On November 19, Hyatt Regency Moscow Petrovsky Park hosted the MICE Excellence Forum for the first time. Four hundred participants gathered under one roof, including customers, suppliers, and industry experts in business and corporate events.
The forum aims to enable interested parties to meet each other, find a new audience, and come to business agreements in a comfortable environment. The program includes a wide variety of content: masterclasses, round tables, and, most importantly, B2B workshops.
Technologies for MICE Excellence from EventPlatform
EventPlatform acted as a technical contractor for the event, taking over the online broadcast of the event and organizing meetings for participants in B2B workshops.
Goal 1: host an online version of the event using gamification.
Goal 2: Provide technical negotiation and administrative support to participants during appointments.
It is not enough to implement the platform, use its mechanisms and work out the event. The main task is to understand the purpose of the event and select the right tools by the audience’s characteristics.
On the one hand, MICE Excellence Forum has become a professional event where experts discuss industry development trends, suggested methods for solving problems, and share their experiences. The format combined both business and entertainment aspects.
Project implementation
1. Online version
The platform for the event was customized following the wishes of the customer. Online access to the forum was provided through the website and application.
This was very convenient for those who were not physically present at the Hyatt Regency – they could track what was happening on PCs and laptops. It was also suitable for confirmed attendees of the event, who were busy at the workshops and afraid to miss something – they entered through the smartphone application.
Thanks to the personalization of the service, the platform met each guest by name. In addition, a complete list of participants with names, places of work, and city of deployment was available to all registered visitors of MICE Excellence. It was easy to contact a specific guest: his email and phone number where indicated in the information section.
The platform structure consisted of 11 valuable tabs. In the broadcast hall, one could watch all the performances and masterclasses. The event’s program was an adaptive schedule, complete with a notification system about changes and brief information about each stage.
“Chips”: in addition to a bright picture and a dynamic presentation of information, guests were involved with the help of interactive features (thematic emoticons in the broadcast, polls, quizzes). The competition for the best cocktail recipe in Megachat helped to “stir up” the participants.
2. Appointment system for B2B workshops
Each guest on the platform got access to their account after registration. But the tab of the appointment module is only for buyers (corporate customers and agencies) and service providers.
Such segmentation was fully justified – as a result, only the target audience participated in the workshops. Each buyer could hold up to 12 meetings, while two representatives could work at one table, which further expanded networking possibilities.
Guests who received access to the module found each other in the contact database and offered to schedule a meeting. Filters worked in the system, allowing you to create individual match lists. Participants sent requests to interlocutors, after which their bid was accepted or rejected, depending on the counterpart’s desire. Confirmed options were automatically added to the schedule grid.
If the person who received the meeting request declined it, they could add a comment about their busyness and invite them to meet at another time. In addition, members managed their time slots and could lock them out if they took a break.
Each MICE Excellence forum guest received extensive information support: push notifications about upcoming activities and schedule changes, a news feed, private messages, and contact with technical assistants. Everything for a successful business session.
“Chips”: audience segmentation, providing selective access to the meeting module to buyers and suppliers; interactive match lists – comfortable meeting management for participants, options for blocking slots and viewing information about interlocutors; informational and technical support — notifications about changes, push notifications about the time of the upcoming meeting.
Project results
Today, introducing new technologies into the formats of special events is standard practice for companies wishing to stay in their niche. The generally unstable situation in the country and constant changes in external and internal conditions lead to increased competition.
Thus, those who want to survive and earn money must balance between creating a comfortable and engaging environment during the event and maintaining the activity’s profitability.
Whether an online, offline, or hybrid event is being planned, the organizer must meet the audience’s expectations to achieve their goals. And here, he is forced to keep track of new “chips.” As one of the tools of the event platform, the meeting module allows you to host significant hybrid events that integrate different formats and technologies. Opportunities include working with large audiences.
At the MICE Excellence Forum, the appointment system proved successful in workshops. It allowed customers and suppliers to make new acquaintances and discuss possible projects in detail.
Statistical summary:
436 participants;
29 speakers;
805 business meetings;
923 requests per session;
15 hours of stay on the forum;
14 thousand minutes spent in networking;
engagement rating 9.93 out of 10 points.
Mikhail Klimanov, agency “We”: This is the first event where networking works so cool!
Irina Mikhalkova, MICE Orchestra: MICE, despite all the restrictions, continues to recover, and you can directly feel this positive energy in the air.
Anna Vetrinskaya, head of SberMarketing agency
The effectiveness of digital tools in the advertising services market is only growing – and next year, they will continue to be relevant. If we talk about trends, then in advertising technologies in 2022, we expect new solutions in AI applications.
Artificial intelligence is successfully solving many routine tasks in working with data, contextual advertising, etc. Next year, I will direct my attention to using AI to solve more creative problems in marketing.
The growth of the digital promotion market in 2022 will also be affected by the development of AR and VR technologies in advertising. This year, there were several bright cases in Russia, including SberMarketing. But for the audience, this is still an unusual format, so the visibility and virality of such advertising messages are very high.