By Mark Parsons, Director Events Intelligence
When EN asked me to be a columnist, deciding what to write about was easy.
Explaining why you, the reader, should care was far harder.
You see, I’m a data nerd in an industry focused on people. Historically I’ve written when the mood took me, when I was asked, or when I had something to say: twenty-odd articles across exhibition design, AI, marketing and data.
Looking back, one thread keeps surfacing through them (and through my teaching at SPD); exhibitions are an amazing source of data, and we’re just scratching the surface of the value it could create.
This column, Dealing in Data, is about what it means to be a data-led organiser.
What would they do differently? Where are they experimenting now? What are they investing in today, and what will they invest in next? You’ll notice that it isn’t a column about AI. I’m sure no one benefits from another writer pontificating on how AI will transform exhibition organisers. I strongly believe AI will change our businesses, slowly at first and then disruptively fast. But the organisers it rewards will be the ones who made themselves data-led first.
I don’t think many organisers are in this mindspace yet. I remember with fondness an old comic strip about office politics, in which an employee asked their boss whether employees were the most important asset of the business. No, the boss replied: money was the most important asset of the business. Disillusioned, the employee asked where employees ranked. Ninth, came the bold reply. What was eighth? Carbon paper. It’s a joke that hasn’t aged well (what on earth is carbon paper, many might ask), but it drives home a point. If we asked the same question of exhibition organisers, where would their data rank?
If we drew up the same list for an exhibition organiser, what would the assets be?
Simplifying massively, I count nine: money, employees, brand, customer relationships (both attendees and exhibitors), supplier relationships (the venue above all), internal processes (how things get done), technology, data, and what I call “IP real estate”. That last is the best phrase I’ve found (so far) for the unique characteristic of exhibitions: they occupy a place and a space in their customers’ diaries each year. It’s more than brand, but it isn’t quite real estate. You may have noticed where data fell as I wrote that list: eighth. Is it really as important as carbon paper?
Now, if I were the pointy-haired boss ranking these assets, I definitely wouldn’t put employees ninth. I sort of agree that money comes first: without it, nothing else happens. Launches happen when people bootstrap and take the risk; shows grow faster when founders raise money or recycle profits into bigger teams. Employees must be second: without great people, shows stagnate. But what’s third? I’m not sure many organisers would say data today. In time, they might.
The reason is that data is how we read the map of the territory we operate in. It’s how we see where growth is coming from, how we can compete, and how we deliver value to our customers. Much of the signal is hidden in noise, often poorly captured and frequently misunderstood, but it is one of our industry’s hidden strengths.
Most companies hold information about their own actual and prospective customers. We hold information about entire markets. Exhibitions convene them: hundreds of suppliers and thousands of buyers interacting, millions of data points about who’s interested in what. The individual, yes, but also the market the exhibition serves as a whole.
Organisers own one of the most useful maps in their industries.
Imagine, for a moment, that map being read.
Consider launches. Most begin with a hunch; the best begin with a gap the data has already found. Registration forms reveal which adjacent interests buyers keep ticking. Search logs reveal the products visitors look for in the exhibitor list and cannot find. That unmet demand is a launch brief. The market has already voted. Someone just has to count.
To tweak a line the statistician George Box wrote about models: all maps are wrong, but some are useful.
That idea will run through the columns ahead. We’ll look at how exhibitions can be designed to generate more useful data. How data can be enriched, joined and linked, then queried, to create more value. Which data has real worth, and which is mere vanity. Where money spent on data pays back, and where it doesn’t. And how AI plays into all of it.
So I leave you with a question: where does data rank in your organisation?
The encouraging news is that very few in our industry have seriously begun to sweat this asset, so the upside is still on the table for those who move first. But if you value your data the way you value your office supplies, I sense your competition may be in for a treat.