Various Global Clients
The Challenge
When the pandemic hit, everyone’s in-person event marketing plans were turned upside down. For some of our largest global clients, they had access to all the public data about case numbers, but they didn’t have insight into how that was affecting the experiential marketing landscape and impacting the industry.
The Solution
GPJ acted quickly, concepting and building an event readiness toolkit that monitors the recovery status of 30+ markets around the world, and yields information, insight and takeaways into how digital, in-person and hybrid experiences are being approached and executed globally. We call our toolkit the Event Readiness Index.
How We Did It
There is no shortage of COVID-19 data available to the public. The trouble is analyzing mass packages of time-series data, relating it to each other and calibrating it to support an event-specific point of view. For this, GPJ’s analysts built real-time dashboards measuring various quantitative pandemic leading indicators. This information was then combined with insights from GPJers who provided qualitative measures such as events occurring in market, a market summary and specific event restrictions.
Both areas of data were combined together, weighted, and computed into an event readiness index based on those market conditions.
As we monitored reopening, digital events and experiences remained a high priority for us and our clients. To supplement the Event Readiness Index scores, we deployed team members to assess digital, hybrid and in-person events in key countries. This allowed us to proactively identify and evaluate new event structures and engagement tactics as they arrived in the market. With a market need to preserve business continuity and enhance attendees’ digital experiences, we synthesized the digital event “audits” into monthly trend reports to help us and our clients actionably experiment further.
What’s Next
The combination of qualitative and quantitative reports have allowed us to keep up with the overwhelming breadth and pace of change throughout the world. As the future unfolds, the event readiness toolkit continues to provide more opportunity than ever as we update its inputs and processes to capture, evaluate and support new realities.
