Social media, event management and customer databases—not to mention an event’s Web site—all loom large on a show organizer’s technology priority list. In fact, these are where organizers have been focusing their investments over the last couple years. But as we add the mobile platform—which many in the industry think will become the centerpiece of any event technology strategy—e-marketing, lead retrieval and virtual events, just to name a few, the tech landscape gets crowded very quickly.

While all of these elements offer a variety of opportunities for organizers, what’s lacking in many cases is an infrastructure that ties it all together. Here, we check in with two of the industry’s biggest players, the National Association of Broadcasters and the Consumer Electronics Association, to see where their tech priorities lie and how this will impact long-term strategies.

NAB

The pace of technology development, as we all know, advances rapidly. Often, this puts companies and a position of perpetual catchup, often cobbling different systems together without any long-term strategic plan to integrate them all on the back end. “Up until the last few years we’ve been patching things together and really haven’t had a good, focused investment approach to the technology side of the equations,” says Chris Brown, executive vice president, conventions and business operations for the National Association of Broadcasters, which produces the annual NAB Show. “In effect we were put in a position where we had to beg, borrow and steal and plug things in where we could. The end result was that we had some systems that were working okay, but probably not delivering everything that we wanted, and we had a lot of systems that weren’t as integrated as we liked them to be.”

Then and Now

NAB has been working to correct this, says Brown, who adds that the organization has recently moved to the a2z platform, which is acting as the anchor system. “So that’s our database for the show. We’re also working with them for the floor plan side of things, both internal and customer facing, so that’s what’s published to the Web as well. It has become our foundation system and we’re now trying to enhance and build on that and add in integration with a CRM system with Salesforce. We’ve got the licenses all set, but we don’t have the integration fully in place with the back end side of the equation. We’re not quite to the point of maximum efficiency and productivity because we’re not yet passing the data between the two systems.”

Ultimately, says Brown, Salesforce will end up being the front-end system, and all of the data will be managed and fed through that and passed back to a2z. “In the past we were a little further ahead than the good old tickler files, but not a whole hell of a lot,” he says. “We were doing things on Excel and Access and whatever we could patch together. We, like everybody else in the good old days, were very much a transactional sales organization. We were managing the flow of contracts coming in and managing the space. Those days are gone. We’re now in an environment where we really have to be able to act like a professional sales organization that is actively mining the community and proactively out making sales.”

Making that transition could not have happened without the new information systems and a way to tie them all together, and the existing technology was only succeeding in slowing the organization down in its attempts to transition to that data mining strategy. “Now our handle on data is much better and I think our communication across the teams with the sales groups is already much tighter,” adds Brown.

Driving Data

The data that NAB is processing and acting on now runs the gamut: information on contacts and multiple contacts all the way down through offices and multiple offices within each company, divisions and ownership relationships, to their activity levels with those companies. Information about who’s making the call is recorded along with how many calls are being made, when a meeting has been held and its outcome, says Brown.

The new system has helped integrate the sales staff as well, whereas in the past, methods tended to be more siloed. “In the past we had totally separate sponsorship sales people from the exhibit sales side of the equation,” says Brown. “The front end brought them in and sold them the space and then they turned them over to the value add team. As you can guess, that puts you in a position where you have several people calling on the same client, and they were often not communicating effectively.”

The New Cost Realities

The new technology strategy, as progressive as it is for NAB, is also much more expensive, but not prohibitively so. There is an achievable ROI attached to the plan. “We weren’t investing a ton of money in systems,” says Brown. “If we were, we were doing it with fairly turnkey packages that didn’t cost much. Since then, our costs have definitely gone up. We’re paying some fairly significant licensing fees now for the software, with several different vendors in the mix. But that’s a good thing too, believe it or not. You have to pay attention to it if it’s sitting there staring at you on the budget line.”

Brown says NAB is paying close to $200,000 annually for the new licensing fees, which is about ten times more than the organization used to spend on its event technology. Even so, the ROI model around the new strategy is “well beyond several factors of the cost of the new systems,” says Brown. “We determined that we would move beyond the break even point within two to two-and-a-half years, if that. That model is achievable.”

The new revenue that the technology opens up comes from literally selling new space, he says. This is fueled by the show’s high-end price points—10,000 square feet of booth space is $400,000. “You can cover some costs pretty quickly with that,” adds Brown. “So we’re not doing this for the sake of making life easier, we’re doing this literally to make our sales team more effective and efficient and to ultimately drive more sales.”

What’s Next for NAB

Next in line for the event is further development of the experience side of the equation, which ultimately evolves into lead gathering. This, says Brown, is where mobile technology will play a huge role. “Our thinking is that will be predominantly mobile, and in a non-proprietary way. I think that given the way people are used to gathering and passing data that eventually there is a lot of power in those devices. Everybody has them, they’re ubiquitous.”

That ubiquity, however, monkeys with proprietary systems, muses Brown, in the sense that attendees will potentially balk at the idea of introducing another layer of software to a device that’s been customized in such a personal way.  “The idea of force-fitting proprietary devices and systems on top of that for both the exhibitor and attendee is a little be clunky. To me the implications are we’ll likely be driving a lot more things through phones and phone applications, including leads and lead retrieval, which I think will make the attendee experience a lot better. Even the registration process becomes a lot easier. A lot of these technologies are already out there, it’s just a matter of integrating them all.”

CES

The Web site for the International CES Show is the focus for much of CES’ technology investment going forward, says Karen Chupka, senior vice president of events and conferences for the Consumer Electronics Association. “Digital directives are all the rage now as organizers shift their markets toward the ease and convenience of Web-based systems,” she says. CESWeb.org, the Web hub for the International CES show, has been the main beneficiary of event-related tech investments. Accordingly, the site has become much more content heavy, taking on characteristics of a full-blown media site, complete with the back-end infrastructure to support that content production as well as a linking of databases to support user queries.

“Where we’ve been focusing a lot of our implementation of technology is just in what we do with the Web site and the experience on the site,” says Chupka. “On the exhibitor side, it’s making it easy for them to get materials, find materials, and find the things they need to do for the show online,” says Chupka. “We also need to make it easy for attendees to find what they need, from making sure we’re adding as much up-to-date information about the exhibiting companies that are at the show, to make it easier for attendees to find other types of content.”

Accordingly, the Web development team uses the organization’s show database to populate the information on the Web. The drawback, says Chupka, is a good chunk of this information is user-generated, meaning that exhibitors are able to upload their own materials and company data. While this certainly benefits the efficiency equation from the vendor side, it often introduces data inconsistencies that can short-circuit the attendee’s experience on the site. “One of the things that we’re trying to do is we’re tagging things under specific categories so that when attendees come in and are searching for information we’re not just relying on the exhibitor putting in the right information. We’re doing more with meta-tagging to trying to make it easier for the attendees to find the things they’re looking for.”

Chupka concedes that the Web site experience is only one piece of a very large technology puzzle. Yet, it’s a significant source of data, which must be collected and shared with other systems. “We use a couple different technologies to pool our information,” she says. “For instance, our registration system is all handled by Experient, but we have our own internal database system that manages the content coming in for the exhibitor directory listings. Then we also use the Expocad exhibit management package. That manages all the financial transactions and everything that happens from the exhibitor side.”

Importantly, all the data collected by these normally disparate platforms must be pooled together which assists with realtime experience elements, but also with the more forward-looking strategic elements, such as targeted marketing and promotions. “That’s why we’ve had to figure out how to go in and do more of this meta-tagging because everything is not just housed just in one location, it’s a series of databases talking back and forth to each other,” adds Chupka. “That’s been a big push for us this year, really trying to make that more intuitive with us doing more of the back end of it.”

In a sense, the market that CES serves drives the organization’s technology strategies. “CES is an umbrella event for everything that’s related to consumer electronics,” explains Chupka. “So, a big part of that is media and the content. As media and content companies become more involved in the [consumer electronics] industry, we’ve had to be reflective of that and look at ourselves as being more of a provider of media and content to anybody who is coming to the show or trying to be a part of the show.”

The challenge for CES is taking a very broad market and show and providing the tools for exhibitors and attendees to create their own personalized experience. “It’s not just the Web site, it’ how we do promotions with the show. Years ago, you’d send a brochure out and then you’d send another brochure out. Now, our first thing that goes out is an emailed alumni piece that tells people that registration is open and we can generate about 13,000 registrations just off that email. Then we do drop a brochure, but now it’s a four-panel piece because every couple weeks we’re sending out an attendee e-newsletter that’s focused on a specific area or category that the users are getting more detailed information about.”

Of course, all of this targeting wouldn’t be possible without the ability to integrate the various databases: registration, exhibitors and Web behavior. “Our e-marketing is much more complex, but, again, we’re trying to get rid of the clutter and make sure people can find the information that’s most relevant to them,” says Chupka.