MeetingPlay + Aventri has rolled out a new exhibitor-management platform called ExpoPro, only months after the two companies merged.
Built from the ground up for managing exhibitors and sponsors at large exhibitions, phase one of the platform automates communications, tasks, content collection, and approvals to keep planners and exhibitors on track for upcoming shows.
The company had an existing exhibition management tool, but it was scrapped and rebuilt using state-of-the-art project-management technology. “We quickly realized that post-pandemic exhibitor-attendee interaction, and any exhibitor-management system, had to be different moving forward, and that's why we started from scratch,” says Joe Schwinger, the company’s chief of innovation.
While phase one’s task-management tools can streamline the planning process, it’s phase two—coming this summer—that Schwinger believes will set ExpoPro apart.
The next release will help exhibitors and sponsors improve their return on investment by meeting the higher expectations for attendee data. Before the pandemic, explains Schwinger, an exhibitor would make a big investment in a trade show and “get anywhere between 20 and 50 qualified leads.” However, during the pandemic, many exhibitors found that the virtual environment could deliver more and better data. “Utilizing the tools to their advantage, [exhibitors] were seeing a 100-percent increase in those numbers. So, the question was this: How do we take the reach that they were getting in the virtual environment and build it into this product?”
“Phase one is about logistics and organization: ‘What do I need to do to be successful?’ But we’re on the cusp of launching phase two, and that’s where we will bring in artificial intelligence and machine learning” to help increase ROI for sponsors. “What we’ve been focused on,” says Schwinger, “is looking at the attendee data that we collect—What sessions are you going to? What other people are watching those sessions? What are your likes and your dislikes? Did you create a meeting with a sponsor in this segment? —and wrapping that data back to content suggestions.”
In essence, ExpoPro will take data that had been siloed and bring it into a single portal. “That's the direction that we’re going in,” says Schwinger. “We’re matching people to content and what they do, and allowing our exhibitors a preview into who they will meet.”
