Amir Vered, account director at eForce, Olympia London’s IT partner, asks whether heat maps are the future for venues?
In print media, premiums are charged for high visibility areas such as double spreads, centre page and of course, the front and back covers.
It is a straightforward formula, the more exposure you get, the higher the chances are to engage potential buyers.
Although the events industry borrows from the publishing sector on many levels, this is one area where it has failed to keep pace.
This is why heat mapping technology is particularly exciting, arguably bringing benefits to exhibitors in terms of refining their event strategy, and benefits to both venue and organiser.
There remains to be work done to prove its take-up and assess implementation, but from a technology standpoint, the idea has wings. Specifically, we’ve piloted a new product to see how heat mapping could work in the context of a particularly busy two-day show at Olympia London.The results were fascinating. The new technology was combined with a variety of advanced location techniques that take advantage of the constant travelling speed of radio waves and packets.
As a result, it is capable of better pinpointing the location of users, depending on the number and density of access points used. In simple terms our Access Points (APs) manage the wireless traffic in specific areas and while not everyone in the hall will connect to the network the APs constantly send and receive a transmission from the mobile devices in the hall.
Deploying our new solution meant that at any given time we could produce a heat map or an illustration of traffic density throughout the hall.
Laying a show’s floor plan on the surveyed area immediately demonstrated very clearly which areas were the busiest and at what time. This is where things get interesting.
You could argue that making this type of information available to organisers is the next big thing. Last year’s heat map is this year’s premium spot.
The areas that were busy last year could command a premium similar to a cover page of a magazine simply because it makes commercial sense. Even looking one step back, the actual data by itself could be valuable to exhibitors in assessing value of presence at an event.
By measuring how dense traffic was around their stand, it is possible to assess which factors went into its success, or not. Poor performance despite a busy exhibition space could for example indicate there were different factors at play than location.
You’ve got supermarkets using the technology to track customer behaviour and send them offers, while Transport for London recently published heat maps to help drivers avoid congested areas for the Tour de France.
The possibilities are endless for the events sector when you look at these examples. It’s something that could revolutionise the way we work.
This was first published in the August issue of EW's sister publication Exhibition News. Any comments? Email Annie Byrne
