In the last fifteen months, I have been to four European martech events: MeasureCamp Amsterdam, The MarTech Summit Amsterdam, Martech World Forum in London, and AntiCon in London.
Four in fifteen months felt respectable until I held it up against people who do this for real. It does not come within sight of the tally Steen Rasmussen racks up, or the North American tour Juan Mendoza just put himself through, and I know both of them well enough to say that to their faces.
People tend to lump these events together as "martech conferences," ask which one is best, and expect a single winner. That question has the wrong shape. These events are built for different people, and the useful answer depends entirely on who is asking.
So this is not a ranking. It is a comparison, written for a brand-side marketer with one trip in the budget who wants to spend it on the right room. I will tell you what each event is, how it actually felt, where it falls short, and who I would send to it.
Two things about my vantage point first, because they shape everything below. I attended each of these once, so this is a snapshot and not a longitudinal study. And I was not a neutral observer at Martech World Forum: I hosted an on-stage interview there, so read my notes on that one knowing I had a foot backstage.
One naming caveat that trips everyone up. Martech World Forum, run by The Martech Weekly, and The MarTech Summit, run by BEETc, are two separate organisations whose names are almost identical. Different events, different teams. I attended both, and yes, it confused me too.
How I judged them
I scored each event on six things, all through the eyes of that one-trip brand-side marketer rather than my own consultant priorities. The one that carries the most weight is content depth, and how much of it you can actually take home and use, because a budgeted trip should buy you something you can act on the next day at work.
The rest are the quality of the people in the room and how easy it is to actually talk to them, how much commercial pressure the vendors put on the day, whether it is worth the money, how senior and how brand-side the crowd is, and the plain energy of the place.
But let's pause for a second. Tell me what you think about this 👇🏻
That bit about talking to people needs a caveat, because easy is not the same thing for everyone. I am an introvert. An extravert will happily work a big open hall, whereas I tend to do better in a smaller, more intimate setting that almost pushes you into a conversation before you can talk yourself out of it.
Sounds backwards, I know, but it is just how I am wired, and it shapes which of these rooms I got the most out of.
Which makes me wish someone would try a friendship bench at one of these. It started as a community-led mental health idea, a bench you sit on as a signal that you are open to talking, and someone comes and joins you.
At a martech event it could do the same for anyone who finds the networking part daunting, a low-stakes way to start a conversation and maybe forge a new peer friendship without having to barge into a circle of strangers.
I would use it. Would you?
If you are an event organizer interested in this different type of sponsorship? Contact me today.
Back to the comparison. 👇🏻
Here is the short version. The detail is underneath.
MeasureCamp Amsterdam
MeasureCamp is a free unconference, built by practitioners for practitioners, with firm rules keeping vendors from running the show. There is no agenda until the attendees write one on the morning, on a board, in front of everyone. Sessions run from straight presentations to honest interactive discussions, and lately the topics have stretched well past pure measurement. With agentic CDPs and AI decisioning arriving, accurate behavioural data is becoming mission critical, which is why I half-joke it could be renamed MartechCamp. I will write about why the foundations matter more than the hype in my upcoming agentic CDP series, and that argument was alive in the room here.
The detail I keep recommending to other organisers is small and clever: when people pitch a session, they declare its complexity level. So you can choose a room that sits at your level instead of gambling. The conversations also do not stop when the session does, they follow you into the corridor and the coffee queue.
The honest catch is access, not quality. The tickets are completely free, which means they vanish faster than you can refresh the page. The Amsterdam edition runs on a Saturday, which for me usually collides with my daughter's birthday, so getting there is its own small campaign. I have only made the Amsterdam one so far, and I am still trying to crack one of the others.
Best for hands-on analysts and marketers, measurement people and consultants who want depth, want to choose their own level, and have zero appetite for vendor theatre. As I said in my MeasureCamp write-up, if you go to one event in the data world, make it this one. Value for money is not really calculable: free in, full value out.
Matthew Niederberger
The MarTech Summit, Amsterdam
The Martech Summit was the most conventional of the four, in a good way. A single day, English throughout, with a sensible balance of vendor presentations and panel discussions. There were around sixteen vendor stands, and at no point did their presence feel heavy. The swag, I will admit, was peak.
The content was on point and deliberately wider than my day-to-day, which pulled in a genuinely mixed crowd, everyone from performance marketers to data engineers. The audience was active, with real questions coming from the floor, and one inventive session put images on screen and made the room vote on whether they were AI-generated. I also walked into people I had not seen in seven years, which is its own kind of value. This is a fine event to sit at the back of and quietly collect ideas.
At roughly €250 for the day, the value is good. My one improvement would be a few off-the-record round tables, where practitioners could open up about what actually broke. Presentations and panels alone limit how deep a speaker can go, and the real value tends to live in the detail, in comparison, in the awkward question you can only ask in a smaller room. The organisers tell me the two-day London flagship adds workshops, which Amsterdam did not have, so if depth matters to you, the London edition may be the better buy. I am going in November to find out.
Best for mid to senior brand-side marketers who want a broad, polished, efficient read across martech in a single day, and who value picking up ideas and reconnecting over going three layers deep.
Martech World Forum, London
This was the most senior room of the four, and the smallest, deliberately so. Keeping numbers down made it the most intimate of the lot, which is the whole point: it is easy to talk to Head and Chief level people when there are not many of them and nobody is lost in a crowd. Vendor presence was subtle, a few presentations and some hosted round tables, but with a room this senior the value came from listening to the table rather than from anyone selling at it.
It runs over two full days this year, with early-bird tickets around £200, which is good value on paper for the seniority of the room. Whether it pays off depends on you, because this is not an event you consume from the back row. You get out of it what you put in, so come with your questions written down and your actual problems listed, because the insight is in the mingling, not the agenda.
The line-ups tend to be strong, the kind where someone like Real Story Group's Tony Byrne or my favorite HSBC's James Taylor are on the bill, which raises the level of the conversations around you.
One fair caveat on the value for this year, and it applies to the whole circuit more than to this event alone. Around a quarter of the speakers had presented the year before, or are names you will recognise from plenty of other martech stages, often there on the back of a vendor sponsorship. Martech moves from week to week, so there is no shortage of new ground to cover, but the same faces working the rounds can make parts of an agenda feel familiar. That is the reality of events, not a knock on this one.
Best for Head and Chief level people who will turn up prepared to participate, and who want senior peer insight more than stage content. If you want to be talked at, this is the wrong room. If you want to compare notes with people carrying the same weight you are, it is hard to beat.
Matthew Niederberger
AntiCon, London
AntiCon, run by LXA, had the best venue by a distance: Magazine, near the O2, with a Canary Wharf view that was doing a lot of work the day I went. LXA opened with a keynote on the thing I care about most, the effect of martech on the people who have to live with it. Tools are wonderful, but if the people cannot keep pace with them, the tools do nothing. That fits LXA's training and upskilling focus, and it was the right note to open on.
Then the depth ran out. The content stayed high level, which suited the retreat feel of the place, all food trucks, music and good energy, but left me wanting. A large share of the talks were vendor-led, sometimes through a client telling the story, but with the sponsor clearly in mind. I do not blame them for that, they have a company to talk about, but for me it landed as too basic.
The clearest example was that opening keynote: it named the people-versus-tools problem precisely, and I was nodding along, and then it stopped at naming it. The how never arrived. I wanted the next layer, what you actually do to help a team keep up, and it was not on offer. To be fair, it is LXA’s core product.
The room was mostly junior to mid-level marketers, the orientation-stage crowd rather than the senior brand-side rooms the Summit and the Forum pulled. Networking was easy enough but stayed at the surface, in keeping with the content. The vibe was genuinely positive, tickets are often free, and that location is phenomenal.
Best for marketers earlier in the journey who want orientation, energy and a low-risk day out, and who are there for the experience and the introductions more than for depth. If you already know the basics, you may find yourself, like me, looking out at Canary Wharf and wishing the session had gone further.
Matthew Niederberger
So which one is for you?
None of these is bad, and none of them is best. They are aimed at different people, and the trick is matching the event to where you actually are.
If you are hands-on and want depth without vendor noise, MeasureCamp, assuming you can get a ticket. If you are a brand-side marketer who wants a broad, efficient survey of the field and a good day of ideas, the MarTech Summit. If you are senior enough to hold your own in a small room and willing to do the work, Martech World Forum. And if you are early in the journey and want orientation wrapped in good energy, AntiCon, with eyes open about the depth.
I am going back to MeasureCamp when the calendar lets me, and to the MarTech Summit in London this November to see whether the flagship delivers the depth Amsterdam stopped short of. Before either of those, at the end of September, I am in Copenhagen for Brand Leadership's Web Analytics Wednesday, where I have been invited to give a talk and host a workshop, about the encroachment of martech into digital analytics, so that one I will be experiencing from the front of the room.
I will report back on the London Summit and on MeasureCamp with the same six measures, so you can see whether my read holds up a second time.
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