Event measurement by the numbers

New, affordable electronic tools track, weigh and analyze variable data points to give event marketers a quantification on value delivered for their marketing spend. Will your show survive the analysis?
By Maxine Golding


Alicia Carter, Medical Marketing Manager, Tempur-Pedic Medical
Photo: Art Dickinson

When Tempur-Pedic Medical’s new management promoted Alicia Carter to Medical Marketing Manager and handed her full authority for the event program early this year, it also halved her budget. She had no choice but to drastically cut the exhibition schedule from well over 60 trade shows and completely drop the regionals.

But which shows should Carter place on the current schedule and what exhibit sizes should she specify to meet the new goals of this manufacturer, marketer and distributor of mattresses, wheelchair cushions, pads and pillows for the healthcare industry, a subsidiary of Tempur-Pedic? She couldn’t rely on “what my gut thought was correct. I really had to quantify that we were getting good value for the investment,” she says. 

Carter joins a growing list of Fortune 500 corporate event directors and managers who are taking dead aim at event measurement. “The expectations of my job have changed,” says Glenda Brungardt, Trade Show and Event Manager for Hewlett-Packard (HP) Co. “I have had to become more strategic to survive.”

In this expanded role, they quickly realize just how expensive a misguided decision can be. “The more hard data you have in terms of the value that events bring back to your company in business captured or awareness delivered, the stronger your case for your resource funding,” says Rosie Madison, Director, Global Events Marketing for Xerox Corp.

Until recently, corporations were hard-pressed to fund measurement without established methodologies, clearly defined objectives or internal support. However, more advanced and affordable electronic tools now can track, weigh and analyze variable data points. Events of all types and sizes — not just those with the biggest investment — can be compared for their contributions to objectives.

By applying event measures consistently across the corporation, event marketers drive down the program’s development costs and quickly get to payback — quantifying value delivered for marketing spend. The ultimate benefit: true alignment of event marketing with corporate, brand and campaign strategies.

“What you did used to be about space and logistics,” says Brungardt. “Now, everyone is in the fight for marketing dollars. Without the metrics to quantify and identify strengths and weaknesses, you don’t have the information for investment and selection decisions that tie in with messaging and branding.”

Temper-Pedic Re-Targets
As Carter chopped Tempur-Pedic Medical’s (www.tempurmed.com) exhibition schedule to eight large shows from more than 60, she turned for help to Ed Jones, President, Dunwoody, GA-based Constellation Communication Corp. (www.constellationcc.com). The number of leads and sales generated at two shows clearly demonstrated ROI (and indicated she could increase booth size), and those orders paid for the investment in measuring the other six. She also asked Jones to assess a show in the acute care market, which turned out to offer only a slim piece of Tempur-Pedic Medical’s target audience.

Jones had Carter complete a spreadsheet with extensive company and show information, such as number of attendees, number of exhibitors, show hours, whether those hours are dedicated or compete with educational sessions, percentage of attendees representing the target audience, space for attendees in booths based on booth properties, the number of booth staff, volume of sales, and any pre-show campaigning. The tool values and weighs the data and expectations and lets Carter know if she is investing enough money in some shows based on what she wants to achieve.

“The first time you do this, the very detailed information must be estimates,” she says. Post-show, Carter updates the spreadsheet data with true figures to compare how well the company did based on estimates and actuals.

Compiling this information and working with Jones on the initial analysis for 2005 took about a week this past February. Carter presented the results at the next managers’ meeting. In this first measurement initiative, the data proved that some shows needed to be eliminated immediately, but at the same time the documentation helped her obtain some more trade show dollars.

“Sales data are very hard to track and link, so that was a big guess on our part,” she says. But the exercise itself allowed Carter and management to understand the clear connection among trade shows, advertising and sales. “And I gained a great deal of respect from executive management because I had actual data to support the value perspective.”

It came as a “real shock to sales” when data showed that Tempur-Pedic Medical should not exhibit at the acute care market show. But Carter was able to explain why: too few exhibit hall hours and too much competition, with 650 exhibitors for only 3,000 attendees. Dollars could be spent more effectively in alternate marketing to that audience.

It will take a year, though, for Carter to fully reap the tool’s benefit, when it ranks all the shows from “best” to “worst” for the company. She then can decide to “cut off here — drop shows because we’re out of money — or increase funding.” And with historical data, she’ll be able to improve the exhibit environment and messaging.

However, a recently announced change in business strategy presents Carter with a new challenge. Tempur-Pedic Medical has decided to no longer sell direct but through distributors and manufacturer partnerships. As a result, she’s refocusing performance measures away from sales, emphasizing lead generation and the value of advertising and branding efforts. She’s also customizing Tempur-Pedic Medical’s lead system to capture the attendee demographics needed for the measurement tool. The lead-retrieval systems for some shows provide only a name and phone number, she says, so she will not use them.

HP Goes All the Way
“I have to be accountable for the value of the dollars spent on my program.”

That’s the bottom line for Brungardt, who has spearheaded exhibit measurement at HP (www.hp.com), where 2004 revenues came in at $79.9 billion. Now, consistent measures produce reliable data for every trade show at which the consumer IT giant exhibits, telling the company whether it attained objectives or should be looking elsewhere. Online surveys 120 days post-event further examine what customers bought, where they bought, and why they did or did not buy from HP. And proprietary events HP hosts are beginning to get the same treatment.

The story begins in 2001, when Brungardt sat in a meeting with colleagues and realized that their methods for gathering numbers just weren’t right. Everything was manual, and what they tracked — attendance numbers (if third-party audits were available), impressions and leads — was inconsistent from show to show.

Brungardt knew that any measurement program she developed had to reside online. So she turned to Red Bank, NJ-based Exhibit Surveys Inc. (www.exhibitsurveys.com) to help her define data points, formulate the right survey questions and automate the measurement process so that even the lead systems fed into the database. “We had to be able to look across groups that might be totally different and still have consistencies in measuring branding and corporate messages,” she says.

It took two years of planning, presenting and refining before corporate management agreed to allocate dollars for the 2003 fiscal year, which began in November 2002. “We were shot down so many times,” Brungardt says. Faced with ever-tighter budgets, the one-stop corporate events shop finally came up with a program that would provide the data needed to back up decisions on every show at a quarter of the price if measurement was done “ad hoc.”

Initially, measurement was kept simple. An early test was the 2003 Consumer Electronics Show, where HP chose to re-engage an audience after being away from the market. “The first time around, we made a basic stab at finding out whether our messaging registered with the audience and asked some lead-gathering questions,” she says.

Since then, the measures for trade/public events, for example, have grown to include:
• Audience: Demographics and qualifications for buying (budget, interest, time frame, role).
• Brand: Message recall, familiarity, ROI and ROO, potential for choosing HP in the future (especially in new markets such as digital entertainment).
• Sales: Purchase intent and value, and cost-per-lead.
• Media: Articles, exposure, circulation, and other benchmarks.

Where she used to stick her finger in the wind, Brungardt now has a tool that delivers both quantitative and qualitative information. She conducts searches, reviews past shows, compares shows across the corporation and runs hundreds of reports for herself and key stakeholders, all to strategize future initiatives.

“We may find that our messaging at PMA (Photo Marketing Association) did not resonate,” she says. “Perhaps booth staff wasn’t approachable or informed. Did we not train staff or equip them with the tools to interact effectively with the audience?” In another example, measurement will tell whether the responsiveness of attendees at a private event at Print ’05 correlates with the broader show audience reached through other messaging and activities.

All this extensive information is guiding HP as it reallocates its market spend and exhibits at fewer shows, but attains better consistency in exhibit look, feel and call to action. Even with HP’s announcement of 14,500 jobs cuts, Brungardt expects the events budget to remain flat, although the mix may change.

What’s more significant is that the company no longer buys just booth space, but seeks to correlate all activities — product display and demonstration, public relations, speaking opportunities and sponsorships — within a total program. “We never would have done this in the past,” Brungardt says. “Everything has to be tied together with a purpose as to why we’re doing it.”

Xerox Launches a Pilot
Madison knew her team had a lot to overcome in formulating an event measurement program for a company with $15.7 billion in 2004 revenues (www.xerox.com). Each of the 60-plus trade shows in which the company participated employed proprietary technology to report attendance and leads. The size and breadth of the shows challenged Xerox’s ability to capture key information on individuals in the limited time they had to visit its booth. And even for shows that captured attendee data for exhibitors, the credibility of their information — skimpy attendee profiles or lists with exhibitors included — was often suspect.

The 28-year Xerox veteran started from one principle: “Make sure you understand your requirements and then try to build on what other companies do well.” Because it would be impossible to officially benchmark event measurement with other companies, Xerox relied on a surrogate — Exhibit Surveys and its extensive customer experience. But without a consistent and effective lead-capture system to feed event measurement, the whole effort would be for naught. So Xerox contracted with Totowa, NJ-based Capture Technologies (www.captureleads.com) at the same time. Leading the development were two Xerox managers with specific knowledge of lead-capture technologies, trade shows and private events.

Their work began in October 2004, and by January 2005, after extensive consultation with the two service providers, they recommended a pilot program launch in March. The Xerox managers wanted to make sure the process worked and that the correct touch points were measured. The initial metrics they devised were applied to all events in second quarter 2005 at which Xerox exhibited (including four private event programs).

Other than tweaking report formats and adding direct electronic distribution of the online report to select Xerox staff, the pilot hit all its marks. The measurement program is now in official operation for all events that corporate marketing supports, except some produced at the local level.

The system first scrubs the captured leads in two ways — to meet the criteria in Xerox’s definition of a qualified lead and then to honor the “opt-in/opt-out” privacy choices of prospects. The washed leads move to Exhibit Surveys, which e-mails them a survey it helped Xerox develop. The survey questions (on messaging, level of awareness, influencers to inclination to buy, booth size, staffing and the like) are standardized for consistency in results, but three customized questions can be added for flexibility.

All responses return to Exhibit Surveys, which rolls the data into a final report (by show) and runs an analysis based on number of attendees and qualified leads. On a quarterly basis, Xerox receives a consolidated report of shows year-to-date, which also breaks out data by leads vs. inquiries and by lines of business. The measures, however, do not connect to sales. That’s up to each line of business to accomplish from the qualitative feedback and leads.

Madison prioritized the most important metrics:
1. Increasing the prospect’s consideration of Xerox. “This will give us some idea of the revenues to expect at the back end.”
2. Reaction to Xerox messaging. “We need to know early if we’re not on point, so that the business teams can refocus.”
3. Number of qualified leads. “For a lot of companies, it’s a balancing act between swipes and real prospects.”

To make sure the new data will be put to good use, Madison hosted a full-day workshop in late July, when those responsible for events in Xerox’s lines of business were starting to plan for 2006. Exhibit Surveys provided 16 participants with insight into the events that were measured and the implications of the data on event strategy. They learned about the event reports and quarterly roll-ups they’ll receive. “These documents will take a lot of subjectivity out of decisions,” Madison told them.

Most importantly, all this ties directly into the intense corporate-wide focus on the customer experience through all touch points, including shows and events.

Funding and Payback
It’s a lot easier to rein in costs and enable procurement to work its magic with vendor contracts when the event marketing function is centralized. By moving in that direction the past few years, corporations became better prepared to tackle the measurement issue and find the events that delivered maximum payback.

HP knew it would not be a cheap investment. The corporation spends six figures a year and dedicates three staff people to measure 400 events. Because it was willing to invest considerable funds upfront, HP enabled its service partner to build consistency and norms into the measurement system. This has brought down per-event measurement cost to a fraction of what it would be ad hoc. “What used to cost us $6,000 to $7,000 a show will cost a quarter of that,” says Brungardt.

Initial program development is always the largest cost to absorb. Madison thought about allocating the cost to customers benefiting from the measurement. (Direct event expenses already are borne by the business units.) But that, she worried, could put the entire effort at risk. “If businesses pit measurement against a product launch, measurement will lose,” she says. “That’s why corporate needed to drive and standardize the program.”

Madison built funding into her budget request, winning her strong case for its value. Xerox spent less than $200,000 to develop lead capture, event measurement and reporting. The ongoing and much smaller system maintenance and reporting costs are easy to bear annually. More important is the payback.

“We’ll see hard payback if the returns on objective and investment in year-over-year spend — cost per square foot and cost per attendee – trend the right way,” Madison says. Soft payback will come from internal customers, as they make more informed decisions on which shows hold more value, based on good business data.

Measurement at Tempur-Pedic Medical, with Jones’ help, costs roughly $2,000 per show. “That’s minor, not even 1 percent of my budget for some shows,” says Carter. “Just seeing what to do with booth sizes gives us quantitative information to validate our decisions.”

For another client, Jones helped restore a $1 million cut in the trade show budget by documenting the direct impact of these events on the company’s business. Measuring face contact, customer relationship management accomplished and sales uplift ultimately cost between $80,000 and $100,000, but justified the entire value of the multi-million-dollar trade show program.

Clearly, the hardest data point to track is sales. “It’s a difficult exercise to determine what percentage of the sale an event is worth,” Jones says. Nearly as challenging is CRM calculation, especially the cost of revenue retention and the impact of seeing specific customers at a show and reinforcing those business relationships. “I suggest there’s nothing more valuable than making sure you protect your revenue base — and grow it,” says Jones.

Fresh statistics back him up. For the first time in four years of study, corporate marketing executives made “enhancing the customer relationship” their top criterion for event marketing success, according to EventView ’05/’06, an annual study of face-to-face marketing trends sponsored by The George P. Johnson Co. and the MPI Foundation. And event marketing remains the top marketing tactic (globally) for return on investment, according to 23 percent of respondents.

More on www.expoweb.com
You find these related EXPO articles on exhibitor trends, as well as additional exclusive Web-only content from this article:
Additional content:

How corporate marketing execs view events. Key findings from EventView ’05/’06, an annual study of face-to-face marketing trends.

More than 700 marketing executives in corporations in the U.S. and abroad with sales exceeding $250 million responded to EventView ’05/’06, an annual study of face-to-face marketing trends sponsored by The George P. Johnson Co. and the MPI Foundation. Here are some of the key findings:
• 96% utilize events in their marketing mix.
• 93% view the importance of event marketing as constant or increasing.
• 50% named event marketing as a “lead tactic” or “vital component” of the marketing mix.
• Event marketing remains the top marketing tactic for ROI, globally, for 23%.
• More than one-quarter of total mar/com budgets is allocated for event marketing programs.
• More than a third of respondents anticipate event marketing budgets will increase in the future.
• For 80-plus percent, aligning and coordinating (before, during and after an event) with a broader marketing

• Beyond ROI and ROO, a white paper by Skip Cox, Exhibit Surveys Inc.

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• Best Practices: Reed's Exhibitor University April 2005
• Not your father’s exhibitor, June 2004