PREVIEW: SBC SUMMIT
So, if we start at the show, we’ve got a new feature this year with the Festival Square, right between FIL AND MEO Arena, the first thing you’ll see is this Festival Square . It’s got different entertainment things there, it’s got a piano bar, it’s got a cocktail bar, and that’s going to stay open later after the show, so after the event closes people can go there, it’s got space for a few thousand people there that can gather after the event, they don’t have to go home immediately.
But I guess the real exciting stuff is on the Tuesday night is the opening party, that’s at Carlos Lopez Pavilion which is a nice building right in the centre of Lisbon, headlining that is The Script who are a major international band, they’ve had six platinum albums, loads of number one songs. I looked the other day they’ve got 30 odd million monthly listeners on Spotify. So, that should be an amazing night, that’s powered by 1xbet as well, as the sponsor.
Then we have our awards, we have a variety of dinners going on for operators, for payments, for affiliates, all VIP dinners, well dinners kind of does them a bit of a disservice, they’re for around 400 people, for 250 people, for 300 people, major events within themselves. The Affiliate Leaders Awards, this is the second year we’ve run it, that’s again a really nice awards, 300 people celebrating the affiliate industry, affiliate marketing, lots of operators at that, lots of affiliates there too. Our SBC awards which over a thousand people
12 SEPTEMBER 2026 GIO
attend, is a really kind of massive gala dinner, John Terry’s going to be the co-host with Kirsty Gallagher again, who’s done it for many years now, hosting that and then we have, following that we have Infinity.
Infinity’s our closing party from an EDM festival brand that we’ve used to close a few of our events recently, we started it in Lisbon in 2024, and this year we’ve got Tiesto performing as the headline there, so that’s just cool, again script on the Tuesday, a bit different, and then we have a different kind of audience, different kind of thing is Tiesto on the Thursday.
Even if you’re not into, dance music, if it’s not your thing, I’d still encourage anyone to go along to Infinity, we took inspiration from Tomorrowland and things like that, I know it’s not Tomorrowland, I’m not saying it is, but that’s an inspiration for it. We’ve got this opportunity, we’ve got this venue, we’ve got 40,000 people coming, let’s see how we can stand out from the crowd, but also how can we create experiences and enjoyment for people, which just adds that bit extra as another reason to attend.
The main reason to attend, it’s always going to be business, it’s people signing that off, people taking time out their working week to come to the show, so you have to provide the business and you have to provide that environment, but if you can put those extra bits in and you can do it when you’ve got an event at scale like we have, it’s a good position to be in and something that we
enjoy investing in, we think it’s the right thing to do and we’ll continue to do so, it’s just how you top it, I don’t know, we’re already talking about how do you top Michael Jordan, but yeah there you go.
GIO: Is there anything that you’re expecting to be a standout, to be the talking point? That may be difficult to predict when the show’s still a month away, maybe something new this year or one of the speakers or one of the events outside the show? PM: I hope so, I think the conference programme will be stronger than ever, I think as I said, Michael Jordan’s keynote is definitely going to be standout, we’ve had interest from all over the world about that because he doesn’t speak anywhere else, so that is something unique and exclusive to us.
We’ve done a lot of work on the event and as it gets to scale, we’ve asked, how do we keep the quality, and then how do we make sure that the right people meet each other? So we’ve really concentrated this year on our networking programme, we’ve always had networking, you put a lot of people in the room and in a gaming event you’re going to have networking, it’s just going to happen, that’s what people do. But we’ve introduced several kind of new products, new features around networking. There’s a speed networking session, for first timers, so many people are new to the event, you think it’s the
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