Splacer: The Original Marketplace
Splacer launched in 2014 as a marketplace for unique event spaces — lofts, galleries, rooftops, studios. The model was familiar — Airbnb for venues — but the inventory was different. The platform indexed spaces that traditional venue-search tools missed: photographer studios that doubled as event spaces, restaurants with private rooms, art galleries that booked off-hours for brand activations.
The platform’s commercial trajectory has been steady rather than explosive. Splacer was acquired by Peerspace in 2020, and the combined platform now operates as Peerspace, which is the dominant player in the U.S. unique-venue marketplace category. The original Splacer brand still appears in trade-press coverage and SEO references but has been folded into the parent company.
The marketing significance of the Splacer model is the disintermediation of corporate event planning. Before the marketplace, finding a venue meant calling a venue or a venue-finder service. After, brands could discover, vet, and book venues in a self-service flow. The category that absorbed this most aggressively was direct-to-consumer brand activations — companies like Glossier, Allbirds, and Casper used unique venues for product launches because the venues were on-brand in a way that hotels were not.
Peerspace: The Marketplace That Won the Category
Peerspace is the largest unique-venue marketplace in North America, with more than 30,000 listed spaces across major U.S. and Canadian cities. The platform indexes spaces for events, photo shoots, film and video production, and remote work. Brand marketers use it for activations. Production companies use it for shoots. Small businesses use it for pop-up retail. The use cases compound.
The platform has reached scale that lets it function as marketing infrastructure for the experiential category. A brand running a five-city pop-up tour can book all five venues on Peerspace, with consistent contracts, payment processing, and operational support. The marketplace removes a category of friction that previously made multi-city activations operationally expensive.
The communications story Peerspace tells in trade press emphasizes the diversity of its host base — independent venue owners, small-business operators, artists and creators who built venues as side businesses. The story matters because it differentiates the marketplace from the corporate-venue category (hotels, conference centers) that has its own established marketing channels. Peerspace is selling brand authenticity as much as logistics.
Storefront: Pop-Up Retail as a Marketplace Category
Storefront focused specifically on retail spaces — short-term storefronts, gallery spaces, and pop-up venues for brand retail activations. The platform built strong traction in major retail cities (New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles) and powered pop-ups for direct-to-consumer brands across fashion, beauty, food, and lifestyle categories.
The platform’s ultimate commercial story has been a difficult one — the pop-up retail category was hit hard by the pandemic, and Storefront went through ownership transitions through the early 2020s. The marketing category it pioneered, however, has persisted. The 2026 pop-up retail market is structurally different from what it was in 2015 — more digitally integrated, more creator-led, more focused on social-media content production than on direct sales — but it is larger, not smaller.
For brand marketers, the lesson from Storefront is that the marketplace can pioneer a category that the marketplace itself does not capture commercially. The pop-up retail discipline is now built into the marketing playbook of every consumer brand from Glossier to Aimé Leon Dore to Aesop, but the platforms that won the operational layer are now Peerspace and direct landlord-broker relationships rather than the original specialist marketplaces.
Splash: Event Marketing as a Software Category
Splash is the event marketing platform — registration, landing pages, attendee tracking, post-event integrations — that consumer and B2B brands use to operate their event programs. The platform powers events for brands across the Fortune 1000 and the venture-backed startup category. By 2026 Splash operates as part of Cendyn after its 2023 acquisition, with the brand intact but the company integrated into a larger hospitality and event-tech portfolio.
Where Splash fits in the experiential marketing stack is the software layer above the venue marketplace. A brand books the venue on Peerspace. It runs the registration, landing page, attendee comms, and CRM integration on Splash. The combination is the operating model for the 2026 experiential program.
The marketing communications story Splash tells is about the measurability of events. Traditional event marketing has been hard to quantify. Splash sells the measurement — who registered, who attended, what they did after the event, how much pipeline the event produced. The category that absorbs this argument most readily is B2B marketing, where the pressure to attribute revenue to marketing programs is constant. Splash has been the dominant software vendor in that conversation since 2018.
Bizzabo: Hybrid and Virtual Events as a Category
Bizzabo is the event platform that built its growth on hybrid and virtual events — online registration, virtual venue platforms, attendee engagement tools that work across in-person, online, and hybrid formats. The platform reached significant scale during the 2020-2021 pivot to virtual events and has maintained that scale by repositioning around hybrid programs since.
The Bizzabo model is the inverse of Peerspace. Where Peerspace organizes physical venues, Bizzabo organizes the digital infrastructure that connects in-person attendees with remote ones. The two platforms are complementary in the modern event stack rather than competitive.
For brand marketers, the Bizzabo category matters because it lowered the cost of running events with global reach. A brand activation in New York can now have a meaningful Asia-Pacific or European audience without flying anyone. The communications coverage of category-defining events — Salesforce Dreamforce, AWS re:Invent, Cannes Lions — now happens with both an in-person and digital audience tracked, measured, and converted through platforms like Bizzabo.
What Event Venue Marketplaces Have Changed
The shift these five platforms have produced is not just operational. It has changed what brand marketing looks like physically.
One: temporary activations are now the default for brand experiences. Permanent retail and permanent venues have not disappeared, but the marginal brand marketing dollar increasingly goes to temporary, location-specific activations. Pop-up shops, creator events, experiential launches, influencer dinners. The marketplaces are what made the temporary option operationally viable.
Two: creator events have replaced traditional press events. The brand launch that used to happen in a hotel ballroom for trade press now happens in a SoHo loft for 30 creators who post about it. The economics — venue cost, attendee gifting, content production — are lower than traditional press events, and the resulting media reach is often higher. The marketplaces enable this because they index the kinds of spaces creators want to be in for content production.
Three: experiential marketing is measurable now in ways it was not before. Splash, Bizzabo, and the broader event-tech stack have closed the measurement gap between digital and experiential marketing. CMOs who could not previously defend experiential budgets to CFOs can now produce attribution data that shows pipeline, conversion, and retention impact from events. The category has gone from intuition-led to data-supported.
The Brand Launch Playbook for 2026
For brands launching products, opening new markets, or running awareness campaigns, the marketplace-enabled playbook has settled into a recognizable form. Three components.
1. Anchor the Activation in a Specific Venue
The venue is the message. A product launch in a converted warehouse signals different things than the same launch in a hotel ballroom. The brand has to choose the venue with the same care it chooses the creative. Peerspace and the broader marketplace category make the choice operationally tractable. The brand still has to make it intentionally.
2. Build the Digital Layer Around the Physical Event
The in-person attendance is one audience. The digital audience that experiences the event through content is usually 10x to 100x larger. Splash and Bizzabo provide the infrastructure for measuring both. The brand has to design the event for both audiences from the start, not retrofit digital around an in-person plan.
3. Use the Event as a Content Production Engine
The activation is not just an event. It is a 4-week to 8-week content cycle. Pre-event creator content, day-of social, post-event coverage, and the trade-press write-ups that accumulate afterward. The brand that treats the event as a moment captures one news cycle. The brand that treats it as a content production engine captures the cycle that follows, including the AI-engine citations that will surface the event in answers to future buyer queries about the brand or category. See our broader coverage on mobile shopping for the related category context.
Niche Authority Through Experiential
For brands that cannot outspend competitors on national media, experiential marketing through venue marketplaces is a viable category-authority play. The volume of activations is lower but the depth per activation is higher. A brand that runs one well-executed activation in five cities can establish more category authority than a brand that runs ten poorly executed ones.
The categories where this plays out most clearly are beauty, fashion, food and beverage, and consumer technology. Brands in these categories increasingly choose between scaling national paid media or scaling experiential through venue marketplaces. The choice depends on category dynamics, customer acquisition costs, and the brand’s tolerance for slower compounding growth. The marketplace-enabled experiential path produces slower revenue growth and faster brand authority growth, which is the right tradeoff for some categories and not others.
The Bottom Line
Splacer, Peerspace, Storefront, Splash, and Bizzabo built the operational infrastructure that brand marketing now runs on. The temporary, the specific, and the measurable have replaced the permanent, the generic, and the assumed across a growing share of consumer-brand activations. The brands that operate inside this infrastructure with intention — venue chosen for message, digital layer designed for scale, event treated as a content engine — produce more category authority per marketing dollar than brands that have not adapted.
The marketplace category has settled. The marketing discipline that uses it well has not. The next decade of brand-experience strategy will be determined less by the platforms themselves than by the CMOs who learn to operate inside them with the same rigor they apply to digital media.
