February 2007 Will BDMetrics’ personalization technology revolutionize the industry?
EXPO takes an inside look at the company and its plans to change the perceived value of trade shows.
By Danica Tormohlen and Cathy Chatfield-Taylor
For a company that once required a password to access its Web site — and still does no advertising — Baltimore-based BDMetrics (www.bdmetrics.com) has elicited a lot of talk. Even before the recent wave of press releases announcing new products and partners, event producers noted the growing popularity of BDMetrics’ You-Based personalization technology at their shows. To wit:
• The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA, www.tiaonline.org) reported that 6,000 participants elected to keep their personal portals active after using “TIAnalytics” at SUPERCOMM 2004. • When CMP Media brought “EEQuorum” back for asecond year at the Embedded Systems Conference 2005 (www.esconline.com), they saw portal activation increase fourfold, and 82 percent of participants updated their profiles. • An attendee who logged onto “MyCES” for the 2006 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES, www.cesweb.org) was recognized as the one millionth user of the You-Based Portal.• At the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB, www.nabshow.com) 2006 show, 60 percent of participants used their “MyNAB Show” portals to plan their activities. • By the end of 2006, more than 2 million attendee portals and 75,000 exhibiting company portals were reportedly activated.
If the print publicity isn’t evidence enough, in a moment of unbridled enthusiasm at a recent industry event, producers of several market-leading events espoused the merits of BDMetrics’ products and their potential to “revolutionize” the industry and “radically change the perceived value of shows.”
“This technology is changing trade shows,” says Gary Shapiro, President and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA, www.ce.org). “It will make them more valuable. It capitalizes on what we’re good at — a live, interactive, face-to-face marketing experience — and makes the experience better for everyone at very little cost.”
How does one small, privately held company zoom from startup mode to endorsement by the producer of North America’s largest annual trade show in just five years? Some would say, by improving trade show performance one event at a time — reducing attendee attrition by 15 percent, increasing exhibit sales by 10 percent and generating up to $800,000 in new revenue.
A startup redirects Founded in 2001 on an investment of $1.2 million by five partners with expertise in computer modeling and analytics, BDMetrics wasn’t originally destined for the trade show industry. The company’s name stands for “Business Development Metrics,” and its technology was designed to help build business relationships by recommending which deals a company should make.
According to Jack Chalden, a former TIA executive who joined BDMetrics in 2005 as Vice President, Business Development and Industry Relations, the company’s intent was to develop business development analytics industry by industry. But an “aha” moment occurred when the partners introduced their product at IAEM’s EXPO! EXPO! in November 2003. Show producers immediately saw the potential of a product that could transform show floor chaos into a connected community.
For the next 14 months, the team toiled away on product development, foregoing salaries to plow every dollar into the company. Early success at leading shows such as NAB and Embedded Systems Conference gave investors confidence in the startup company. In June 2004, BDMetrics received $3.5 million in venture capital. The company now has strong financial backing from Valhalla Partners, New Markets Growth Fund and the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development.
The initial hook for show producers was social networking — the ability to help attendees find each other and schedule time to talk. It soon became clear that the company’s powerful data-mining technology could crawl through multiple databases to find logical connections between people. With each new engagement came a round of innovation. In the first 12 months, the company introduced one new product every 17.5 days.
“We started with attendee-to-attendee relationships for the first NAB show, then it developed into attendee to exhibitor, attendee to products, attendee to articles, and attendee to social events,” says President and CEO Rick Geritz. “One keyword search will push attendees all the information they need to maximize their show experience.”
BDMetrics hit its stride in mid-2004 with “You-Based” personalization technology that finds relevant people, products, sessions and events for attendees and exhibitors weeks before the show. Likened to Amazon.com’s personalized recommendations, the portal suggests matches based on a participant’s profile and search history, as well as the history of others who have searched for similar items or share like profiles.
“The You-Based campaigns and personalized recommendations took us beyond being a matchmaking service,” says Don Mahoney, BDMetrics Chief Operating Officer and a founding partner. “That drove us from single-digit usage rates to consistently higher usage.”
Paired with dynamic walking maps — an idea suggested by NAB and developed by BDMetrics at a cost of $250,000 — the portals become a personal show guide. By 2006, at BDMetrics’ third NAB engagement, participants conducted 250,000 keyword searches to find the people, products and sessions they wanted to see, then printed 15,000 walking maps to get there.
It’s smart technology BDMetrics’ technology is built on a “SmartPlatform,” which performs three primary functions: personalization, monetization, and command and control. The Web-based solution seamlessly integrates BDMetrics’ toolset with the show producer’s in-house systems — sometimes as many as 10 different databases such as registration, sales contact management and content management.
The personalization tools use “role-based” analytics to create the personal portal. When a participant registers for an event, the data runs through BDMetrics’ business relationship optimization analytics. The portal is populated with recommendations based on the person’s job title, company and other parameters. To make the recommendations more accurate, attendees can fine-tune their profiles by answering increasingly detailed questions. Using the portal’s search tools also refines the recommendations. Similar to the way search engines crawl the Web looking for relevant matches, BDMetrics’ unified search technology drives concurrent database searches. The tool looks for attendees, exhibiting companies, products, conference sessions, press releases and social events that relate to the search terms. But it doesn’t stop there. If an exhibitor profile is incomplete, the tool goes to the exhibitor’s Web site to retrieve basic information. This “Web scraping” guarantees the search delivers results.
“Exhibitors have good reason to add data to their profiles,” says Pat Ourednik, BDMetrics Sr. Vice President, Analytics, and a founding partner. “They know that there’s an online community with hundreds of thousands of page views from search results, and their company can be recommended to people. They want to be part of that. That’s their incentive to add richer information to their profiles.”
The more accurate the profiles, the better the results for all the users. Matchmaking tools pairs participants for peer networking. An agenda planner compiles appointments, sessions and events in one calendar. The dynamic walking maps plot the most efficient path through the exhibit hall to targeted booths. And a message center relays communications from participants who’d like to meet — but reveals personal contact information only when both parties agree to connect.
BDMetrics monetizes these connections by providing tools to attract more participants to the show, then maximizing the opportunities to build relationships. For example, the SmartPlatform drives a You-Based pre-show marketing campaign that pushes recommendations and alerts registrants when new products and conference sessions related to their interests are announced — and even when peers they should meet register. Those who need to justify attending or exhibiting can receive a personalized report that quantifies the value of the event in terms of relevant contacts and content. These features have proven to help reduce attrition and increase exhibit sales.
As exhibitors populate their profiles with detailed information, keyword searches return priority listings that give them greater exposure, much like Google AdWords. Exhibitors can sponsor content in the portal, as well as place dynamic, rich media ads that talk to participants one-on-one. Called “Face2Face Interactive,” this media opportunity can be delivered when a specific search term is entered, or when specific content is accessed.
Perhaps the greatest ROI generator is the exhibitor portal, SmartBooth, which is sold as a booth upgrade. The Web-based data-mining tool helps exhibitors to generate more qualified leads by enabling them to define their target market demographics, see how many qualified buyers will be at the show, schedule appointments before the show, analyze their booth performance on site, and receive a post-show list of prospects they missed.
Exhibitors who use the SmartBooth portal report substantial savings in cost per lead because the portal generates more qualified leads. But even those who don’t upgrade get valuable metrics on who accessed their profiles, clicked through to their Web sites, etc.
Command-and-control features for the show producer include an event metrics dashboard that measures performance in real time. For example, the Event Performance Metrics reveal the top keyword searches, the number of attendees who registered upon receipt of a justification report, the percent of participants who engaged in networking activities and the number of qualified leads delivered to exhibitors. These metrics quantify event value, which can be leveraged for exhibit sales.
Generating ROI BDMetrics’ business model is straightforward. Show producers pay a fee of $25,000 to $75,000 to set up and run the SmartPlatform for one year. A five-person team provides sales, marketing, operations and customer support. The show producer’s sales staff pushes SmartBooth upgrades so companies can execute objective-based marketing campaigns. And they sell EventKeywords, sponsorships and Face2Face interactive media opportunities as add-ons. A portion of all SmartPlatform-related revenue returns to BDMetrics.
The goal of the revenue-sharing model is for producers to recoup their fees within one to two years. When the Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI, www.plasticsindustry.org) first deployed NPE365 in 2006, 70 percent of attendees activated their portals, and about 40 percent of exhibitors upgraded to SmartBooth and purchased keywords or other opportunities. Their return on investment was immediate.
“We had an exhibitor send us an e-mail six weeks prior to NPE telling us he had already paid for the show, as he had already secured sales,” says William Carteaux, SPI President and CEO.
SPI profited, as well, from its share of the revenue generated by BDMetrics. Geritz says: “We gave SPI a check three to four times larger than their fee.” The revenue was “significant,” Carteaux says, the third-largest source of revenue behind booth sales and registration.
Revenue returns to the producer in other ways as well. For example, at the 2006 INTERPHEX Conference & Exhibition (www.interphex.com), BDMetrics estimates that 90 additional conferees attended as a result of You-Based conference-session alerts, generating $40,000 in incremental conference revenue.
The bigger target is the corporate sales and marketing budget that’s separate and apart from the exhibit budget. BDMetrics intends to drive more marketing dollars to trade shows by clearly demonstrating the value of face-to-face events. Metrics such as the exhibitor opportunity report, which breaks down the precise demographics of attendees who match an exhibitor’s “dream” prospect, quantify the potential ROI for companies.
When the event portal becomes a year-round vertical marketplace, the media opportunities expand beyond the show days to 365-day exposure. “Event producers see that instead of cannibalizing other revenue-generating opportunities, we take budget that’s spent outside the trade show and bring it into the show,” Mahoney says. “Instead of spending budget on online media, we bring them to the face-to-face world.”
BDMetrics is now partnering with the Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute (PMMI, www.pmmi.org) to integrate the My PACK EXPO portal with the packaging industry Web site, Packexpo.com. In early 2007, they’ll be integrating NPE365 with MyPlasticsIndustry.com, SPI’s vertical buying community. These ventures will provide year-round search visibility, syndicated news and content. Subscribers will download a tool that pushes relevant content to their desktops.
Venturing into the online marketplace arena puts BDMetrics in competition with media companies that have been trying to monetize online communities since the late ’90s. The company is convinced its superior technology guarantees success. “
We have an active agent that helps drive information to the user. That’s the key differentiator,” says Mahoney.
Marketing’s three Rs The move toward online buying communities comes in response to what clients tell BDMetrics they want. Mahoney calls it the “Three Rs” — round the clock, relevance and ROI. “They want a year-round presence for their brands, but relevance is key,” he says. “As you move to the online space, personalization — which is what our patents and intellectual property revolve around — will mine those metaprofiles to drive relevant recommendations to the community.”
ROI comes with the ability to provide relevant content, track community behavior and deliver opportunities to reach highly qualified prospects. To deliver ROI and take face-to-face marketing from a one-time event to a year-round community, BDMetrics must continue to evolve the data-mining toolset.
Now that the company has matured, the development cycle has slowed to a mere four to five weeks between new product rollouts. Enhancements are made by collaborating with select industry events. These partnerships are not only a product-development strategy but also the primary marketing tactic.
“If you make customers happy, they’ll tell everyone. That’s our style,” says Geritz. “No one wants to buy a technology. They want to improve their show. They tell us their end goals, and we figure out how to achieve them.”
One goal has been to make the portals more intuitive to use, so participants are more likely to take advantage of all the features. Upon registration, attendees receive instructions on how to activate their portals and immediately begin to receive recommendations, which may or may not be relevant. “Giving them a blank slate of functionality wasn’t enough,” Mahoney says. “A key function of recommendations is to get people thinking about how they could be using the portal to achieve their objectives.”
Usage has grown from the early days when only 8–12 percent of the community activated the portals, to an average of 60–80 percent now. The highest usage at an event to date has been 97 percent. For that to be the norm, show producers will need to integrate the functions participants perform in one interface — registering, searching the exhibitor directory, conference planning, appointment scheduling, etc. — and eliminate alternative methods.
Eliminating the print show guide, as PACK EXPO did in 2006, is one sure way to increase portal usage. To help recover the $500,000 in lost ad revenue, PMMI sold more opportunities for exposure in the portal — which is now moving to the 365-day vertical buying community model.
Future flight path BDMetrics continually builds out new features and functionality in response to client requests, such as online voting for NAB’s Award for Innovation in Media. When participants logged on to their portals, they were prompted to vote, resulting in five times more votes than when they cast paper ballots on the show floor. Other enhancements evolve from clients’ in-house initiatives that stalled or failed, such as the Event Command Center and the Exhibitor Data Collection tool. The R&D team only pursues ideas that are applicable to trade shows in general.
“Our engagement with the client is collaborative, for product development and revenue sharing,” says Mahoney. “If we see the ability to monetize a feature for the greater community, we pursue it. We’ve shouldered some significant efforts. We bear the risks, we bear the expense, but in doing so, we’re improving the product and helping the industry as a whole.”
Predicting where BDMetrics will be in three to five years is a tough call. The platform is customizable by configuration, and scalable for future growth. With a rapid development cycle that morphs the product into something new every few months, and a “Theming Engine” that allows each event to create its own look and feel, BDMetrics technology may soon be unrecognizable.
Despite a heavy R&D budget, the company is already profitable, with contracts for 180 events in 30 industry sectors. In 2007 alone, the company will be at 80 events, including encore appearances with stalwart NAB and CES, as well as first-time events for Reed Exhibitions, George Little Management and others. Though early customers were technology shows, BDMetrics is now engaged in such diverse industries as pets, restaurants, gifts, jewelry and apparel.
As the You-Based portal draws in an ever-widening audience, the question becomes: What if convention and visitor bureaus, hotels and other event stakeholders could populate the portal with information to enrich visitors’ experience in the show city? BDMetrics projects that if each NAB attendee stayed one extra day, Las Vegas would gain more than $20 million.
“Trade shows are poised for phenomenal growth,” Geritz says. “If we can prove to the CEO and vice president of marketing the value of trade shows, we can grow the gross domestic product of the industry.”
EXPO Editor in Chief Danica Tormohlen and Freelance Writer/Editor Cathy Chatfield-Taylor have worked together on EXPO stories since 1995. E-mail Danica at dtormohlen@ascendmedia.com, or Cathy at cathy@cc-tunlimited.com.
Brand Advocate: Why CEA champions BDMetrics BDMetrics first powered MyCES at the 2006 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES, www.cesweb.org), where fewer than 25 percent of participants activated the portal. This year, attendees had already conducted more than 150,000 unique key word searches and scheduled more than 30,000 booth visits more than a month before the show.“
Exhibitors are having success before the show even starts,” says Gary Shapiro, President and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA, www.ce.org), Arlington, VA. “It makes the show very effective. Do small shows need this tool? No. But for any show of a decent size, it allows everyone to plan ahead.”
People who have made appointments are more likely to attend, thus reducing attrition. Exhibitors who know how much traffic to expect can allocate their resources appropriately. And show management can use the event performance metrics to guide planning for future events.
“It helps us see the titles of people who come, who they visit, and what they’re requesting. You get a flavor for the connectivity,” Shapiro says. “We’re just beginning to mine the huge amount of data we get.”
What participants search for reveals who they want to see and what they think is hot. That market intelligence allows the association to sell to exhibitors using tangible evidence of product demand, as well as to plan conference sessions with compelling content.
Though he won’t disclose how much revenue BDMetrics generates for CES, Shapiro says it’s not about the money. “The money for the show producer was not the issue in our decision,” he says. “We’re investing our time and name and staff. It’s an investment in training, telling our industry about it, and putting our name out there with it. We’re a technology show in a technology industry. We want to get it right.”
If there’s one drawback of the technology, he says, it’s that getting it right takes time.
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