The Association of Equipment Manufacturers [AEM] is taking advantage of Kande Media’s Expo-Sure targeted advertising to reach potential attendees and exhibitors. The group’s CONEXPO-CON/AGG show designed a campaign with the advertising company to optimize brand awareness in a new way.

“We’re offering a consumer-oriented advertising strategy that’s been developed mostly for online retail and we’re adapting this technology for the needs of tradeshows, exhibitions and associations,” says Joe Seither, vice president of marketing and business development for Kande Media.

When a person visits a tradeshow’s Web site, without even knowing anything about the individual, a server logs the visit and sets up traffic tracking techniques to follow the person and display banner ads on other sites.

“We’re in a situation right now where, technology wise, you can’t really leave any stone unturned. You have to look for new ways to communicate—to attendees, members and customers—that ultimately gets valuable content in front of them,” says Steve Suhm, marketing manager for AEM.

The tradeshow group has seen the ads appear on Fox News sites, Hotmail.com as well as joke and satirical sites and other venues geared toward men aged 45 and over.

Targeting Behavior

“Utilizing Kande Media’s technology and services has allowed us to target individuals based on some of their Web browsing habits,” says Suhm. “If an individual comes to our homepage and then clicks on education, we can then target an ad promoting either a specific education session or just promoting the show in general. Additionally, if an individual registers for the show but does not sign up for an education session we can then target an ad toward that individual promoting the education.”

Suhm says that about 4,000 people registered for the CONEXPO-CON/AGG show that had seen at least three of the banner ads. “We still need to figure out if there’s a direct correlation, we’re still in the stage where this is a new technology that we’re going to continue to monitor very closely,” he adds.

The Kande Media and CONEXPO-CON/AGG campaign started in November and December 2010 and carried over into the first month of this year. The show, which is held every three years in March, had considerably more traffic to its Web site. According to Suhm, ConExpoConAgg.com had 68,510 unique visitors in January 2008. In January 2011 there was 83,610 unique visitors, a 22 percent increase.

The show also had a 55 percent increase the month of the show, with 140,000 unique visitors coming to ConExpoConAgg.com in March 2011, up from about 93,743 in March 2008, though these numbers can’t be solely attributed to Kande Media’s smart ads.

“Prices for attendance-driver campaigns are driven by the number of prospects in the ‘network’ we build for the client and the number of impressions the client wants to deliver per prospect over the course of a campaign,” Seither says. “A show always has more registration ‘prospects’ than actual registrants, often three to five times more. For a show with 10,000 registrants, we may create a ‘reg. prospect’ network of 50,000 individuals.”

For a small network audience the cost falls around a couple thousand dollars and will deliver about 5 to 10 impressions per prospect on average. The larger the network the more expensive the service is, but the per-prospect marketing cost, according to Kande Media, is lower than other traditional registration efforts like direct mail or email since contact information is not needed to deliver the message.

“All we need is for a prospect to visit the show site and we can later deliver banners to them,” Seither says.

In the end, it can also pay off for different reasons.

“It’s given us another opportunity to build brand awareness with our attendees and our potential attendees online without having to spend exorbitant fees that typically you would see in advertising directly with a mainstream site like Fox News,” Suhm says.