Data
The race to enrich trade show data
Mark Parsons tells Theo Reilly that the clock is ticking for organisers to develop their most valuable resource : data .
or the hottest
F buzzword in the industry , very little is understood about data . At the recent IBTM World show in Barcelona , there was scarcely a session that didn ’ t mention its importance . Vice-president of European sales at Cvent Jamie Vaughan went so far as to say : “ An event planner without data is just an event planner with an opinion .”
We know the importance of gathering data , understanding our audience and having statistics to show stakeholders . But when people say ‘ data is the future ’, what exactly do they mean ? What does a data-driven future look like ?
To get a better picture , I spoke to data aficionado Mark Parsons . A corporate financier-turned data scientist , Mark has worked at big accounting firms like EY and KPMG . In 2016 , he launched Events Intelligence to help the exhibition industry build its data science chops .
During our conversation , Mark told me that he sees an entirely new class of exhibition organiser emerging in five years ’ time . These organisers , he claims , will be so advanced at data collection and data enrichment that they will be viewed as tech companies when being acquired . By achieving the status of a data or SaaS ( softwareas-a-service ) business , they will earn higher valuations , breaking through the current upper bond that exhibition organisers hold .
So , how will they achieve this ?
How well are we using our data ? Organisers are sitting on vast piles of data . Most of it , Mark tells me , is in unstructured , unlinked databases – list upon list of names , email addresses , phone numbers and company names with some job titles thrown in . How much use are we getting out of these caches ?
Mark ’ s answer , predictably , is ‘ not enough ’. An event is a data gold mine – a repeating opportunity to gather first-party data on connections . A major challenge in data collection today is acquiring high-quality data . Traditionally , we have worked with third-party data because it ’ s readily available , but rarely does it help us understand how groups are connected . Experts are increasingly promoting ‘ connection data ’ as a much more valuable commodity – something that ’ s available in abundance at
Left : Mark Parsons
exhibitions . Exhibition organisers bring together separate communities . Their value is in how effective they are as a bridge . With richer , more connected sets of data , organisers can accurately map out subcommunities , or clusters , and link them together . A comparison can be drawn to a supermarket . If Lidl analyses its receipt data and finds that customers are buying wine and baby formula together , they might move the products closer together . Exhibitions connect people with other people and products , much like a supermarket .
Say , for example , there is a
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