We Can Work From Anywhere. So Why Do We Keep Showing Up?
What remote work, trade shows, marathons, coffee meetings, and a decade-old conference idea can teach us about the value of purposeful presence.
The Big Question
In March 2020, I was anxiously refreshing my newsfeed. Airports were shutting down. COVID-19 was spreading. At the television station where I worked, we were still figuring out who could work from home and how we were going to make that happen. But there was one website I kept checking more than almost anything else: The Boston Marathon.
I ran my first marathon in 2015, and Boston had always been a dream. I was never going to qualify based on speed, so I found another way in. I secured a fundraising spot with the 261 Fearless team, founded by Kathrine Switzer, and raised $11,000 through family, friends, and my own contribution.
I was going to Boston until I wasn't. About a month before the race, the Boston Marathon was postponed until the fall. Eventually, it was canceled as an in-person event altogether. If I wanted the medal, I had to complete the marathon virtually.
Have you ever run for five hours by yourself? There are a surprising number of logistics involved. I mapped out my route. I supplied water stations and recruited people to staff them. I gave my cheer groups cowbells. My coach, Chris Patterson, joined me for the second half.
I finished the 26.2 mile run. My legs certainly knew I'd run a marathon. I earned the medal, and I'm incredibly grateful that the virtual race gave me a way to finish something I'd spent months training and fundraising for when bringing thousands of runners together in Massachusetts simply wasn't possible.
Then I ran Boston in person the following year. The difference was immediate: the expo, the other runners, the volunteers, the crowds and the noise. And the hills. Ouch, the hills.
This time, it felt like a proper race. One of my favorite moments happened near the end. I heard someone yell, “Mimi!” I knew a Mimi. More specifically, I knew a Mimi from Facebook. Mimi and I were both members of the runDisney Independent Princesses, an online group started in 2016 so women running Disney races could support each other with training, event planning, and those ridiculous early mornings when most of our families were still asleep.
Members wear pink bows on our shoes so we can recognize each other. We recruit virtual Fairy Godmothers who provide encouragement through Facebook and text. I knew Mimi was running Boston, but she'd started ahead of me. Apparently, we'd spent much of the second half running fairly close to each other without realizing it.
Then I heard her name. I saw her. I clocked the pink bow and we sprint-limped that final stretch together. A digital community had just created one of my favorite memories from a very physical event.
Which makes the question more complicated than I originally thought: If technology has proven that we don't have to be in the same place to participate, learn, collaborate, build relationships, or work together, why do we keep showing up? What happens when we do?
Why I Started Digging
I've been thinking about in-person events a lot lately. People in my network recently attended IMTS. I've watched companies I follow participate in Ashby One in London. My good friend Julie Foley is representing her company at a conference in Washington, DC this week. I've even applied to speak at a few conferences myself. Fingers crossed.
In stalking different events across LinkedIn I realized something: I miss them. One of my favorite professional events before COVID was Second Street's annual conference in St. Louis. I spoke on panels, learned what other broadcasters were doing, and inevitably came home with ideas.
Webinars can absolutely provide that spark. I've attended plenty of good ones, but there's something different about sitting down over a cocktail with someone from another market or industry and asking: "Wait. You did what? How did that work?"
Sometimes the most useful part of a conference isn't the thing printed on your agenda. I've also been watching remote-first companies deliberately spend money to put people back into the same room.
Nerdio recently brought its marketing organization together for a two-day offsite in Charleston. The company's own LinkedIn post described Nerdio as remote-first and said the gathering was organized around a simple idea: “Connection makes better work.” The agenda wasn't two days of PowerPoint presentations. Leadership talked about where the business was headed and Marketing's role in getting there. The team worked through communication styles. They planned upcoming events. They had breakout sessions. They spent an afternoon assembling bicycles for a local charity. Team members even received handwritten appreciation cards.
Then there was Ashby One, where a technology company brought people together in London to talk about upcoming product developments, learn, ask questions, and connect. Meanwhile, one of the companies at the center of our increasingly digital world—OpenAI—is investing significantly in its own in-person event strategy. The State of Brand: OpenAI Is Betting on In-Person
That's a lot of plane tickets, hotel rooms, conference badges, catered lunches, and employee hours for a professional world that spent the last several years proving how much we can accomplish without them. So I started digging.
Five Minutes to Catch Up
COVID didn't invent virtual communication, but it forced millions of us to conduct a massive real-world experiment with it. Meetings became Zoom calls. Conferences became livestreams. Offices became kitchen tables.
Even marathons became something you could technically do by yourself. Some organizations discovered that virtual events could do things physical ones couldn't. Games Done Quick is a fascinating example. The speedrunning organization already had a thriving community and successful fundraising events before the pandemic. Its January 2020 Awesome Games Done Quick event raised more than $3.1 million before widespread COVID lockdowns began.
When gathering became impossible, GDQ moved its events online. The virtual format didn't magically cause donations to explode—the numbers don't support that simple story. But something more interesting happened. The event survived.
People were still doing speedruns at the same time.
People were still watching together.
People were still reacting together.
People were still donating together.
GDQ preserved much of what made the event feel live without requiring everyone to occupy the same physical room. That distinction matters. Virtual doesn't have to mean asynchronous and physical presence isn't required for people to experience something together.
Academic researchers have been wrestling with the same distinction. Studies of virtual, hybrid, and face-to-face events suggest that the question isn't necessarily which format wins. Different environments appear capable of producing different types of engagement and interaction. A 2026 Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing study of 920 B2B trade-show visitors is particularly interesting. Researchers found that face-to-face and technology-mediated interactions appeared to be complementary rather than substitutes. Face-to-face interaction influenced purchase intention through both relational and calculative trust, while technology-mediated interactions primarily operated through calculative trust. The researchers measured purchase intention rather than completed purchases, an important limitation, but the distinction is still worth exploring. Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing study
Instead of asking whether virtual or in-person communication is better, perhaps we should be asking: What is each one better at?
The Current Conversation
The business case for events usually comes back to ROI. Truthfully, that is a reasonable approach. Trade shows are expensive. Corporate offsites are expensive. Flights are expensive. Hotels are expensive. Pulling employees away from their regular work is expensive. If Marketing spends $100,000 on an event, someone eventually wants to know what the company got for $100,000.
How many badge scans?
How many leads?
How many meetings?
How much pipeline?
How many customers attended?
How did employees rate the offsite?
Those are useful questions, but they're also questions about things that are relatively easy to count. Some of my most valuable experiences at events would be almost impossible to put into that spreadsheet.
Take Cruze Into Summer as an example. Years ago, I attended a Second Street conference in St. Louis where a presentation from Lutz Finger changed the way I thought about contest data.
A contest registration tells you someone wants to win something. That's useful, but let's be honest: if you're giving away a car, finding people who would like a free car isn't exactly a groundbreaking customer insight.
What if you asked better questions? When we eventually launched Cruze Into Summer, we could ask whether participants expected to purchase a vehicle in the next several months. We could look at intentional communication opt-ins. The contest could tell us something about potential buying intent instead of simply generating a giant list of people who enjoy free things.
I recently wrote about that campaign while exploring the difference between collecting data and actually asking, “So what?”
Here's the part I hadn't really considered until writing this Field Note. One of the ideas behind that campaign started years earlier, in a conference room in St. Louis. How exactly do I attribute that in an event ROI dashboard? Nobody scanning my conference badge could have entered: Future Chevy campaign influenced by idea Alyx heard today. Yet it happened.
What Else Should We Consider?
Maybe some of the value of being together occurs between the agenda items. A few weeks ago, I met fellow American Marketing Association member Sarah Vartarian for coffee here in Albany.
Sarah owns an advertising agency and had recently returned from maternity leave. She brought her beautiful two-month-old daughter with her.
We talked for two hours. I picked her brain about freelancing and building a business. She asked me questions about being a new mom and balancing work with raising a baby. Neither of us was exclusively the mentor or the mentee.
When I got home, I signed up for Square payments. I tightened my freelance packages. And, more importantly, I started thinking differently about my professional situation. I wasn't simply an unemployed marketing professional waiting for someone to hire me. I was a marketing specialist looking for clients or the right full-time opportunity.
Could Sarah have emailed me advice about freelancing? Absolutely. In fact, another professional relationship has given me one of the best arguments for asynchronous communication. When I began seriously exploring voiceover work, my mother-in-law's friend Holly sent me an extraordinarily useful email full of advice. That email became part of my project notes because I could save it, reread it, reference it, and act on it later.
Coffee isn't automatically better than email. They do different jobs. The email became a resource and the coffee became a catalyst. That distinction makes me wonder whether information transfer is really the unique value of meeting in person.
Maybe part of the value is activation. There's another possibility: serendipity. Remember Mimi? Our relationship started digitally. The Independent Princesses helped us find each other before we ever happened to share pavement.
After Boston, I made sure to meet up with her again following the Berlin Marathon in 2022. Then, in 2023, I encountered her again while running the London Marathon. She lives in California and I live in New York. Apparently European marathons are one of our meeting places.
Berlin produced another relationship entirely differently. Two days before the race, I took an English-language bicycle tour of the city. I noticed another woman in the group wearing a local race shirt. (Runners notice these things.) We started talking. It turned out she and her friend were also from Albany. I had traveled thousands of miles and accidentally met people from home because someone wore the right T-shirt. We took a photograph together in Berlin. We still try to meet up for runs when we can.
This is basically what companies hope happens at a good industry event. Someone recognizes a logo instead of a race shirt. "You work with them?"
A conversation starts. Maybe nothing happens. Maybe you connect on LinkedIn. Then six months later that person has exactly the expertise you need. An idea from that conversation turns up in a campaign several years later.
Physical spaces create collisions. Digital communication can keep those relationships alive afterward. And sometimes—as Mimi demonstrates—the process works exactly backward.
Story Behind the Strategy
I don't think the lesson is that everyone needs to go back to the office. Actually, I think that's a completely different conversation. Mandatory proximity and purposeful presence are not the same thing. Research from Atlassian offers an interesting example. The company has studied how intentional gatherings affect distributed teams and reported an average 27% increase in team connection following those gatherings, with the effect gradually returning toward baseline after several months. Atlassian's Intentional Togetherness research
That doesn't mean distributed employees need neighboring cubicles. It suggests there may be value in deliberately choosing moments when physical presence accomplishes something useful. Nerdio's offsite illustrates the distinction nicely. The company doesn't need its remote-first marketing team in Charleston every Monday morning to answer emails.
Instead, it brought people together for strategy, working styles, planning, recognition, conversation, and a shared service project.
Remote work proved that we don't have to be together to work together. Perhaps the next question for leaders isn't how to reverse that. It's: When is being together worth it? Once you've answered that, design the experience around the reason you're asking people to show up.
If the goal is distributing information, maybe the webinar really is better.
If people need something they can repeatedly reference, write the email.
If you need a geographically dispersed group to participate, virtual may dramatically increase access.
If you're trying to create relationships, expose people to unfamiliar perspectives, work through ambiguous problems, build shared memories, or create opportunities for conversations you can't predict?
Knowing the answers to those questions is when the price of a plane ticket starts making sense.
So What?
I started this research thinking I was writing about why in-person events still matter in a remote-first world. I don't think that's quite what I found. The more interesting lesson is that communication channels aren't interchangeable. That's something I've taught communication students for years: don't start with the channel you like. Start with what you're trying to accomplish.
For leaders, that means an offsite shouldn't exist simply because we haven't gotten everyone together lately. Ask what people should understand, experience, or be able to do afterward that would be difficult to accomplish remotely.
For marketers, it means evaluating an event beyond booth traffic while still demanding a reason for the investment. Leads and pipeline matter. So might customer trust, product understanding, relationship development, and the ideas employees bring home.
For remote employees, it means appreciating what flexibility gives us without pretending every human interaction translates perfectly to a screen.
For event organizers, perhaps it means protecting some of the space between the agenda items instead of programming every minute. You can't schedule every useful conversation, you can only create the conditions where one might happen.
Where to Learn More
If you want to keep digging, I'd start with the research rather than another “five reasons conferences are back” article.
The 2026 Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing study examines how face-to-face and technology-mediated interactions affect different dimensions of trust and purchase intention at B2B trade shows. Read the study abstract
The 2022 Event Management research comparing virtual and face-to-face events provides useful pandemic-era context, while a 2018 paper examining traditional, virtual, and hybrid conferences offers a fascinating pre-pandemic baseline. 2022 Event Management research 2018 Event Management research
Atlassian's work is worth reading specifically through the lens of distributed teams because it focuses on intentional gatherings rather than assuming permanent office attendance is the solution. Atlassian research
The State of Brand's examination of OpenAI's investment in events is what originally pushed me deeper into the business side of this question. OpenAI Is Betting on In-Person
Questions I'm Still Exploring
I'm still not convinced we've figured out how to measure the best parts of an event.
How long does the value of an in-person interaction last?
How frequently do distributed teams actually benefit from gathering?
How much of an event's value comes from the programmed content versus the conversations around it?
Can companies measure relationship-building without turning every human interaction into another KPI?
What do hybrid events need to do differently so virtual participants aren't simply watching the “real” event happen somewhere else?
And perhaps the question I keep coming back to: How do you measure something you didn't know was going to happen?
In 2020, I ran the Boston Marathon virtually. I recreated water stations. I recruited cheerleaders. I handed out cowbells. My coach joined me for the second half. Technology and a little creativity allowed me to accomplish the goal when the event itself couldn't happen.
A year later, I finally got the real thing. Somewhere near the finish line, in a crowd of thousands of runners, I heard someone yell a Facebook friend's name. I spotted a pink bow and suddenly I wasn't finishing Boston alone. The medal wasn't different but the experience was.
