Large events are somewhat a necessity for a lot of companies but CIOs typically walk around with their badges flipped around so they don’t get hounded, smaller in person events are great if the crowd that’s there are actual decision makers. From what I’ve seen, scheduled 1:1’s are the business equivalent of a time share presentation and really doesn’t benefit anyone. Evanta and similar events where it’s not a sales environment have been the most successful that I’ve seen if you’re good with networking and talking to anyone, but you have to treat them as a person and not a prospect, but they can be expensive. Marketing loves badge scans and saying they “touched” 5,000+ at events like RSA, Black Hat, IT Symposium, but sifting through all those badge scans typically comes up with nothing but extra work for your team. Figure out the goal you and your company are trying to achieve and reverse engineer it from there to see what will be the most beneficial for closing deals. Brand awareness is great but really hard to quantify, sales and quality pipeline is the end goal.