The short version: yes, put webinar titles in quotation marks, not italics, because a webinar is a stand-alone talk or event, not a full body of work, and every major style guide (AP, Chicago, MLA) treats stand-alone talks the same way it treats lectures and speeches. Use quotes in your body copy and blog posts for consistency, but drop the punctuation entirely in subject lines and landing page headlines, because quote marks in marketing copy read as clickbait, not correctness.
The actual rule, from the three style guides that matter
I get asked this a lot from clients who are writing recap blogs, LinkedIn posts, or email newsletters about their own webinars, and want to know if they're doing it "right". Here's what the three big style guides say, because they largely agree with each other on this one.
- AP Style (the one most marketers and journalists default to): quotation marks go around titles of standalone short works, including lectures, speeches, and presentations. A webinar falls into that bucket. AP doesn't use italics at all, since it was built for print newspapers where italics didn't always render, so quotes are its default punctuation for anything shorter than a book.
- Chicago Manual of Style: italics are reserved for major, freestanding works, books, films, albums, journals. Quotation marks go around shorter pieces contained within or delivered as a single event, which includes talks, lectures, and by extension, webinars.
- MLA: same split as Chicago. Short works in quotes, long or complete works in italics.
So across all three, the answer lands in the same place: a webinar title takes quotation marks. A book title, a course curriculum, or a full training series might earn italics because it's a larger, ongoing body of work. A single 45-minute webinar session doesn't qualify. If you want the fuller breakdown of why webinars specifically get grouped with lectures rather than books, I go through it in more detail in this piece on whether webinar titles should be italicised, which covers the italics side of the same question.
Why this trips people up more than it should
Most confusion comes from mixing up a webinar with a webinar series. If you're running a five-part series called The Growth Sprint, that series name behaves more like a course title or a publication, so some house styles will italicise the series name and quote the individual session titles inside it. For example: The Growth Sprint featured a session called "Turning Cold Leads Into Booked Calls". Series in italics, single session in quotes. That distinction, series versus single event, is the bit that most quick answers online skip entirely, and it's the bit that causes real inconsistency in company blogs.
What I tested with real subject lines
Here's the part nobody else writing about this topic mentions, because most of these posts are written by people who've never had to make the call under a deadline with a client watching. Two years ago, I ran a webinar titled 5 AI Prompts That Save You 10 Hours a Week, and I had three confirmation email variants ready to go out to the same list, segmented into three roughly equal groups of around 1,400 subscribers each:
- Variant A: You're In: "5 AI Prompts That Save You 10 Hours a Week"
- Variant B: You're In: 5 AI Prompts That Save You 10 Hours a Week (no punctuation at all)
- Variant C: You're In: 5 AI Prompts That Save You 10 Hours a Week (title in bold, no quotes)
Open rates came back at 41.2%, 42.8%, and 42.1%. A gap of under two points, well within normal variance for a list that size. Click-through to the calendar link was almost identical too, off by six clicks across 4,200 sends. In other words, the quotation marks made no measurable difference to whether someone opened the email or showed up. That's the uncomfortable bit most style-guide articles avoid saying out loud: the punctuation rule is a real rule, it exists, it's worth following for consistency and professionalism, but it will not move your registration numbers by a single person. People decide to attend a webinar based on the promise in the title, not the marks around it.
Where the rule matters (and where it doesn't)
So if quote marks don't drive registrations, where does getting this right pay off? Three places, in my experience running content for my own business and for clients:
- Blog recaps and case studies. If you're writing a post that says "In our webinar 'Turning Cold Leads Into Booked Calls', we covered...", inconsistent punctuation across a site, quotes in one post, italics in another, no punctuation in a third, reads as sloppy to anyone who edits or writes for a living, and some of your readers will be exactly those people.
- Press releases and media pitches. Journalists and editors were trained on AP or Chicago. If you're pitching a webinar as a story angle and your press release uses italics for a webinar title, a sharp editor will quietly mark you down as someone who doesn't know the conventions, even if they never say it to your face.
- Internal documentation and repeat content. If your team runs 20 webinars a year, and you're repurposing each one into blog posts, LinkedIn carousels, and email sequences (I write about the tools for that kind of repurposing in this roundup of content repurposing tools), having one house rule saves your writers from re-litigating the same tiny decision 20 times a year. That's hours saved, not vanity.
Where it doesn't matter: subject lines, ad headlines, landing page H1s, social captions. In every one of those, punctuation marks around a title compete for visual attention with everything else on the page, and quote marks specifically can make a title look like it's being sarcastically distanced from, as in, "we're putting scare quotes around our own promise". I've seen landing pages where a client insisted on quoting the webinar title in the hero headline and it read like the company didn't believe its own claim.
A simple decision path for your own webinar titles
Here's the process I give clients when this question comes up, usually from a marketing coordinator who's been told by a manager that "it needs to look professional" and has no idea what that means in practice:
- Step 1: Pick one style guide for the whole business. AP if you're closer to journalism, PR, or a UK/US news-facing brand. Chicago if you're closer to academic, publishing, or long-form content. Most small businesses I work with default to AP because it's simpler and it's what most freelance writers already know.
- Step 2: Apply quotation marks to single webinar titles inside sentences, on the blog, in recaps, in press releases. Example: "We hosted 'The 90-Day AI Rollout' on the 12th of March."
- Step 3: Reserve italics only for the name of a full series, program, or ongoing curriculum, not a single session.
- Step 4: Strip all punctuation from subject lines, ad copy, and hero headlines. Bold or capitalise for emphasis instead if you need it to stand out.
- Step 5: Write the rule down once, in a one-line style note, and stop having the conversation again. I've watched teams spend 40 minutes in a Slack thread debating this exact question, which is 40 minutes nobody gets back.
How this connects to the rest of your style guide
If you're setting this rule for webinars, you're going to hit the same question for every other named piece of content your business puts out, and it's worth settling all of them at once rather than one at a time under deadline pressure. The same logic applies almost identically to whether you should italicise your own blog post titles, and to newsletter titles in email marketing copy. The short answer across all of them is the same shape: standalone short pieces get quotes, ongoing named publications or series get italics. If your business sends a regular email newsletter, you'll also want to settle how you handle the newsletter's actual name in running text, since that's usually treated closer to a publication title than a single episode.
Want AI doing the heavy lifting in your marketing?
I build the systems that handle the boring 80 percent, so you get your week back. Done properly, with the human kept in.
And if you're the kind of person who enjoys this rabbit hole of small editorial decisions that quietly shape how professional your content looks, I put together a list of 50 useful websites most people have never heard of, a few of which are style and grammar references worth bookmarking next to your own house style doc.
The bit worth remembering
Get the punctuation right because it's the correct rule and because consistency across your site makes you look like you know what you're doing. Don't get precious about it in your marketing copy, because the person deciding whether to register for your webinar is reading your promise, not your punctuation. I've written webinar titles both ways, quoted and bare, in a hundred different emails over the past few years, and not once has a prospect emailed me to complain about the quote marks. They email me when the webinar doesn't deliver what the title promised. That's the part worth spending your editing time on.
If you're choosing a platform, my roundup of the best webinar software compares the tools by audience size and features.
Frequently asked questions
Should webinar titles be in quotes or italics?
Quotes. AP, Chicago, and MLA style guides all treat a single webinar as a standalone talk or lecture, which takes quotation marks, not italics. Italics are reserved for larger, ongoing works like a full webinar series or published course.
Do webinar titles need punctuation in email subject lines?
No. Subject lines and landing page headlines work better without quote marks or italics, since punctuation around a title in marketing copy can read as sarcastic or clickbait-y rather than professional, and testing shows it makes no measurable difference to open or click rates anyway.
What about a webinar series name, does that get quotes too?
No, treat the series name like a publication or course title and italicise it, then use quotation marks for the individual session titles inside that series, the same way you'd italicise a magazine name but quote an individual article title.
Which style guide should a small business follow for this?
AP style is the simplest default for most small businesses and marketing teams, since it's what the majority of freelance writers and journalists already use, and it skips italics altogether in favour of quotation marks for short standalone works like webinars, lectures, and speeches.
