Exhibitors Take Advantage of Trends in Business Intelligence

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1 Location-based Business Intelligence at trade shows White Paper Smartrack Via Aurelia Nord 27, Pietrasanta (LU), Italy Tel:

2 Fairtrack:)location-based)Business) Intelligence)at)trade)shows) In its early days, the Internet was mainly used to emulate reality, and websites were merely a virtual version of corresponding real entities. But pretty soon the web s huge potential became clearer and clearer: Internet allows companies to better understanding the market (the clients, the competitors, the trends) and enables new business models (e-commerce, contextual advertisement, etc.). As a consequence, a wide variety of paradigms and methodologies have been developed to unveil the web potential, such as web analytics, web 2.0, recommender systems, click-through-rate, pay-per-click and so on. Nowadays companies can obtain an incredibly rich amount of information by analyzing the behavior of the visitors of their own website and web analytics are widely recognized as very powerful marketing tools capable of increasing profitability and improving the quality of service. Web analytics allow companies to: collect information about the traffic of their website (page after page); identify the most and least visited pages, thus identifying visitors likes and dislikes; measure the results of promotional campaigns; make contextual advertising and pay advertisements on click basis (pay-perclick); measure the click-through-rates, i.e. the conversion rates between visited pages and finalized purchases (in case of e-commerce activities). Web analytics also improve the customer s experience. As an example, recommender systems (such as Amazon s) based on the analysis of the visitors behavior and by identifying common interests between clusters of visitors, can simplify the purchase process and increase sales and profitability. Given the web s huge impact on how companies make business, we believe that today the roles have swapped: it is now time for the real world to emulate the web. This vision inspired Smartrack, a startup which provides Business & Competitive Intelligence services based on the analysis of how customers (e.g. fair visitors, mall customers, etc.) interact with the environment (product, people, exhibition booths, displays, ) in order to understand the visit and purchase behavior. We do recognize a strong analogy between the web and some markets, such as trade shows and stores, between how web visitors surf the web and how people move around in real trade environments. We therefore take advantage of web tools and we apply them in the real world, where they are even more relevant. Although this concept can find many applications (e.g. retail shops, work in process analysis in manufacturing factories, congress industry, sports and military training, etc.), this white paper focuses on trade shows, which Smartrack developed a specific product for, called Fairtrack. The analogy between the web and fairs is shown in Figure 1. Figure 1: The web-fair analogy. With Fairtrack, we measure how people move around at trade shows, how they interact with the environment (products, booths, people, advertisement panels, display racks ) and we analyze this information in order to describe the visit and purchase process. That is made possible by using stateof-the-art indoor location technology to track visitors, coupled with our proprietary Business Intelligence algorithms. Thanks to this information, companies can understand the complex market mechanisms, benchmark against competitors, understand the real interests and needs of the clients (either existing or potential), identify new market opportunities, increase sales and measure

3 their return of investment. Fairtrack enables a wide variety of services for all the key fair stakeholders: exhibitors, visitors, fair organizers and fair owners. FairTrack is a modular system that can be easily scaled up to cover any fairs. Background:)the)Trade)Show) industry) Trade shows are still the most important marketing and communication tool for most companies, which spend on average 30% (and up to 70%) of their marketing budget for the participation to fairs. The trade show industry generates in Europe every year revenues for 15 billion euros, with 8 times as much in terms of satellite revenues: this is about 1.5% of Europe s GDP. The European fair market counts more than direct employees, 85 million square meters of rental space, about 1.5 million exhibitors and 160 millions of visitors every year. The average overall cost of exhibiting at trade shows is (including travel, transportation etc.), and companies participate to 4-20 events per year. The)problem) Despite the significant investment in terms of time and resources, the return of investment is usually limited. Companies are not able of taking advantage of all the amount of information about the market which is available at trade shows, because the exhibitors view is typically limited to what happens in their own booth only, and they ignore or have no tools to measure how the competitors are performing. And even inside their booth, exhibitors can collect information only about those visitors/potential buyers who are directly engaged by their sales force, which is just 10% of the qualified leads that could be potentially reached (Figure 2). Figure 2: Exhibitors have no tools to collect information about booths other than theirs and even inside their booth they can collect information only about those visitors who are directly engaged by their sales force. The)solution) Fairtrack is an integrated hardware-software solution that easily and effectively allows exhibitors getting full advantage of all the incredibly rich amount of information available at trade shows, which otherwise would remain mainly unexploited. Fairtrack measures the visitors behavior (i.e. their movements) in the fair environment, by leveraging state-of-the-art real-time indoor positioning systems based on active RFID Ultra Wide Band technology. The positioning system is based on three main components:

4 Fairtrack Location-based Business Intelligence at trade shows the tags, which transmit an unique radio-frequency pulse at preset transmission intervals; the antennas, which receive the pulses and transmit the information to the control unit; the control unit, which computes the tag position by trilateration. the conversion rates (percentage of pavilion visitors who visited my booth, etc.); the benchmark against competitors (my visitors visited also ); understanding of the visitors real preferences and needs; the visitors flux over time and space. This information is organized into a report customized to each exhibitor, as shown, for example, in Figure 4. Figure 3: The location system: location tag, antennas and control unit. By attaching a tiny tag to the fair badge it is possible to measure the badge holder position with sub-meter accuracy. We can therefore calculate: the time spent by each visitor in the proximity of each booth; the time spent by each visitor in the proximity of each product; the time spent by each visitor in the proximity of each booth representative. This information is then analyzed by Smartrack s proprietary Business Intelligence algorithms in order to obtain: the ranking of most visited exhibition booths; the list of all booth visitors (i.e. not only the small percentage of those who interacted with the sales force); Figure 4: Example of Fairtrack report for exhibitors. Fairtrack also enables new payment models, such as the pay-per-visit model, where the rental space can be paid based on the actual number of booth visitors, rather than on square meter basis only.

5 Fairtrack is a new product satisfying clear needs of the modern trade show industry. The fair industry is recovering from the economic downturn in western countries, while a strong growth is taking place in emerging countries. In order to survive to the increasing competition, fair centres and fair producers are seeking for new services in order to differentiate their offer and to get a competitive advantage. The exhibition space, which used to be a specialty, is now becoming a commodity and is no longer enough, by itself, to attract visitors and exhibitors. Trade shows are becoming visitorcentric, and Fairtrack anticipates this trend. Fairtrack s services can be therefore valuable for all the fair stakeholders: exhibitors, visitors, fair producers, fair owners, security and safety companies. Boothmarking TM )and)visit) continuation)on)the)web) Boothmarking is one of the most innovative Fairtrack services. The location tag can be equipped with a button. Whenever a visitor passes by or visits a booth of interest, he can press the button to mark the booth, i.e. to define a boothmark. Fairtrack then adds the selected booth to the list of boothmarks, based on the visitor position when he pressed the button. More generally, the pressure of the button reveals the interaction of the visitor with an event, and can therefore also be used, as an example, during courses or seminars where the visitor can vote or express a preference. After the exhibition, the visitor can retrieve all this information in his personal area of the fair s website. Figure 6 shows an example of such a personal web page, providing the following information: a reconstruction of the visit, where visited booths are highlighted in blue and boothmarked booths are highlighted in yellow (section a); the boothmark list, with links to relevant companies and products (section b); a recommender system, with suggestions on other links potentially of interest (section c). Figure 5: The button on the tag (left) and its use to boothmark a booth of interest (right). Figure 6: Visitor s private area on the fair web site, showing (a) the visitor s path during the visit, (b) the list of boothmarks and (c) the recommender system with suggestions on additional links to visit. This service motivates visitors to extend their visit after the event, and makes the fair website very attractive for targeted advertising, which could be a new revenue stream for the fair organizers. Boothmarking can provide very valuable information to exhibitors as well. It is a measure of the success of the booth or of some specific products and therefore it allows the exhibitor to focus on specific marketing actions. This service can be useful

6 to compare the success of our products with the competitors ones and then can depict a clearer picture of the market evolution and of the customers interests. Smartrack Via Aurelia Nord Pietrasanta (LU) Italy Tel & Fax: Contact information Alberto Baldacci, CEO alberto.baldacci@smartrack.it Mobile: