200,000+ attendees engaged at GITEX Global 2025 with 16,000+ poster shares

Introduction

GITEX Global 2025, held from October 6th to 10th at the Dubai World Trade Centre, brought together over 200,000 attendees and 6,000 exhibitorsfrom around the world, making it the largest tech show on the planet.

To scale attendee engagement across this massive audience, GITEX partnered with Premagic to power every stage of the event lifecycle, from pre-event advocacy and onsite engagementto post-event analytics and ROI tracking.

The Challenge: Scaling Engagement for a growing audience

When you're running the world's largest tech show, growth is a constant. And so are the challenges that come with it. Each year, GITEX Global sees a phenomenal increase in footfall. In 2025, over 200,000+ exhibitors and visitors gathered in Dubai over five days, a number that continues to rise year after year.

"The biggest thing for us year on year is to ensure that our exhibitors and visitors are getting the results they need after making the effort to travel all the way from different parts of the world to Dubai."

Shreya Shyam Sunder

Marketing Executive
DWTC

At that scale, engagement becomes a moving target. You're not just running an event but rather orchestrating a city-sized experience. Every touchpoint needs to work seamlessly, from pre-event promotions to on-site engagement and post-event impact.

But scaling engagement for 200,000 people isn't just about manpower. It demands technology that grows with your audience and more importantly, provides a one-stop solution to manage every engagement touchpoint without the mess of juggling multiple disconnected tools.

The Solution: From Single Activation to Full Lifecycle Integration

In previous years, GITEX Global partnered with Premagic as a single-point activation, mainly for AI-powered photo distribution and UGC generation. It worked. Attendees loved it. The team saw potential.

"Over the years, we've steadily ramped up how we work with Premagic. It started with activations, then expanded to AI photo distribution," said Shreya. "This year, we've taken it to a full-fledged partnership by integrating social advocacy and engagement across the event."

For 2025, the goal was to move beyond a single activation to integrating Premagic across the entire event lifecycle - pre-event, during the event, and post-event

Pre-event: Turning attendees into advocates

GITEX rolled out Premagic's event marketing posters well before the show to spark attendee advocacy and boost registrations. Here's how the strategy unfolded step by step:

During the event: AI photo distribution that scaled flawlessly

With over 200,000 attendees, traditional photo management simply wasn’t an option. As Shreya explains the challenge “With such a large number of visitors and exhibitors on-site, it can get really hard when people come back asking for specific images — like when they were speaking on stage or at their booth.”

Here is how Premagic tackled this issue.

Pre-event registration for photos

Attendees could pre-register to receive their photos automatically, ensuring a seamless experience once the event began.

On-site instant access

Over 20 QR standees were placed across the venue, allowing attendees to instantly access their photos during the event.

Capturing every moment that mattered

Premagic’s photographers covered the entire venue — from attendees and exhibitors to speaker sessions and booth activities — capturing high-quality 4K moments throughout the event.

AI-powered delivery

Photos were automatically identified, matched, and delivered to attendees within seconds of upload, ensuring every participant received their moments instantly.

Related Read: How Khaleej Times scaled event marketing with AI-powered attendee engagement

Post-event: closing the loop with data and engagement

Premagic’s AI avatars turned out to be a major crowd-puller, giving attendees a fun, personalized takeaway while keeping booth engagement high across multiple zones. After the event, GITEX Global’s organizing team could see the full picture, from poster shares and photo downloads to referral clicks and booth traffic, all in one unified dashboard.

This data not only helped measure ROI but also revealed advocacy and engagement trends that informed future event strategies with clarity and confidence.

The Result: Engagement That Scales with the Event

GITEX GLOBAL 2025 leveraged referral marketing and photo distribution with remarkable success, translating directly into significant digital reach, high engagement, and measurable cost savings. The platform effectively mobilized the 172,566 participants to become active promoters of the event.

Photo Distribution & Engagement Success

The official event photos were a powerful engagement tool, driving substantial organic views and high download rates among participants. With 100% of the target registrations completed, the event demonstrated extremely high interest and conversion success ahead of the full deadline.

The photo distribution generated 160,531 Views and a total of 2,218 Downloads.

The single most powerful comparison is the 94.2% increase in the Photo Share Rate (Downloads/Views), demonstrating a near-doubling of attendee engagement and desire to own and share the personal visual content from GITEX GLOBAL 2025 compared to 2024.

"Premagic helped us elevate engagement at a scale that’s unique to GITEX. When you’re managing tens of thousands of visitors, seamless delivery and real-time sharing become critical. Premagic gave us exactly that: a frictionless way for attendees, exhibitors, and speakers to access and share their moments instantly. It added measurable value to the overall experience."

Rozana Noja

AVP Marketing & Partnerships, GITEX, Dubai World Trade Centre

Event Advocacy Success: Referral Distribution

The successful launch of the event referral marketing tool led to 16,198 posters being shared across social media. This, in turn, generated 47,876 referrals, saving $212,262 in ad spend. A true showcase of the power in turning attendees into measurable marketing channels

The posters shared by the Speakers were the most effective per person (4.47 referrals per advocate), highlighting the high-quality nature of their network's engagement.

This active advocacy drove a Potential Reach of 5,970,383 across 29,851,914 networks, showcasing the massive viral potential unlocked by the participants.

The social sharing and referrals resulted in an impressive $212,262 in Ad Spend Saved, demonstrating the immense value of organic, participant-driven marketing.

The total estimated ticket sales impact from advocacy (direct attributed + modelled indirect) is 19,907 tickets.

A total of 246 AI avatars were created by 108 guests. Many created multiple versions of their avatars, experimenting with different looks and sharing them instantly on social media.

Premagic proved that true event tech innovation lies not in isolated features but in powering the entire event journey, end to end.

Want to try our Event Marketing Posters at your event? Get in touch!

The Insight: True innovation isn't isolated, it's integrated

GITEX Global 2025 didn't just get bigger. It got smarter.

By moving from point solutions to a full lifecycle engagement platform, the DWTC team proved something crucial: the future of event tech isn't about doing one thing well; it's about connecting everything seamlessly.

"Premagic integrated perfectly into the full event cycle: pre-event promotion, onsite engagement, and post-event analytics. Few tools can truly support the entire journey at scale, but Premagic delivered. The clarity it brought to attendee engagement and content distribution was remarkable."

Vinod Nalawade

Global Events & Operations Specialist

With three key features: referral marketing tools, AI photo distribution, and AI avatars, Premagic connected every stage of the attendee journey, creating a full cycle of engagement that turned attendees into event marketers at every step. The results spoke for themselves: record traction on event marketing posters, buzzing galleries with nonstop downloads, and exhibitors enjoying unprecedented visibility.

Want to power your next event with the same full-cycle engagement strategy? Get in touch with our team today.