What we mean when we say “make it worth talking about.”
The phrase started as a working slogan. Six months in, it's clarified something about what the work actually is — and where the industry defaults keep pulling us back.
We put "make it worth talking about" on the site because it was the shortest sentence we could write that captured what we actually try to do. Every other version — outcomes-driven, high-impact, results-oriented — felt like it belonged to somebody else's brochure. The phrase has done more work than we expected. It also creates a specific pressure on how we work, which is what I want to write about here.
When a client says they want a brand activation to be "memorable," that's a soft ask. Memorable is a private measurement — it happens inside one head, at some later time, and there's no way to check whether it happened. Every event ends up "memorable" to somebody. The word tells you nothing about whether the money was well-spent.
Worth talking about is different. It's testable. It happens in a hallway, on a Slack channel, in the parking lot on the way home, on someone's LinkedIn feed at 11 p.m. — and it either happens or it doesn't. The phrase forces the design brief in a specific direction: what will people actually say to each other about this, unprompted, when the venue lights come down?
The problem with "success looks like this"
Discovery calls tend to open with a variant of "what does success look like?" and end with a variant of "we'll know it when we see it." That's not the client being evasive — most clients haven't been given the language to describe post-event outcomes at the level the question is really asking about. So they reach for what they've heard other people say, and what they've heard is a decade of agency deck-speak: engagement, reach, impressions, brand affinity, lasting impact.
None of those describe what a specific human being will do differently on Tuesday morning. Which is the actual question. If your event doesn't change anyone's Tuesday morning, it didn't happen — no matter how many hero shots landed.
Memorable is a private measurement. Worth-talking-about is a public one — and public is the one that compounds.
The re-framing is small but the downstream consequences are large. It shifts the brief from "what visuals do you want in the hero shot" to "what's the one specific claim you'd like a sponsor to make about you to their peer, in casual conversation, within a week." Same event budget. Very different design decisions.
What actually shows up in a hallway
Two hundred people leave your event. Ninety of them, by our count, will mention it to somebody within 72 hours. What are they going to say?
Most of the time it's one of four things:
- A moment. Something that happened — the surprise reveal, the panelist who told the truth on stage, the meal that everyone photographed.
- A framing. A phrase or reframe from a keynote that stuck — usually one that named something the audience already half-suspected.
- An artefact. A physical thing they left with — a book, a tool, a piece of print — that seeded conversations at their desk later.
- An introduction. A person they met that they wouldn't have found otherwise, and who they've messaged since.
Notice what's not on the list: the lighting rig, the AV production quality, the swag bag, the after-party. Those things matter — they're the ambient conditions that let the four items above happen — but they're rarely what the conversation is about the next morning. You can spend 40% – 70% of a budget on production polish and 5% – 10% on any of the four things above, and the polish is invisible in the story.
How to design for it
Once you accept that the four categories above are what actually gets talked about, the design process narrows in a useful way. For each event, we now ask ourselves before locking a run sheet:
- What is the one moment we're engineering, and who is it for?
- What is the one framing we want to plant in vocabulary?
- What is the one artefact that will still be on someone's desk in three weeks?
- What are the two introductions per attendee we're deliberately trying to broker?
Not every event needs all four. A sponsor onboarding session needs the artefact and the introduction. A launch event needs the moment and the framing. A board offsite needs the framing and the introduction. Choosing which two matter for a given audience is where most of the strategic work sits.
Sponsors are their own audience with their own version of "worth talking about" — usually a very specific one, tied to a metric they need to defend internally. We split their design track from the attendee track deliberately.
The measurable version
We test these four categories after every event. The instrument is a two-question follow-up sent 72 hours out — deliberately not immediately, because 72 hours is where the mention has either happened or it hasn't. The prompts are simple:
- "Have you talked to someone about this event since it ended?"
- "If yes, what specifically did you talk about?"
The second question is the useful one. The answers cluster remarkably cleanly into the four categories above, and when they don't cluster — when most responses are just "it was well-run" — that's the signal that we designed a well-run event that wasn't worth talking about. Two different things, and the wrap deck should say so honestly.
That's the version of the phrase that's operational. It's a filter on the design brief, an evaluation instrument, and a diagnostic when things don't land. It's not a slogan.
The reason we keep it on the site is because it makes the phone ring from a specific kind of client. The ones who read it and immediately know what we mean tend to be the ones we can help. The ones who read it and ask us what our capabilities matrix looks like are usually a different fit.
If you're reading this and something in it landed, we should talk.