How Europe's largest marketing festival personalizes the experience for 70,000 attendees with Chatbase

At a glance

OMR is the leading platform for the digital economy, spanning content, events and tech. They are the company behind one of the world's largest digital marketing festivals held annually in Hamburg since 2011. Over three days, 70,000+ attendees, 800+ speakers, and 1,000+ exhibitors fill a program of keynotes, masterclasses, and side events. The audience is primarily CEOs, senior leaders, and marketing managers, each with different roles, industries, and goals. OMR serves a wide mix of customers: festival ticket buyers, masterclass attendees, exhibitors, and corporate partners. Support runs across email and phone, but the first point of contact is the AI agent on the OMR Festival website, built on Chatbase. What started as a support bot has grown into an autonomous agent handling 190,000+ messages a year, driving direct ticket revenue, and generating leads for the sales team.

Email-only support and no way to personalize at scale

Before Chatbase, OMR's support was exclusively email-based. Every question, from ticket swaps to timetable requests to finding the nearest restroom, was handled manually. The team was building individual timetables for attendees by hand, a personalization effort that could not scale to tens of thousands of people. During technical issues or peak periods like Black Friday and the weeks before the festival, the inbox flooded and response times stretched. Off-hours coverage was limited. Questions that arrived on evenings and weekends sat until the next business day. The team tested alternatives. A static FAQ website came first, followed by several chatbot tools. Most of them turned out to be support funnels built on pre-defined responses, not true LLM-based agents, and the maintenance overhead was high.

From support bot to autonomous agent

OMR's first Chatbase agent went live within a few days. The Support and crew management teams stress-tested before launch, and refining the agent to its current capabilities took about three months. Today the agent does far more than answer support questions. It captures leads, guides users toward the right ticket options, and delivers personalized festival recommendations to each attendee.

• The main festival agent: first-line support, lead capture, ticket guidance, and attendee recommendations
• A digital masterclasses agent
• A crew job questions agent
• A support counter and onboarding agent used at the festival itself

70,000 personalized journeys

The biggest shift is what the agent makes possible for attendees. It builds custom timetables based on each person's role, industry, and goals, something the team used to do manually and could never scale. Instead of browsing a wall of content or emailing the support team, attendees get recommendations tailored to why they are there. The volume tells the story. The agent handled 190,000+ messages this year, up from 32,000 last year. The result the team did not plan for: Chatbase is now directly generating revenue, driving ticket sales and referring potential exhibitors and partners to the sales team.

What's next

OMR is already expanding. The HelpScout integration for routing sensitive inquiries launched in early 2026, and the team continues refining the agent's knowledge base from real conversation patterns. With message volume nearly 6x what it was a year ago and four agents running across the business, the direction is clear: deeper integration into the attendee and partner experience.