Observations from UFI

Last week, I attended the UFI European Conference at the NEC in Birmingham along with my colleague Dan Currin, our first experience of an UFI event.

UFI is the “Global Association of the Exhibition Industry” and the conference was attended by around 300 delegates from organisers, venues and suppliers all over the world, with a theme of ‘The Organisers’ Future: Challenging Business Models’. There were a range of speakers, from Robert Peston and Nick de Bois chairing a Q&A about the ongoing Brexit saga (which in keeping with Brexit, definitely split opinion amongst delegates!) through to industry experts discussing all manner of aspects impacting the Exhibition Industry.

Whilst Akkroo is used hundreds of times on a daily basis at exhibitions all over the world, we’ve always viewed ourselves very much as Marketing Technology - an extension of our customers’ existing MarTech stacks - and even more so since our joining of forces with Integrate, rather than ‘Event Tech’ as such. Dan and I have spent the last few years working closely with modern B2B Marketing teams, utilising Marketing Technology on a daily basis and the Conference took us very much into a different world - that of the event organiser.

In many ways it was a revealing few days, and here are my 3 headline observations that I took away:

1. Steady profit margins = slow progress & late adoption

It’d be safe to say that the entire industry is still very much driven by selling square feet (or metres!) with 80% of revenue coming from floor space, as it has done for decades. Organisers and exhibitions are by and large profitable (although there have been a few high profile casualties in recent years), enjoying steady growth and profit margins of around 30% on average.

What this has meant is that, unlike other sectors where an 'innovate or die' mentality has kicked in, there often hasn't been the urgency to make progress. The implications? An industry that in many ways continues to lag behind in terms of innovation and taking a customer centric approach. In Akkroo, we live in the world of SaaS, where customer centricity and experience is at the very heart of everything powering the explosion in global SaaS and MarTech. My experience of the Exhibition Industry on the other hand, somewhat reinforced by the UFI Conference, is that often the event industry takes a short term, event-by-event view on things (copy and paste the floor plan from last year anyone?) rather than truly recognising or evolving with the ever changing demands from the paying customers: exhibitors…

2. Attendee Experience > Exhibitor Experience

Despite the fact that it is largely the paying exhibitors who fuel the entire industry, I was a somewhat taken aback about how little airtime or focus was given to how the industry creates successful customers. The attendee experience, whilst clearly a crucial component in any successful exhibition strategy, was definitely given more attention than the exhibitor experience, despite the fact that attendees often attend events free of charge.

'Exhibitor ROI' was thrown around a few times, but I’m not entirely sure how many people think that goes much beyond vanity metrics such as counting how many people attended an exhibition overall (often including duplicates day-to-day), how many badges were scanned at booths, or asking the exhibitor on the final day of the show “would you like to rebook for next year?”

From the conversations I had with various people, there was definitely a distinct lack of deep understanding on how exhibitors are actually handling event leads and thinking about event ROI + attribution as part of the broader marketing strategy, certainly from an enterprise perspective at least. This may in part be related to the fact that organisers have been very late in adopting modern Marketing Automation + CRM systems themselves. 

The idea that you can ask a B2B exhibitor on the last day of the show if the event has been a success has always been a flawed approach for me, given B2B lead cycles often take many months, even years, and how events are often just one interaction on a long and complex buying journey. I’ve written and presented before on what the events industry can learn from the explosion in the B2B MarTech landscape and this conference only further strengthened my view that there is a long way to go for the industry to catch up. 

With global Exhibitor Net Promoter Score at a frankly scary -18 (yes, that is a minus) rectifying this for me should be the top of every organiser’s agenda for me, but that doesn’t appear to always be the case.

3. Exhibitions 2.0

For Dan and I, this excellent presentation by Denzil Rankine, Executive Chairman at AMR International, was certainly the most relevant and sparked the most interest, a view shared by many of the delegates I spoke to afterwards.

To start with, the title of the presentation itself says a lot. If you mentioned “Web 2.0” to anyone in the Akkroo office they’d think you’d gone back at least a decade (in fact, the term was invented in 1999 and popularised in the mid-2000s... anyway, I digress.)

Denzil was making the very valid point that in the exhibition industry, it’s still Exhibitions 1.0. Not too much has changed in a couple of decades, for lots of reasons. However, change is here, and it is here now whether organisers acknowledge it or not. Attendee and more importantly, exhibitor demands are rapidly changing and those organisers who don’t evolve will soon suffer, potentially catastrophically. This is of course absolutely avoidable, and encouragingly there are forward thinking organisers and suppliers already on the journey to modernisation. Denzil explained how those organisers who are adapting, taking a more customer centric approach and embracing technology, are already seeing exhibition performance increase by 15% and it is still early days. 

It was refreshing to hear Denzil introduce terminology that has been a mainstay in the SaaS industry for over a decade, such as Customer Success, Customer Centricity, Customer Advocacy, Customer Lifetime Value vs Customer Acquisition Cost (spot the theme?) when thinking about exhibitor strategy, all underpinned by embracing modern technology. There is much the industry can learn how successful B2B SaaS companies have been able to quickly and profitably scale. Denzil provided great insights into how the modern organiser should be thinking along with practical examples of operational tactics to be used, followed by an interactive breakout session with engaged groups of delegates diving deeper into specific topics. 

B2B Marketers placing event spend under the spotlight

Over recent years, at the B2B Enterprise Marketing level, we’ve seen the steady rise in power and influence of Marketing Operations & Technology functions, especially in the US, with event spend increasingly being placed under the spotlight. As Enterprises are taking a progressively broader view on unifying top-of-funnel marketing activities, the need to align events with the rest of their Marketing Technology stacks has become not just a nice-to-have, but an absolute requirement and this momentum gathers pace by the day.

With 18% of all corporate marketing spend on events, larger than any other channel according to Forrester, it is simply no longer acceptable that this level of investment remains the one final opaque channel that is not wholly accountable. Put simply, if B2B Marketers cannot categorically prove that exhibiting is a genuinely effective use of budget, then that spend will be sent towards channels that can. 

How is the industry reacting?

Organisers and suppliers have to react to this shift but have largely been slow to do so, a significant contributing factor in the -18 Net Promoter Score. Thankfully however, as Denzil Rankine pointed out, we are already seeing encouraging signs from the more forward thinking organisations taking the “Exhibitions 2.0” approach, particularly in the US, although it would be fair to say there is some catching up to be done in Europe. 

What does this actually mean for the paying exhibitor customers? Well, everyone knows that the absolute number one reason that businesses exhibit at shows is to generate leads and business. And it is here, from a lead retrieval perspective, where demands are changing most. 

The trend in the US over recent years has seen more forward thinking event registration providers, such as CompuSystems and Experient, acknowledge and embrace this shift by providing exhibitors with access to a simple API connection as an alternative to renting the typical badge scanning devices. Badge scanning, at a very basic level has done a job and no doubt was a real breakthrough for the industry in the 1990s, but this method hasn’t really changed in 20+ years: scan a load of badges, wait to get hands on spreadsheet after the event, manually work on spreadsheet for hours before uploading into Marketing system, send out generic follow up email a couple of weeks later… hope for the best. 

A modern, secure API connection, on the other hand, enables the exhibitor to connect their own integrated systems, such as Akkroo, into the existing event registration system, take closer control of the process and this is the future.  

It is a win:win situation for all involved:

1. The exhibitor gets the best of both worlds - speed of scanning a badge via a mobile app running on their own devices, plus complete control and ownership of the qualifying info being collected, along with the opt-ins required from a compliance perspective. As Akkroo (and others) are fully integrated with the exhibitors’ Marketing Automation & CRM workflows, event leads are delivered to right place in real-time and a personalised, automated follow up begins immediately. This approach equips exhibitors with a universal, consistent and streamlined process for event lead capture at every event that ultimately accelerates revenue and truly connects event spend with bottom-of-funnel results. 
2. For organisers and event registration providers in turn, solutions like Akkroo, put simply, enable our shared exhibitor customers to be more successful at events and have the downstream revenue data to prove it. By enabling exhibitors to securely plug-in their own solutions via an API connection, organisers still maintain full visibility on the flow of leads to each individual exhibitor; event registration providers can still generate revenue from charging a small fee for API access (versus renting scanners) and coming back to the earlier point about Customer Centricity, the exhibitor wins for the reasons outlined in point 1. 

And successful exhibitors = a successful exhibition = a successful industry. 

The European landscape is definitely a few years behind the curve here, although encouragingly we’re seeing European providers such as CircData, EventMakers, Marvel, Scan2lead and LeadU embracing the changing demands of exhibitors and opening up modern API connections alongside the typical scanning services. Hopefully we’ll see the other providers follow suit and it was great to hear Adam Parry, Founder & Editor of Event Industry News, and Katie Crocombe, Director at 52eight3, in their session on Digital Innovation talk openly about the importance and benefits of integrations and connectivity from a wider event tech perspective.

Final Thoughts

All in all, it was a very informative and enjoyable few days, well organised by the UFI team with a particular shout out to Nick Dugdale-Moore, clearly a man of many talents from host to presenter to interviewer to a walking, talking delegate helpdesk! Dan and I made lots of useful connections and I look forward to the 2020 event in Gothenburg, where hopefully we’ll see how much the industry can move on in 12 months!