October 2007
Finding the Flow
NPES secretly films exhibit hall to discover what attracts attendees to booths

By Cathy Chatfield-Taylor

The 38 cameras suspended from rafters at GRAPH EXPO (www.graphexpo.com), held Oct. 15–19, 2006, at McCormick Place in Chicago, recorded 989 hours of video footage to document not only the precise traffic patterns in the exhibit hall but also how many attendees passed by, stopped to look, or actually engaged with exhibitors.

As with most films, the reviews were mixed.

“We found out some good things and some not so good things,” says Ralph J. Nappi, President of NPES, The Association for Suppliers of Printing, Publishing and Converting Technologies (www.npes.org), Reston, VA. “We presented both to our board of directors and exhibitors.”

Nappi commissioned the $50,000 study to gather traffic flow data from a third-party source. A relative newcomer to the association then, he thought the time was right to get an objective viewpoint and investigate grumblings about not enough people getting to the back of the exhibit hall. He retained Benton Harbor, MI-based ethnoMETRICS (www.ethnometrics.org), a consulting firm that specializes in measuring traffic — how many people, where they go and what they do — in complex and diverse environments like tradeshows.

The cameras were positioned on tracks so they could be moved to focus on the entrance, aisles and booths during the 28 hours the 470,000-net-square-foot exhibit hall was open. An ethnoMETRICS technician directed the cameras, allowing Nappi to monitor five of the largest exhibitors, as well as other select booths. Neither exhibitors nor attendees were aware of the filming — a practice that is legal in public forums, according to ethnoMETRICS.

The study revealed that traffic flow through the hall was better than expected. Within the first hour of opening, enough people had gravitated to the back of the hall to disprove exhibitor suspicions. The footage clearly demonstrated that a substantial number of attendees entered the hall and headed directly to the pavilions there.

The bad news was that the Grand Concourse Entrance was too crowded. “That caused problems for the up-front exhibitors, because attendees were
trying to figure out where to go, and they were bumping into each other,” Nappi says. “We clearly needed a larger area.” A widened entrance and main aisle to give people more space are planned for 2008.

The most revealing footage showed how 43,820 attendees and 600-plus exhibiting companies interacted. Two metrics quantified what was clearly visible: the attraction rate (how many stop as they pass by a booth), and the engagement rate (how many of those who stop interact with the exhibitor). The average attraction rate was 22 percent — twice the average at comparable shows, as measured by ethnoMETRICS. Among the five largest exhibitors, the rate was slightly less, 17.5 percent, in part because more people passed by their prime locations.

Exhibitors did not perform as well engaging attendees once they had attracted them to their booths. A typical five-minute clip from the film showed an exhibitor with hands behind the back, leaning against a machine, not making eye contact. “It was all the things you read about what not to do in a booth,” Nappi says.

Seeing is believing. Nappi presented a webinar for exhibitors to share the data and show footage – not of someone they could recognize, but from another show – and begin the process of learning how to engage more attendees. “That was the one great positive unintended consequence of what we did,” he says.