UFI MD Paul Woodward on personalising the audience experience.
We have a very successful industry. It has for the most part survived the economic challenges of the last five years intact. But, how innovative are we? At best, the way in which we do business has evolved gently. While other industries have seen massive transformations in the past 20 years, exhibitions look pretty similar.
We are making some practical use of new technologies, but the look and feel of most of our events remain largely the same and most of us charge for them in the same way we always have. We could, of course, pat ourselves on the back and offer congratulations to one another for being perfect.
Given the possibility that perfection may not have been achieved, however, UFI used its summer gathering in Sweden to pool the collective wisdom of the audience. Inspired by futurist Kjell Nordstrom and prodded into action by Simon Naudi, the delegates worked to address the basic question of what they thought would be the key way exhibitions will change in the coming 10 years.
Some strong common themes emerged. Engagement with the audience was a critical issue. This took several forms. One was personalisation. We have the data tools in hand that should allow us to help tailor the experience of every participant at our event. Only by engaging delegates with a much more personalised experience was it felt exhibitions would remain relevant. At the same time, it was also suggested we are not sufficiently engaging the audience during our events with a really compelling experience. Getting all stakeholders involved in this will be vital; the organiser team, exhibitors, stand designers and builders and the visitors themselves can all contribute to enhancing the event experience in way that truly involves all participants in a way which web companies might call ‘sticky’.
There was also focus on how we would engage our audiences throughout the year in a way truly useful for them. Most agreed we had not really come close to achieve this properly in most cases.
Several of the groups felt that the look and feel of fairs should change. Naudi had suggested that we have evolved remarkably little over 100 or more years in how we lay out our shows and manage the audience. Some felt that this would inevitably mean smaller, more specialised events that managed crowd flows very differently to today’s exhibitions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, larger organisers were reluctant to concede this trend’s inevitability.
For several years, there has been a lot of talk about our events being at the heart of ‘thought leadership’ for our industry. Beyond enhancing our conference programmes and websites, I have to confess I have been at a bit of a loss to understand how we might achieve that. The discussions in Malmö did point up some useful thoughts in that direction. We bring together an unmatchable ‘brains trust’ of industry leaders, technologists and marketers at our events. Finding effective ways to source and disseminate important industry insight from the whole crowd, not just selected keynote speakers, seems a promising direction to consider.
There was a lot of other detail on which some groups focused, but I certainly took away these three as potentially the most far-reaching: engaging our audience, redesigning our fairs and putting some real meat on the bones of the thought leadership concept.
This was first published in Issue 3/2013 of EW. Any comments Email exhibitionworld@mashmedia.net
