BTS @ Brighton SEO with Top 50 PPC Expert & BrightonSEO/HeroConf organiser

Brighton SEO’s main stages are not held together by charisma alone. Sophie Logan works in the back office where 180 speaker decks are checked, speakers are supported, and last-minute swaps happen when someone gets ill two weeks before the doors open.

Sophie is Community and Editorial Manager at Rough Agenda, the company behind Brighton SEO, HeroConf and MeasureFest, and one of the Top 50 Most Influential PPC Experts of 2026. Her nearly 12 years in PPC, plus five Brighton SEO speaking slots of her own, give her a clear view of what makes a marketing conference useful from both sides of the stage.

Her sharpest lesson for B2B marketers running events is uncomfortable: a full room is less valuable than the right room. She would rather have 10 people who want a service or partnership than 10,000 people who took the pizza and left.

This interview has been edited for clarity and concision.

Tom: What does managing 180 speakers actually involve before a two-day Brighton SEO?

Sophie: I had spoken at Brighton SEO five times before joining Rough Agenda, so I had seen the speaker side. Working on the agenda and managing 180 speakers across two days for the UK event has been the biggest learning curve for me.

That means their decks, hotels, tickets, guest tickets, mentoring and deck reviews. It is the full scope of getting people onto stage.

Two weeks out, it is composed, but people get poorly and people cannot speak, so there is a lot of switching and swapping near the end. There is also a lot of caffeine.

The biggest thing people do not realise is how much time and effort speakers put into their decks, rehearsing and practising. It can become like a little part-time job for them to prepare. The speakers are putting a graft in.

Tom: How do you keep a conference talk useful when speakers naturally want to promote their agency, brand or software?

Sophie: It starts with selection. If you pitch, it does not mean you are going to get a spot. We spend a lot of time building the agenda, then every deck for every speaker is reviewed at least twice. With 180 speakers, that means hundreds of deck checks.

We go through each deck, look at what they are going to be speaking about, and make sure it is not too salesy. Obviously, we want people to show off their agency, brand or software, but we have all been in audiences where it is really obvious that it is a hard sell. We are quite strict on that.

Carmen looks at design, making sure the font and layout are right. I look at the content as if I am an audience member. Am I being informed? Is it actionable?

If the action is, “to do this, you have to use our tool”, I push back. I want people to guide and signpost the audience so they can do it themselves.

That is the difference between a boardroom presentation or sales pitch and a conference talk. Making the deck is a skill, presenting it is a skill, and speaking in a massive hall on a massive stage is different again. In Auditorium One, the screen has probably got more space than my house.

We also support speakers properly. We do speaker training, speaker guides, deck reviews, WhatsApp groups where speakers chat and give each other advice, and mentors on hand. Yes, we want good quality content and we want the audience to go away happy, but we also want speakers to enjoy the process and have YouTube videos they can share with friends and family and say, “look at me on this stage”.

Tom: How do you stop intuition from taking over the agenda?

Sophie: We survey people after the event. Not everybody fills it out, but that is where we get the juiciest information. People will say, “these talks were too basic”, “they did not go in depth enough”, or “they felt too sales pitchy”. We take that on board.

We also keep an eye on talks live and get the feel of the room. Is it standing room only? Are people interested in this topic? That helps us understand what people actually want.

A few months before building the agenda, we also put out a poll on social and ask what kind of talks people are looking for. I was surprised by how many people wanted to hear about Amazon ads. It was right up there, and I did not think people would be that interested, so we made sure the agenda reflected it and put those talks on larger stages. It is giving people what they want rather than doing what you want.

The worst feedback is “it was perfect”. You cannot do anything with perfect, and I do not believe anything is perfect. If someone says the content was too basic or I spoke too fast, there is something I can work on. Constructive feedback gives you something to improve.

AI is a tricky one because we know there is fatigue. I have experienced it myself. You go through blogs and think, “another AI blog”. But we also know people want to learn about it and future-proof their roles, so we do need to include it.

The balance is covering it enough for the people who want it, while remembering that traditional practices still need to go on. I am big on the fundamentals. I have been doing PPC for a long time, and I am always surprised by how much people focus on new topics and neglect the foundations. The new thing is exciting, but please make sure you are still focusing on the foundations and the backbone of your discipline.

Tom: What makes in-person worthwhile when senior marketers can listen to famous names from their phone?

Sophie: What I like about Brighton SEO is that it does not matter if you are a CEO of a big company or have a fancy title. Your insights can be valuable to everybody.

People are interested in relatable content, actions they can implement, and budgets that are realistic to their budgets. We cannot always compete with events that have the big bosses of huge companies, but a lot of our audience wants relatable people and case studies where they think, “that happened to me”, or “I have been through that situation myself”.

That relatability is something larger names in the industry do not always have for the average marketer. It is also where the community side comes in. I feel so much better when I have a good moan about a PPC account or situation and someone says, “oh my gosh, that has exactly happened to me”. Then you can knock your heads together and come up with a solution, or someone can say, “this is what I did”, or “have you spoken to this person?”

COVID changed events because we were not allowed to have thousands of people in one room listening to someone present. A lot of smaller events lost the momentum they had spent a long time building. In Nottingham, there was an event called Drink Digital. It was on a Thursday, back when we were in the office every day. We would go to the office, work, have a pint in the pub, and then go to the event. It was a religious thing. After COVID, events like that struggled because people were remote and not necessarily together to go to events.

Over the past two years, I have noticed it picking back up. There are a lot more events in the UK, which is good to see. People want to see people in person, network, have a drink in the sunshine, and learn.

People are also more comfortable leaving when their social battery runs out. Some people go to an event, enjoy it, and go home as soon as it finishes. Others get there early, talk to people, stay for the event, go for coffee afterwards, and turn it into a whole day thing. There is a mix.

We try to offer different types of fringe events because people have different lifestyles. We have yoga, a 5k run on the beach, basketball and paddle for the US event, dinners, casual catch-ups, live podcast recordings, and karaoke on the Thursday night.

The connection after the event matters too. We facilitate communities that already exist, like Women in Tech SEO. We give them a stand, they come together, and they have a photo on the stage. We want people to meet at our events, share profiles, share numbers, join WhatsApp groups and continue that relationship next week, next month, maybe forever. It could become a business partnership, a new employee or a job opportunity.

I used to describe Brighton as a holiday for marketers.

Tom: How should marketers approach specialist tracks when their roles are getting broader?

Sophie: The way we cater for that is that a Brighton SEO ticket also gets you into HeroConf, and vice versa. If you buy a HeroConf ticket, you can go into either. We encourage people to go into a PR talk, or for PPC people to go into an SEO talk or a GA4 talk.

I am a PPC specialist, but I could learn so much by sitting in a talk from someone whose full-time job is GA4, because I hate GA4 and I am still struggling with it. Sitting in that talk can make me better at my job.

More events are adding multiple tracks now. Unless it is a small local event, they might have an SEO talk, a PPC talk or something else going on at the same time, so people can choose what suits them and hopefully try something different. Whether the audience decides to do that is up to them.

I think you should go and sit in a talk where you have no idea what it even means and learn something new. Even if you do not use it in your job, it might help you understand someone else in your team and what they are going through. You might find something completely fascinating and change your whole career path.

I have worked in PPC for nearly 12 years, and my job was completely different when I started. If you only stick to talks, blogs, articles and podcasts about exactly what you know, what is the point? You are just in a little circle. I cannot imagine anything more boring in marketing than staying in that circle. Worst case, you did not enjoy a talk for 20 minutes. It is not the end of the world.

Tom: What should a smaller B2B event organiser get right before spending money on polish?

Sophie: Always start with your speakers. Without your speakers, you have nothing. You have an empty venue, and no one is going to come and sit in an empty venue looking at a wall.

Events need to focus on quality speakers, but also different speakers. There are so many people out there who either have not spoken at events or do not speak very often. A little goldmine for events is to reach those untapped speakers, those new people, and help give them their break.

That is great for them, but it also opens up that person’s network. A fresh speaker will often promote your event much more than someone who tours the world doing events every day, because it means so much to them. People sometimes focus on nice branding, a logo or a cool venue, but without good speakers you have nothing. Then comes the audience, then ticket sales, then sponsors.

Operationally, the boring thing that Brighton SEO does really well is AV. If your speaker has a banging presentation but it does not work, or people cannot hear them, your event means nothing because you have not got the value from the speaker. Audiovisual is something a lot of events skip because it is expensive to do well and you need a specialist. As marketers, we are probably not the best people to be doing AV, so speak to a specialist.

Promotion matters too, but you need to reach the community that is relevant to you. You do not just want 50 people who have turned up for free pizza, because people will. You want people who are valuable for whatever you are running the event for.

Build partnerships and relationships with relevant communities and regulars. Every time you have an event, they will fill some of your tickets. They speak to people, invite people and share their code. For PPC, that could mean reaching out to PPC Slack communities or even universities. If students are doing digital marketing, you could give them tickets and they could do a blog post or a TikTok for you. It takes time, but you can build a core audience you can rely on.

You can run an event on a budget, but it is about expectations. If someone says to me, “I have only got £100, can I run a campaign?” Of course you can run a campaign. It is the same with an event. If you want 500 people there, you need a big budget. If you want 50 people, maybe you can speak to a local agency with a nice hall and ask to use it in exchange for putting their name on the newsletter. Then you have free venue hire.

You can also try to get a sponsor, but you are not going to ring up Google and ask them to sponsor your event. Look for relevant local businesses or smaller software companies that fit what you are talking about. Venue hire, AV and catering are getting very expensive, so be realistic and lean on partnerships, relationships and potential sponsors.

The thing I talk about all the time is quality over quantity. If I had 10 people in my event and they were 10 people who wanted my services or a partnership, what is the value of those 10 compared to 10,000 people who took the pizza and left? Sometimes it is vanity: “I want a big event, I want everybody there, I want it to look cool in photos.” But why are you running the event in the first place? What value are you getting from it? Drop the ego a little bit.

Tom: Which personal lessons from PPC still shape how you work now?

Sophie: I am quite dyslexic, so writing long-form content takes me a while. I do not always get the structure right. I know what I need to say, but I cannot always get it in the right structure. AI has helped me with that. It does not do the work for me, but it helps me sense-check it. On a day-to-day basis, it can mean I spend one hour proofreading a blog instead of two.

I have also learnt to drop my ego. I used to avoid asking for help or think I had to do everything perfectly. As soon as I started dropping that with PPC work, I learnt so much more, made better connections and had more opportunities. You do not have to be the strong, independent woman who knows everything. You can let people in and ask for help.

My biggest screw-up was in PPC. My specialism is advertising software brands and B2B SaaS, and I managed to put “software” as a negative keyword in a campaign. It completely tanked performance for a long time. My manager looked at the account, the team looked at it, and no one could understand what it was because it was so stupid and so obvious, but not obvious at the same time.

I found it one day and realised we were not getting any leads because I had put software as a negative keyword. Leads dried up completely. The client was full-service, so if we lost them, we would lose a lot of money. I had to admit the mistake, and they appreciated the honesty. But yes, that was bad.