MarketingCal
Fili Wiese
I run MarketingCal.
I am Fili Wiese, and I have spoken at more than 150 marketing conferences. I started the calendar in 2016 because finding which marketing-related conferences existed at all was the hard part. Nobody kept a complete overview of upcoming conferences. The few lists in existence covered a fraction of what was happening, and most were yearly round-ups published once and never updated afterwards. None of them offered a way to hear about a new conference, so keeping track meant checking the same pages again and again. I made sure to include email alerts, so a new conference arrives in an inbox rather than waiting to be found. The calendar started on online.marketing and lives here now.
How a listing gets here
Most listings start with me going looking. I search for conferences, follow the ones I hear about while speaking at others, and check back on the organisers I already know. Submissions arrive through the form as well, and they add to the rest rather than making up the calendar. Every listing, found or submitted, is read against the organiser's own website before it goes up, and the dates, the city and the venue are compared against what the page says. Entries come down when the dates pass. A cancelled conference keeps its place, labelled Cancelled, because someone searching for the conference deserves an answer rather than silence.
A conference brings people together in one place. An online-only programme is a webinar, a different format with an audience and a calendar of its own, and therefore does not qualify here.
Why the Recommended label is not for sale
Standing on a stage and sitting in the audience teach me things a website cannot: whether the schedule holds, whether the organiser answers email, whether the venue matches the description. A conference earns the Recommended label from being in the room, and no amount of money changes the list. Paid placement exists, carries a Featured label and sits in the Highlights section, so the bought placement stays visible.
The calendar carries no affiliate links. When an organiser gives me a discount code, the whole saving goes to the reader and the calendar earns nothing from the code. A conference asking speakers to pay for a slot is labelled Paid speaking, because speakers deserve to know before applying and attendees deserve to know before paying for a ticket.
Where the judgement comes from
I spent seven years at Google as an engineer and technical lead on the Search Quality team, working on large-scale website penalisation, spam policy, reconsideration requests, internal training and tools development. I co-founded Search Brothers, an SEO consultancy, and I still speak at marketing conferences across Europe and North America, which is how I keep meeting the organisers behind the listings.
Corrections
Every listing carries an edit link, . A correction submitted through the link reaches me directly and goes through the same review as a new submission, which makes the link the fastest way to fix a listing. Corrections are welcome from readers as well as organisers.