Introduction Table of contents

Introduction
Data is the lifeblood of the digital age. The most successful companies of the 21st
century all put data firmly at the centre of their business.

Since the event industry increased use of virtual and hybrid event technology and 365
community engagement, the number of data points on each participant has increased by 

a factor of 20. These new business models have created a far more data rich environment.

In the words of one of our contributors, when you strip it right back event organisers
only have three things: "Their venue contract, their brand and their data."

So it’s perhaps unsurprising that an overwhelming 97% of event organisers agree that
taking control of their data is a critical first step to controlling your destiny.

But what next? How can a savvy organiser extract value from this data?

In this ebook we have interviewed a range of industry experts to dig into these
challenges and opportunities, and to provide their practical advice about how 

to re-invent their business.

Luke Bilton
Chief Growth Officer, ExpoPlatform

Thank you to all our contributors:

Thank you to all our interviewees, including Paul Miller, Liz Irving, Gunnar Heinrich,
Stephan Forseilles, Stuart Ledden, Mark Parsons, Mark Maydon, Mark Brewster, Laura
Davidson and Elsbeth Kottelenberg and all who completed our survey.

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 Table of Contents
l. What are the greatest benefits for the events industry? 4
1. Shaping product development with customer insight 7
2. Seamless experience 10
3. Personalisation with AI recommendations 11
4. Tracking visitors around venues 12
5. Better ROI reporting for exhibitors 15
II. How AI matchmaking works 16
III. Which metrics should the event industry focus on 20
IV. Growing your audience and retaining them 24
V. Keep control of your data 28
Vl. What are the challenges? 33
VII. How do event organisers move up the data value chain? 37
VIII. Build a team to derive meaning from data 39
IX. How to create a business case for a data-driven business 46

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01
What are the
greatest benefits for
the events industry?

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i. What are the greatest benefits for the events industry? Table of contents

Unlocking the power of data can have a transformative effect on a company’s success.

We have interviewed leading exhibition organisers to better understand the ways data
science can make an impact on events businesses.

Our research shows the greatest opportunities for organisers are:

• The number one opportunity is to uncover customer insights in the data which can

be used to shape product development, with 68% of responses.

• Connecting data sources and providing a seamless experience across the customer

journey are two areas that would make a positive impact - 65% and 59% respectively.

• AI-powered recommendations to provide users with personalised online

experiences (62%) and Smart Event agendas (49%).

• Providing exhibitors with lead dashboards and demonstrating return on investment

(ROI) was chosen by 49%. While leads are important, finding new ways to sell data to
exhibitors is of lowest importance.

What are the greatest opportunities for data and analytics to

improve your business in 2022?

Customer insights to help shape product development 68%

Connecting data sources to provide 360 view of customers 65%

Personalisation of online experiences with recommended content,

62%
suppliers and connections

Seamless experience across the customer journey 59%

Exhibitor lead dashboards and proof of ROI 49%

Personalisation of event agendas with recommended content,

49%
exhibitors and connections

Acquire new visitors and exhibitors through data- driven advertising

43%
(PPC)

Tracking visitor footfall around venue 27%

New ways to sell data to exhibitors 14%

0% 20% 40% 60% 80%

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i. What are the greatest benefits for the events industry? Table of contents

Paul Miller, CEO of Questex, highlighted the massive potential for

those in our industry who are willing to adapt to change.

I do think the industry on the whole is full of very smart people who will find a way.

I think there'll be some big winners and some losers along the way, like there is with
any kind of change.

Some of it I think is going to hurt us. Some of it if you get it right is going to be very
beneficial.

Gunnar Heinrich, CEO of adventics, believes event planners who do

not get on board with a data-driven business model will be left
behind by competitors.

There are so many outsiders of our industry linked to data: Alibaba, Facebook with
Metaverse. Organisers need to make sure they are in the driver's seat, driving their
community.

Now, let’s explore these areas in more detail.

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01
i. What are the greatest benefits for the events industry? Table of contents

Shaping product development with

customer insight
Our research reveals event professionals rank the ability to shape product
development as the top opportunity for analytics. Studying the data can give you
insight into the trends within your community, which can be useful in making your
upcoming events and online products more impactful. These patterns could be related
to the type of content being consumed by a group or the fundamentals of supply and
demand within your community.

In this ExpoPlatform dashboard, supply can be tracked against demand from the visitor
community. It is measured by the number of products and exhibitors in a category. High
demand and low supply could indicate a sales opportunity, while poor demand and high
supply could indicate your exhibitors are not going to have a productive event and 

the visitor acquisition strategy should shift.

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i. What are the greatest benefits for the events industry? Table of contents

“ Every product manager needs the product attributes at his hand to develop 

the product further over the lifecycle and the instances of a product. Behavioural
information, not just what they registered with, is important to understand to move
your product forward meaningfully.

Gunnar Heinrich gave an example of how an agricultural fair may have attendees who
say they are interested in corn, but their behaviour indicates they want rice. This could
be down to a number of reasons including a new demographic within your audience.
Organisers have several options then to develop their shows using this data.

“ If you have all this information you can manage spin offs, or mergers or you can
make better decisions about whether you buy another company in this segment.

Another strategic action could be to do a geoclone of a show - maybe go to South

Africa, China or South America and make a clone of a show there.

Gunnar Heinrich
CEO of adventics

Elsbeth Kottelenberg, Head of Data and Insights at Jaarbeurs,

identified how events can be shaped by learning about what your
audience is engaging with.

I was always taught to ask for the why behind the why – for example: why is it
important that something works or fails? Is it business critical? The answer to that is
the title of your sessions.

Trend research: What are people searching for, reading and downloading online or
on your website? These are the themes and topics for your next event.

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i. What are the greatest benefits for the events industry? Table of contents

Elsbeth Kottelenberg
Head of Data and Insights at Jaarbeurs

Conference themes and topics: It is very important to dive in deeper with qualitative
research - interviews with visitors, exhibitors and key thought leaders - to find out
exactly what, how, who and most importantly why.

Jaarbeurs is planning to integrate a customer data platform to get better insight into its
target audience, based on what they say their interests are and based on their
behaviour - online and onsite.

I can imagine that this will help us to redesign floor plans, because we connect
location data from our beacons and app and understand the onsite journey better.

We create different content on our webpages based on interests or position in 


the customer life cycle.

“ People have got certain interests and are part of certain trends.

It’s important to have an ability to slice and dice and look at things in clusters 

to learn what your audience is interested in.

That's the big data lens, it’s the core competency of what an organiser needs 

to be doing.

That's how you find your next show, that's how you find your next growth pocket.

Mark Parsons
Founder of Events Intelligence

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02
i. What are the greatest benefits for the events industry? Table of contents

Seamless experience

Event professionals rank this as very high in importance. The omnichannel experience
should be a seamless transition from community to event and back again. This works
better both for customers as they don't have to jump between platforms, while
organisers can also progressively build richer profiles of the audience. It means they can
start to offer increasingly personalised products and recommendations.

Hybrid Event
Physical Event Virtual Event

Webinar
Webinar

365 Community and Marketplace

Jan feb mar apr m ay jun jul aug sep oct nov Dec jan feb mar APR M AY JUN JUL AUG SEP NOV Dec

AI matchmaking, networking and lead generation

Whether visitors are engaging online or offline, it is important to have a unified profile.

Stephan Forseilles
Head of Technology at Easyfairs

Create one profile which is the same for online and onsite.

Everything you do online and anything you do onsite all ends up in the same place.

That means the people you interact with can be online or be onsite.

But it all happens on the same platform and you can decide to share your
profile across different events.

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i. What are the greatest benefits for the events industry? Table of contents

Liz Irving, Executive Vice President of Clarion Events, also believes

it is important to use this wealth of information onsite and offline to
personalise your offerings.

It always starts with the customer first - your stakeholders, your target audiences.

Understand what their needs are, understand what they want to see and how they
want to see it, then go and help create it.

One of the things I've learned over the last 18 months is it always has to be
about what the customers want or what your market needs.

The great thing with digital is you have immediate results, you're not
waiting until after the show - you actually have that data at your fingertips
and you can improve as you go and be dynamic in your approach.

03 Personalisation with AI recommendations

Machine learning - the branch of artificial intelligence (AI) which focuses on the use of
data and algorithms to improve accuracy - has huge potential in the conferences and
exhibitions industry.

It’s how Spotify makes 70 million tracks into a playlist of songs you might like, it’s how
Tinder can turn 57 million people into a list of potential dates or Amazon can transform
350 million products into targeted recommendations.

AI matchmaking has changed the way connections are made at events.

This technology can be used to turn a large-scale event into something highly relevant
and personalised, providing focused recommendations for better, higher quality
experiences for visitor and exhibitor alike.

It means an organiser can cut out the randomness of an event and maximise the most of
a user’s time at the show.

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i . What are the greatest benefits for the events industry? Table of contents

“
Attendees and visitors have recognised the value of their own time.

What we need to do with the data is get a better handle on those 


consumer behaviours.

We're going to find that people are going to attend live events with the same kind 

of mentality - they’re here to do something specific.

Stuart Ledden
Tarsus Group Marketing Director

Examples of event personalisation can include:

Recommended content agendas, including meetups and conference sessions
Recommended people to network with
Targeted list of exhibitors to meet

04
Use of request for proposals and hosted buying to connect buyers and sellers

Tracking visitors around venues

Badge-scanning technology can be useful at in-person events for working out what was
successful at an event and why. The in-show behaviour of these attendees can be
analysed to see where they were interacting at the event.

The three main benefits of tracking visitors this way are:

Blue dot wayfinding: visitors can’t easily find their way around, which means they
don’t get to see exhibitors relevant to them
Exhibitor ROI: metrics for every stand across the entire show floor. Sales team
can access at any time, during and after the event.
Push notification messages to be hyper targeted based on a visitor’s current a /or 

historic locations.

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Introduction Table of contents

30

25 These stands are high

performers and could
20 be put in a higher
pricing tier

15

+12%
10 +16%

Illustration of a tracking system developed by Crowd Connected

Mark Maydon
Director at Crowd Connected

It's no longer just about mapping, wayfinding and navigation - it’s about discovering.

The app becomes a kind of digital concierge service.

It helps you find what you came for and discover what you didn't know was there.

We're helping the organisers by taking all of that footfall data and
delivering it back via the organiser to the exhibitors.

The customers then have evidence of how well they performed at the show.
As with any data it’s important to separate signal from noise.

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i. What are the greatest benefits for the events industry? Table of contents

Mark Maydon
Director at Crowd Connected

That’s why technologies are being developed where historically disparate data sets
are being joined up.

This allows for key profiles to be targeted to find out how they are behaving 

at an event - identifying the big spenders, not the time wasters.

Paul Miller
Questex CEO

There’s maybe a clown juggling on someone's booth and all of a sudden it's 

a hotspot for 20 minutes.

I'm more interested in whether someone spent 20 minutes at the IBM booth -
that's much more interesting to me.

That opens up a whole layer of discussion of how you can work the show better,
how we price the positions of the show.

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05
i. What are the greatest benefits for the events industry? Table of contents

Better ROI reporting for exhibitors

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Interactions with
advertising and popups
Connections made
online and at show

A top concern for event professionals is that return on investment is made clear and
transparent to exhibitors. There are a couple of factors driving this:

- Proving the quality. At a time when trade shows are expected to have a lesser quantity
of visitors, being able to demonstrate the quality of visitors is key.

- Rising expectations of digital marketing. The last two years of the pandemic have
accelerated digital marketing in all industries. Marketers now expect to see detailed
metrics about how their campaigns have performed.

The ExpoPlatform supplier dashboard (pictured above) brings together various

different data points to provide a single-view of an exhibitor’s ROI. The dashboard
brings together insight into online profile views, engagement with content and product
listings as well as in-person badge scans together into one holistic dashboard.

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02
How AI
matchmaking works

expoplatform.com | The AI Blueprint 16

II. How AI matchmaking works Table of contents

ExpoPlatform uses person-to-object matchmaking which matches users based on:

Products
Exhibiting companies
Content types such as sessions
News and webinars

Visitor Product

product Categories

preferences product Categories

Category A Category A
Category b Category b
Category C Category C
Category D Category D

Registration data

my activities my Interests my Product categories

Match!

2. behaviour

Meeting Requests favourite

search products my Product categories
profile views send messages Match!

3. peer interests and behaviour

s te r
cl u
s te r
1 cl u 2

The matching algorithm is initialised using registration data, learning more over time
based on user behaviour
Whenever a person interacts in any way with any object, their interests get updated.

This includes viewing pages - news, exhibitors, product profiles favouriting, requesting 

a meeting, sending a message, viewing a session, rejecting a match and more.

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Ii. How AI matchmaking works Table of contents

The system detects peer groups based on similarity of registration data and
demographic information.
Objects that gather a lot of interest from the peer group are more likely to appear

to others in the group who have not yet reacted to them. This is especially useful in cases
where little interaction data is available about a person and their peer’s interests may
prove to be more accurate than what they’ve ticked in their product category preferences.

Organisers can use a series of matchmaking filters to influence 


the recommendations shown.
These can be used to eliminate matches in the ranked list between specific people 

and/or companies based on answers to registration questions - for example, a small buyer
should not match with a large supplier.

Recommendations can then be shown online and in emails triggered to users.

“ We need the content deliverability and interest grabbing of Netflix.

We need the social stickiness and interactivity of LinkedIn and we need 


the personalised experience of Amazon, where you’re linked to the right stuff.

Bringing all of that together is when we get a lot of traffic and stickiness on the platforms.

Mykyta Fastovets
Chief Technology Officer, ExpoPlatform

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Ii. How AI matchmaking works Table of contents

Identifying the perfect buyer

Visitors are not equal. How can you make it easier to identify the valuable visitors and
get them in front of the right suppliers? Consider what processes you can use to Identify,
Nurture and Convert the right profile of buyers your exhibitors will want to meet.

Demographics: job title, industry, company size, budget

1. Identify Intent to purchase: online behaviour, actively researching

content and solutions to see if ready to buy

Recommend helpful content e.g. vendor comparisons, checklists

2. Nurture Marketplace recommendations

VIP concierge service

Generate hosted buyer meetings with suppliers. Highlight lead quality to

3. Convert exhibitors in dashboards. Request for proposals sent out to relevant exhibitors.

“ It’s about being able to let exhibitors concentrate their efforts in marketing and
spending time seeing the right person.

An exhibitor on an event of two days may see 100 different people, but out of these
only 10 may be really interesting.

What if you could say ‘instead of spending 10 minutes with someone, you can spend
one hour with each of the 10 people who are a much better use of your time’.

That's a very interesting proposal for the exhibitors.

Stephan Forseilles
Head of Technology at Easyfairs

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03
Which metrics should
the event industry
focus on?

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III. Which metrics should the event industry focus on? Table of contents

There are a number of key metrics which our industry can pursue to help create events
of the future.

The survey asked respondents to identify the metrics which are most important for

the future of their business.

• Proof of ROI and return on time is the main priority for the event industry, with 44%
of responses. Organisers want to understand “the amount of business done” and any
data points that indicate the value an exhibitor has received such as quantity and
quality of connections, meetings, RFIs.

• Engagement across the full customer journey: 28% of responses related to

customer engagement - across all stages of their involvement with the business.
Comments were about “tracking full customer journey from start to finish”,
“conversion of online-visitor to in-person visitor” and measuring “engaged data and
customer retention rates across all digital channels and events”.

• Net Promoter Score (NPS) is still relevant, even though it is a lagging metric. NPS
score should be top left of your dashboard.

• Revenue will always remain an important metric to measure the performance 


of the business.

Revenue 9.4% 43.8% ROI and demand

Other 6.3%

NPS 12.5%

28.1% Full customer

engagement

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III. Which metrics should the event industry focus on? Table of contents

A key part of making a success in this area comes through knowing what you are trying
to achieve.

This means you align KPIs with your corporate strategy - if you want to grow in Asia you
need a measurement for that.

Gunnar Heinrich, CEO of adventics, recommended sticking to the rule 


of “twenty’s plenty”.

The real art is to work on these 20 KPIs - what are the really important numbers for
you and your business?

These numbers must be derived from your corporate strategy. It's super important
that you think about the right KPIs - and not having 100 different numbers.

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III. Which metrics should the event industry focus on? Table of contents

Questions to ask the data:

In an interview with ExpoPlatform, CEO of Questex Paul Miller

provided some questions he'd like the data to answer.

How many meetings moved the buyer along the journey from discovery to
making a buying decision?

Did someone make a purchase at the show? Was that purchase bigger,
smaller or the same as last year? Did someone make more purchases in this
show than at other shows?

Where did those buyers go next for content? What sort of content 

are they reading?

Did an attendee see the people they needed to? How many networking
incidents happened at the show?

How many booths were visited at the show?

How many discussions took place? How many of those were either
serendipitous or planned?

How was the show experience beyond business - food, drink, entertainment?

Which exhibit wasn't there that should have been there?

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04
Growing your audience
and retaining them

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IV. Growing your audience and retaining them Table of contents

Data-driven marketing opens up new channels for reaching potential customers. You can
use the information from your current audience to define a target demographic - that can
be by job title, sector or numerous other characteristics.

We asked the experts for their advice on how better data handling can be used to acquire
new audiences. Here’s what they had to say:

Stuart Ledden
Tarsus Group Marketing Director

However you define that by demographic - by job function, by sector, whatever it

might be - you should be able to use that data to reach similar profiled customers
that you're not you're not currently talking to.

That's where data-driven marketing particularly becomes incredibly powerful.

It's allowing you to get outside of the pool of potential customers that you tend to
spend a lot of time with into those new areas.

Therefore you're increasing your range - you're generating new customer

engagement and growing your audience.

Having a strong focus on content is one area which allows an organiser to

attract a wider and more engaged audience.

An event planner can follow the data to reveal what their target
demographic is looking for and what they are most interacting with.

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IV. Growing your audience and retaining them Table of contents

Laura Davidson, Director of Tag Digital, recommends organisers start

seeing cookies as being a thing of the past. They should instead be running
campaigns to build data which is “more valuable than water now”.

They need to use content to do that, give their audience something useful and then
they are starting from a strong position to market their event, digital product 

and more.

They need to be using machine learning to show the right ad, at the right time, 

to the right user and make sure of the 5,000 other data points that ad tech captures 

on every user.

Use things like target cost per acquisition bidding to ensure you are building data 

at a cost that works for your business.

Laura identified three data categories for growing audience:

Building emails - ideally business
Building phone numbers
Cookie data, until this is retired in 2023

All of these seed audiences can then be fed into advertising platforms to create similar
groups so you can then grow your networks and potential audiences. These demographics
must be split out into relevant data sets as opposed to combining them. Ensure the
audiences are all over 1,000 users then think about a metric that makes sense to your new
targets, such as CTR or engagement rate. This will give you information on how well they
are engaging with your content.

Laura added that it was important to “make sure that any campaigns you are
running are split into a funnel based approach”.

This is because users can be pushed down this and then they will convert 

at the bottom for your required action.

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IV. Growing your audience and retaining them Table of contents

Stephan Forseilles
Head of Technology at Easyfairs

For the past 10 years, doing marketing for an event has been sending as many
emails as you could - but those days are gone.

You have to optimise your marketing to be multichannel and be able to track people
across different channels - which is not always easy, especially when you're dealing
with B2C versus B2B world.

Have an intelligent data platform that can actually tell you an area where you can
optimise your costs and be more intelligent in where you spend money.

Retain those that come

It is fantastic to grow your audience using new information available - but it’s more
important to keep them coming back.

Rebooking rates for exhibitors are a standard metric in our industry so the level 

at which people keep coming back to a show should be too.

You as an organiser will manage to build a loyal fanbase which is certain to turn up and
please exhibitors who are investing in space.

This is another area where a data team can be used to measure what has been
successful with those who do come back to an event.

Stephan said: “The pond in which we fish is not infinite and the strategy to say we will
always acquire new visitors and not make efforts to retain the old one is a
shortsighted strategy.

“At some point you're going to run out of new visitors to address, but also considering
that acquiring a visitor is much more expensive than keeping an existing one.”

It’s easier to retain a visitor than find a new one.

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05
Keep control of 

your data

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V. Keep control of your data Table of contents

A whopping 97% of exhibition organisers say it’s very important to take control 


of their data.

That is a major example of its value amid the explosion of digital options for events.

More data is being generated now than ever before.

With such a massive amount of data being generated, questions arise over ownership

and control of this data, whether that sits with the organiser or with the event

technology platform.

How important is it that organisers retain full and

exclusive control of user data?

80.00%
75.68%

60.00%

40.00%

21.62%
20.00%

2.70%

0.00% 0.00%
0.00%

Not important Low importance Average importance Very important Greatest importance

A whopping 97% of exhibition organisers told our survey it’s very important to take

control of their data.

That is a major example of its value amid the explosion of digital options for events.

More data is being generated now than ever before, meaning there have been questions

over ownership and control of this data, whether that sits with the organiser or with 


the event technology platform.

An UFI Connects session in December 2021 saw experts from world-leading planners

agree that this debate over control is over - it should lie with the planner.

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V. Keep control of your data Table of contents

This is important because there are broadly two event data models that technology
vendors are using:

Organiser-led data control

users Organiser Vendor

The organiser controls the customer relationship and is the exclusive data controller

Organiser-led model
The organiser-led model, the event organiser controls the attendee data, with the
technology platform being the ‘processor of data’ as long as the contract lasts. This is
similar to how registration companies have worked, and generally considered to be in
the best interest of the organiser.

Vendor-led data control

MULTIPLE
users vendor organisers

The vendor controls the customer relationship and can share with other third parties

Vendor-led model
Meanwhile, the vendor-led model has led to concerns among event industry players,
where the event tech platform co-controls the data and so will not delete it if requested
by the organiser.

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V. Keep control of your data Table of contents

Gunnar Heinrich
CEO of adventics

If you allow other parties to use this data for their own purposes, you throw away
your most important assets - it's super shortsighted.

You need this information to shape your product for the future, to be more
profitable, to build even closer relationships with your market participants 

over the time - so they can't afford to not be with you - and it's a long lasting
partnership, which gets stronger and stronger over the years.

Data is king there, to be stronger in the future and to avoid being irrelevant.

Stephan Forseilles
Head of Technology at Easyfairs

We don't want all our data collected at our events on the platform that we have paid
for to serve a competitor.

That competitor can be another tradeshow, but it can also be the platform itself if it
one day decides to create community events or things like that online.

We don't want this data to be used by the platform to make their algorithm better -
even in an anonymised way.

Because that would increase the experience of our competitors that use 

the same platforms - using our data to train an algorithm.

It's like hiring someone, spending six months training them in organising trade
shows and then they go work for a competitor - it's exactly the same thing.

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V. Keep control of your data Table of contents

Mark Brewster
CEO of Explori

It’s absolutely critical that an organiser has control and they have demonstrated
that recently.

There’s evidence by their choices around which platforms to use and pushback
against the platforms that don’t offer them data ownership terms that they’re
satisfied with.

I don’t blame them for that, the data is the big asset in this business model,
particularly if it’s really utilised well.

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06
What are the
challenges?

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VI. What are the challenges? Table of contents

This abundance of data isn’t all about opportunity - there are challenges to using it
correctly. Organisers told us where they believe the biggest hurdles to making a success
of this information are. But do not fear - our experts have helped us to guide you through
overcoming them and making a success from the data.

1 Getting the data foundation right is by far the single greatest issue for event
professionals, with over half of responses.

Making sure the data from different sources is pulled into a unified database

is a major stumbling block to most of those interviewed.

The typical brand team structure of event organisers formed over the years 

by acquisitions of different businesses, works against having a consistent
technology stack and unified approach.

One respondent commented that “Our greatest challenge is a federated corporate

structure means integration of different data sets/formats/structures from
different systems”.

2 The second largest issue, raised by nearly a quarter of respondents, is of

organisational maturity. Issues include not having the right resources, data
governance and processes in place, which can come from a “lack of buy-in from
top management”.

3 Other challenges raised include finding meaningful insights in the data (15%).
Respondents commented about the need to “separate data from knowledge”
and to “design strategies so that the data obtained are useful in relation 

to the growth and quality of the fair”.

4 Data privacy and security (6%) was an issue for a relatively small 

number of respondents.

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VI. What are the challenges? Table of contents

Other 3.0% 51.5% Data foundation

Security 6.1%

Insight 15.2%

Organisational
24.2%
issues

Members from more than 15 event organisations have grouped to develop a new
industry standard for digital events.

VSef is one such initiative designed to standardise how virtual event data is
standardised for easy interoperability.

The BPA Reporting Standards for Digital Events (RSDE) project also aims to create 

a reporting framework for virtual shows to tackle the lack of standards for online.

Mark Brewster, CEO of Explori, believes this standardisation is “critical” for

organisers who want to make the most of the large volume of data which

is now available.

This enables planners to finetune marketing to their audiences through

highly personalised content.

The huge barrier to that is the lack of consistency, which is one of the reasons
Explori has led the VSef initiative - to get that consistency so there’s a common data
standard for the way that data is available to organisers.

So they can really act on those big opportunities to take what they do with customer
data to the next level.

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VI. What are the challenges? Table of contents

Elsbeth Kottelenberg, Head of Data and Insights at Jaarbeurs, has identified

separating good information from the rest as a challenge for her 

company - particularly with its customer data platform.

She claims three years or three editions is the lifetime of how relevant data
can be from an event for analysis or marketing campaigns.

We’re dealing with databases that have a lot of old, irrelevant data such as double
records - they’re difficult to clean up.

I’ve now learned that there are tools out there that can help creating a new clean
database, while cleaning up the old: if a person registers, we locate it in our old
database, take the old record out and put everything we know about that person in 

the new database.

After a while you can do a campaign on the old data, but at some point we will let it go.

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07
How do event
organisers move up
the data value chain?

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VIi. How do event organisers move up the data value chain? Table of contents

The event industry is on a journey to extract more value from the data which
is being collected.

The data science hierarchy of needs (below) shows the tools and processes required,
starting with a foundation of well collected, organised data sets, before moving up 

the pyramid to more advanced analytics, experimentation and AI models.

The datA science

Hierarchy of needs Al,

deep
learning

A/B testing,
learn/ optimise experementation, simple
ML algorithms

Analytics, metrics, segments,

aggregate/ label aggregates, features, training data

explore/ transform Cleaning, anomaly detection, prep

Reliable date, folow, infrastructure, pipelines, etl

move/ store structured and unstructured data storage

collect Instrumentation, logging, sensors, external data,

user, generated content

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Build a team to derive
meaning from data

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VIII. Build a team to derive meaning from data Table of contents

Our research reveals a split between organisers who don’t currently have a team for
data science compared with the other half who already have a team or are in the process
of recruiting.

Yes we have 30.6% 30.6% No plans

existing team

We are actively 19.4%

recruiting Not yet, planning
19.4%
for 2022/3

It is important to consider the benefits of investing in this area when making a decision
about changing your company makeup.

The need for experts on your team has become increasingly important as the waves of
data grow higher and more frequent in today’s B2B sphere.

Marketers, growth officers and content creators are expected to analyse 


this information in ways they have never done before.

In some businesses that responsibility can be left up to one person: email designing, social
media monitoring, running PPC campaigns.

But these are all increasingly complex channels which need monitoring and interpreting.

That’s why organisers should seriously consider bringing in a person or team who
understands this language and is able to interpret it effectively.

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VIII. Build a team to derive meaning from data Table of contents

Despite this our research suggests:

Only 49% have done so or are actively recruiting a data science team

A further 30% said they have no plans in this area

Stuart Ledden, Tarsus Group Marketing Director, believes this is crucial for
making the most of this valuable information source.

The data that comes back from those means you can't expect one person to do that.

Even if you don't have the resources for a multifaceted marketing team, you need
somebody there that is interpreting the knowledge that's coming back in from all
that activity.

The marketing manager can then create more effective campaigns and plan.

The positives of having a data specialist come in three main areas:

It facilitates a data hub which allows for easier system integration

All information is in one place with “one version of truth” for creating KPIs

The data can be centralised to train AI algorithms

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VIII. Build a team to derive meaning from data Table of contents

Stephan Forseilles, Head of Technology at Easyfairs, has set out in more

detail how bringing in a specialist and building a hub for your data can
benefit you.

1. It acts as the core point of all of the data, so when we have to transfer data from
one system to another we have an easier way to do it.

If you're connected to the data lake, then you can get the data from there.

2. Almost all of our reporting has exclusively moved to that point. Everybody works
with the same version of the truth.

This is where we calculate all of our KPIs - it looks obvious, but it's not. If you
speak to five different organisers, or even five different event managers in the
same organisation, they could have five different ways of counting visitors.

Concentrating everything in one place where you have one definition of how to
calculate the number of visitors is actually a huge step forward in understanding
how the business works.

3. We have all the data to train our AI algorithms and we have a bunch of those
which run on the data lake. They have access to all the data from all the events we
have organised.

Bringing in a data expert is a starting point, but the fruits may take some time to develop.

This is because the effort in building a “data lake” which holds all of the information can
take some time.

It involves gathering touchpoints and behaviours which can be analysed to direct strategy.

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VIII. Build a team to derive meaning from data Table of contents

“ Their role is to construct a team and an infrastructure over time. First you need the
team, then you need the infrastructure - but you also need all of the other systems in
your organisation to be able to send data to the data lake.

Stephan Forseilles 

Head of Technology at Easyfairs

Digital behaviour is key in getting insights into what people are really interested in.

It goes back to following what your audience does, rather than simply what they say.

Examples could include analysing who they met, their online searches, topics read on
the emails, websites visited and products looked at.

This is about making sure the data available is sufficiently representative and correct -
“building and maintaining accuracy of data held”.

“ Behaviour tells you the real truth.

Companies like ExpoPlatform can help in the future because they prestructure all
the data for you and say this is the real truth.

Now you can profile your attendees much better and you can make more business
with this information.

Gunnar Heinrich
CEO, adventics

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VIII. Build a team to derive meaning from data Table of contents

Restructuring for success

Paul Miller, CEO of Questex, told ExpoPlatform how he restructured his teams to allow
them to quickly react to trends they were seeing from data, introducing a focus on
internal “centres of excellence”.

The company wanted to break the “silo culture” and develop expertise so individual
teams can quickly share information about what has been working across

different shows.

This means for instance that content “best practices” sits in one group, as does product
development best practices, banners signage best practices, database best practices and
so on.

“ We've gone through a massive transformation - digital revenue streams doubled

in a Covid-19 environment, while our event revenue streams clearly haven't.

We believe that the initial thesis that there is a different way that communities
are going to engage going forward has been exposed completely by Covid-19 and
that it's correct.

I wanted to break the silo culture here, but that wasn't the only reason.

We set up a robust shared services operation so all of our event performance

operations are in one group, product development and technology is in one
group and the management of the database is in one group.

We stripped all of that away from the markets and said it's going to be 

a centre of excellence.

If we see something working in Singapore that might be relevant in Las Vegas

we'll share it really rapidly.

Paul Miller
Questex CEO

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VIII. Build a team to derive meaning from data Table of contents

Clarion Events

Clarion Events is another organiser which decided to adapt the skillset of its team so they
were in a strong position to make a success of the digital transformation of our industry.

Liz Irving, Executive Vice President, said they had to ensure they had what
they needed to be able to interpret the new data they were acquiring, but
also use it to improve a customer’s journey.

We've added new skill sets - with data, with digital skill sets, customer journey
mapping that is rounding out an already strong marketing team.

I think those are big things that we as event organisers have to leverage.

It's no longer that just running a multi-channel marketing plan, we also need to
augment our team to be much more data centric and be able to harness insights
and trends to deliver greater, more personalised results for our customers.

We have to really understand the customer journey and how to define it and
make it better every time.

We use a lot of our digital skill sets to help us get there so I think it's huge for us.

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09
How to create a
business case for a
data-driven business

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IX. How to create a business case for a data-driven business Table of contents

We have shown you the benefits of using this information in our industry. In this final
section, the experts tell us how to build a real case for a data-driven business.

Paul Miller
Questex CEO

Let your customers drive your strategy - stop thinking you know best, stop
thinking you're the only one that knows how to put on an event, stop
thinking that the classic barriers to entry of putting on live events are your
reason for being.

Gunnar Heinrich
CEO of adventics

As an organiser your role is to serve a community or industry and be

profitable - we make profit out of this.

It's much easier to talk to these kinds of people about what we can do with
digital strategy and monetising on data.

Mark Maydon
Director at Crowd Connected

If you're not making decisions built on data you're probably not making very good
decisions.

The best organisations in the world, the best operations in the world, are all 

data-driven decision makers.

If you think about the really super valuable businesses that have been built 

in the last 20 years - Google, Facebook or Meta, Apple and all those digital
businesses - they're all built on data.

Exhibition organisers are rapidly having to change to become data businesses.

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IX. How to create a business case for a data-driven business Table of contents

Mark Maydon
Director at Crowd Connected

Those that do will win and those that don't will wither on the vine.

Digging into data should reveal trends and opportunities to make

improvements that the business will value.

Start small with experiments, measure results and iterate.

Liz Irving
Executive Vice President of Clarion Events

It's okay to not get it right the first time, the idea is that you want to try and 

the more you truly understand what your customers want you can deliver and
iterate from there.

This is an area that we're still learning and you have to be a little risky by being OK
with not having all the answers.

It's okay to try but learn what's working - do more of it and where you see
something not working, or customers not engaging, move quickly to let it go.

We've done that over the last year, that's a hard thing personally to do 

as a leader but what is so rewarding as you learn as you go.

You improve as a team but most of all you deliver new value to delight your
customers, providing the product they need.

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IX. How to create a business case for a data-driven business Table of contents

Rather than throwing everything at an audience, develop focused product offerings

that truly solve their painpoints.

A minimum viable product (MVP) is that version of a new product which allows a team
to collect maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.

Having launched an MVP in the market, organisers can test, learn from the user
feedback to iterate towards a better, more successful product.

NOT LIKE THIS!

LIKE THIS!

“ People are expecting this, everyone has less time to do more stuff.

They're expecting an experience that caters to their needs - the real value of an
event is bringing together the right components.

People expect things to be there and ready for them, so underestimate this at your
own peril because you will lose people to online B2B marketplaces where things 

are ready for them.

They will go to whoever offers them an easier and faster experience - time is money.

Mykyta Fastovets
Chief Technology Officer, ExpoPlatform

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 Table of contents

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