welcome to the event before they even arrived.”

The summit also gave attendees the opportunity to contribute their time and energy to benefit the local community. Volunteers who participated in the PCMA Foundation’s on-site “Do Good, Feel Good” initiative packed food bags for the Central Texas Food Bank. The Foundation also donated $5,000 to the food bank to support local flood-relief efforts.

The success of this year’s summit is a testament to the strength of the CEMA community and their loyalty to each other, Mason said. “CEMA is a 365-day-a-year organization and the summit is only the culmination of all that happens throughout the year,” he said. “We worked really hard to create value for the organization through the entire year and when people reached the time for the summit, they showed up in a big way.”

CEMA Summit 2026 will take place in Toronto, Canada, Aug. 9-11, 2026. Find out more at CemaOnline.org.

Experiential in Nature

The CEMA Summit takesplace every summer, but the education and networking fueled by the meeting never stops. Throughout the year, CEMA offers both virtual and in-person educational programs for members.

Last month, event marketers participated in a CEMA Study Tour, going behind the scenes at Oktane, the enterprise cloud software company Okta’s dynamic annual meeting, held in Las Vegas Sept. 24-26. Participants had the chance to learn from on-site production and tech teams and participated in hands-on activations throughout the three days on site.

Kate Mulcrone is Convene’s digital managing editor.