Trade Shows Are Becoming More Intelligent

For the past decade, a handful of companies have developed various approaches to extracting intelligence from the physically rigid construct of the exhibition by creating a digital layer of data on top of it.

As technology evolves, developers are able to add more data points to the layer. Now, one company is able to “virtualize” the entire event life cycle.

Trade Shows Are Becoming More Intelligent

For example, an attendee can’t fill a room in the convention center with only the individuals, companies and content with which he wishes to engage. Likewise, exhibitors and sponsors are unable to rent a booth space or purchase a banner that only attracts prospects pre-determined to have an interest in their products.

A smart trade show, as envisioned by platform developers, emits data from various sources—websites, registration systems, mobile devices, RFID readers, beacons or surveys—which they then transform into relevant business intelligence for organizers, exhibitors, sponsors, and attendees.

In doing so, they allow the physical trade show to assume an alter ego, one that creates myriad opportunities.

A Smart Trade Show

With the new platforms coming online, not only can they learn far more about their customers, they can monetize the data by selling it back to exhibitors and sponsors or creating new programming and features that attendees will pay extra for. The more granular the data is, the more valuable it becomes.

The Virtual Event is a Data Cache

Exhibitors & Attendees Benefit

Data extracted from multiple sources at different times during the event cycle yields three-dimensional attendee profiles and actionable insight. With the new breed of tools, exhibitors can create initiatives(push notifications, content or advertising) to reach target prospects. Attendees can generate customized agendas based on Amazon-style suggestions and organizers can target their marketing programs more effectively.

Companies Working in the Event Virtualization Space

Since early in the 2000s, Alliance Tech has been chronicling the attendee journey using RFID-enabled badges, a mobile app, barcode scanners and, most recently a registration and check-in platform.

GenieConnect by Lanyon expanded its earlier work in event mobile apps to include data collection via web

portals and beacons.

A New Entrant into theEvent Virtualization Space

The company’s comprehensive trade show data-mapping platform processes inputs from the event website, registration, social media, mobile, user-generated actions and location-tracking devices to gather data throughout the event life cycle.

Hubvents Differs From Other Solutions

The cloud platform at the core of the solution is source agnostic. It provides organizers with a set of native components—a community platform, mobile app and networking solution, among others—and can integrate data collected by other vendors through application programming interfaces (APIs).

Also, the company adopts a hybrid Approach to proximity-based data collection, using beacons or RFID depending on the location of the event.

Progressive Profiling

Hubvents’ platform is primarily focused on “learning an audience at a deeper, more nuanced level,” says Co-founder Prasanna Venkatesan. Through a process called progressive profiling, “every click, every action [on the website, mobile app or on the show floor] taken within the event ecosystem feeds into a machine-learning backend to continuously build a custom identity for every individual,” he explains.

Custom Identities

Custom identities provide context for attendee actions within the event, Venkatesan says. For example, as an attendee approaches a booth, the exhibitor can be alerted about the individual’s specific interests, priorities and affinities, paving the way for an informed interaction.

The Hubvents platform can make suggestions to him about companies and conference education that align with his identity or serve him contextual advertising as he moves through the event.

The Emergence of 2 Planes

What Hubvents and other platform developers within the trade show virtualization space allude to is the emergence of two planes of the event—one physical and one digital—both of which can be leveraged, monetized, and improvised.

“Holistic”

Hubvents’ Lenore Barbato describes this characterization as holistic. “Events are these living, breathing, multidimensional organisms and the solutions that try to intuit them need to be multidimensional in order to serve the community of event professionals at various levels well,” she says.