Exhibitor 2010 Series: Part 3 – Virtual Dangers A Practical Guide to Creating foursquare Events

Exhibitor 2010: RFID Tracking Case Study

Posted by Joshua Rush on Mar 25, 2010 in Exhibiting, Technology

This morning I’d like to keep the Exhibitor 2010 follow up going with a few notes from a session that I attended and found most interesting. The topic covered was RFID tracking technology, and how Philips Healthcare used it to measure the behaviors of visitors within their exhibit at RSNA. They were tracking everything from how many attendees visited specific displays/demos, how long they staid there and since the RFID was tied to registration, whether or not they had brought colleagues with them a later time during the show.

Jeff Masters, a senior marketing manager at Philips said that they had over 90,000 lines of excel data after the first use. You can imagine that is a lot of data to sort through so they eventually developed a dashboard view to consolidate the data into windows of manageable information.

Now don’t get me wrong, this technology isn’t cheap and not every company has a special budget set aside each year for testing new technologies. All that said, the Philips case study does provide some insight and ideas for how RFID technology might be used on a smaller scale.

After you get a chance to read through the case study below, let me know if you’re currently employing similar tools of measurement in your exhibit.

Exhibitor 2010: Afternoon Session
What: Profile in Excellence: Philips Healthcare Merging RFID with Research to Measure Beahvior and Results
Who: Jeff Masters, Sr. Manager, Global Event Marketing Group, Philips Healthcare and Skip Cox, CEO, Exhibit Surveys

Developing Measurement Plan

JM: It’s important that your metrics that align with and measure success of events in meeting overall corporate marketing objectives and initiatives. Your methodology should be consistent across all shows to:

Develop cost effective and efficient process
Develop mormative data for benchmarking
Use consistent tools
Directly compare
Summarize data periodically (by business unit, market, etc.)

JM: What you measure must be consistent with corporate business plans and objectives. Your first step should be to develop a database to house key metrics and results. They should be scalable and flexible measurement, practical for small and large events and provide multiple reporting tools to communicate results to different levels of internal stakeholders.

Case Study: RSNA Expo
Background: RFID program installed in 2007, which was when JM first arrived to Philips (RFID scanners provided by Alliance Tech). How the scanners is work is that they automatically measure barcodes embedded in badge and can measure behaviors of attendees within an exhibit space. Types of measurement:

Traffic
Time in booth
Time in a specific area

“A swipe is a swipe, is a swipe. But a lead is a whole other deal.” -Jeff Masters, Philips Healthcare

JM: You need to be able to define differences between swipes, qualified leads and created opportunities. Marketing is all math. If you want to talk the language of the board room, you’re talking about math. If you’re interested in the numbers, find something interesting.

Finding ROO:
JM: Philips’ current Return On Objectives (ROO) expectation is 20:1 if new business is objective. That means that for every dollar spent on trade shows, he is accountable for a $20 return. He uses a custom Corporate Opportunities System developed by Alliance Tech that pumps data into visualization software so that executives get a dashboard view of leads. It allows him to follow every opportunity opened at show and tracking through it’s life cycle.

Key Elements of Measurment Plan:

Measurment Objectives Metrics & info required to meet objectives
Source(s) and/or methodology for collecting data
Analysis Plan

Objectives

Increase overall Net Promoter Score (NPS) at exhibit. Use NPS because it’s a strong indicator of health of company, particular to its longterm growth, and it’s easy to measure.

On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our company to a colleague?
On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend this exhibit to a company or colleague?

Increase pipeline opportunities. This is a fairly common goal for exhibit marketers but the key is to make sure that you put the metrics in a language that your executives will understand/

Responsible to creating: