Roundtable
“There’s too much noise
at the moment, no matter
what generation you are,
it’s information overload,
so you need to be able to pull
out key information you can
remember, and at the moment
there’s too much noise around
so people aren’t able to pull
out those key experiences,
and that’s how people
consume it differently.”
What does the
ultimate tech
experience look
like?
“Seamless and
collaborative- both
people get what they
want very quickly.”
“You’ve to be multi-
layered, because it can
be an immersive brand
experience, all the way
through to the tech and
data management of
masses of information,
technology is involved in
everything.”
“Relevant – There’s
no point unless it’s
beneficial to the visitor
and exhibitor.”
“Exciting – visitors want
to be excited and go
away and talk it to other
people.”
“Interactive and engaging
- give people a takeaway
that is purposeful.”
“Multi-sensory - The
difference music and
lighting can make to an
exhibition.”
How do you deliver ROI?
Warden: “I was just
thinking about my
experience at Confex and
being on the other side of it
as a visitor, and, I had some
really good conversations
on site, but follow-ups
are poor and you just get
‘thanks for visiting, here’s
some information’, and
that’s it. But then you
get the exhibitors that
have remembered the
conversation you’ve had
and once you’ve gone away,
they’ve taken note of what
you’ve talked about, and
they come back with ‘It was
really great to talk to you
about [this specific thing], I
remembered you mentioned
[this], do you want to talk
about it a bit more?’, and
that to me was a lot more
positive, that I’d come out of
that conversation and made
that connection. I know as
organisers that’s not our
responsibilities, but maybe
we should be educating our
exhibitors on that a little bit
more?’
Smith agrees: “I think
that’s a really interesting
point. There’s a whole
question of quality verses
quantity on both sides,
whether you’re an
exhibitor or an attendee.
As an attendee, you may
have a whole bunch of
conversations, but some are
more useful than others,
and as an exhibitor it’ll be
the same. If you’re at a trade
show for a few days, you can
have a lot of conversations
and actually being able to
prioritise conversations is
one of the real challenges,
no matter what data capture
you’re using.”
Adam Price, sales manager,
DBPixelHouse gives his
insight: “For brands, we’ve
actually built sales apps
where we used to do it in
criteria, in a methodical way
where you could tick off the
things you were interested
in, you could evaluate the
conversation afterwards, and
the data in the background
would save the salespeople
looking from product to
product. But, over many
years we actually found a
good way of doing it is just
when you are showing the
information, on an iPad for
example, if you grab the top
right hand side of the iPad,
it saves it into one pile, and
if you grab it by the top left
then it saves it in another
pile…There’s all this clever
data but we actually do
some very simple, basic
qualifications.”
Alastair Reece, content
director, DBPixelhouse
concludes: “There’s so much
more data that we can gather
from people, that we just
don’t put the effort into,
and that’s the reason why
companies like Facebook and
Google are worth so much
because they’ve got this rich
data on individuals. Quite
often, we’ll tag someone’s
badge and maybe there’s a
brief description, but what
we haven’t done is looked
at their behaviour on the
stand and what they’ve
interacted with. If you’ve got
that data you can continue
that conversation because
you’ve got an insight into
what they’re interested in,
rather than it being just
another introduction to the
company.” EN
April — 53