Nerd Out with Rod: harnessing the power of technology to enrich the user experience.
Artificial intelligence, deep machine learning, mixed and augmented reality. It all sounds very exciting, but what impact do these technologies have on our industry? And how can we harness them to truly enrich the attendee live experience? We sat down with our Executive Producer and Experience Technologist Rod to get to the bottom of it.
Q. What tech things should all experience technologists be thinking about right now?
The main technologies that should be at the forefront of every experience technologist’s mind are content delivery mechanisms and measurement tools.
At Jack Morton we are collaborating with our partners, to develop a propriety system to measure the impact of our live experiences. We use data that we have collected from sentiment tracking, body scanning and RFID tracking to get a picture of how people behave in the live space. The beauty of this technology is in how it tracks the movements of guests throughout each live experience. We can look at time spent in specific locations, with specific products. This allows us to map the attendee journey and quantify the strengths and weaknesses of the program.
Whilst the data does not track individuals per say, we can still extrapolate general attendee profiles. This gives us great insight year to year, event to event, and allows us to work with our clients to ensure future success. Most importantly, the JMW team eliminate surmised results by providing accuracy of attendance or social share numbers and this data uncovers what is important to the attendee.
Content is also key. Mixed or augmented reality is a main disrupter for content and the way it is consumed. I have currently been working with a team on developing a way to use mixed reality as a part of live presentations without viewing it through your phone. I know this will be a real game-changer in the events space.
Q. What is Artificial intelligence and how does it apply to events and the experiential space?
Essentially, AI is a human process that is simulated by machines, and is actually a technology that we use almost every day. Even if you utter the words “Just google it”, you are referring to the use of AI to assist in searching the millions of web pages to find the answer you are looking for.
When applying Artificial Intelligence to the events industry, there are two questions experience technologists need to ask themselves; What do the next 5 years look like? And what do the next 20 years look like?
The next immediate step is where AI can be used directly for example you can present on stage and the imagery and content is created and presented for you!
How do you see AI playing an integral role in the next 5 years?
I see the personalisation element of agendas at events being the next big step. Turning up to an event where the guest has personally selected speakers and has been given an agenda specifically designed for them, down to the finer detail of personalising their lunch and breaks to fit in with their own timetable of events truly maximises the attendee experience. This is the smart way forward by using AI technologies to facilitate the programming of personalised scheduling with ease as well as to host both live and non-live visual presentations (i.e. holograms and offline video webinars).
To advance attendee scheduling this far we need also need to make sure that at its infancy we are capturing attendance, viewing and engagement data.
And in the next 20 years?
I believe that pattern recognition and deep learning will be all the rage. Deep learning has been making huge advancements in many industries and helping to develop AI to an even greater level. What this means for events is there will be a point in which we input the venue, the capacity and the goal into a deep learning machine which will run millions of computations to give you the most cost-effective, best laid out and most perfect event scenario.
Imagine inputting a set of criteria into a deep learning system and the machine runs millions of variations and layouts giving you the client’s desired outcome and potentially discovering fresh and exciting ways to reuse space and run events too!
That is the future of AI and events.
Q. What is Jack Morton doing in the tech space?
Without our different partnerships, Jack Morton would not be at the forefront of technology in brand experience and the next few years are going to be really exciting for us. To respond to the ever changing landscape of tech, we have created Genuine X. Jack Morton’s innovation practice that helps brands harness the opportunities at the intersection of technology, content and data. This collaborative initiative will not only fuel innovative thinking but it will also allow us to deliver more impactful and measurable results for our brands and strategic partners.
Simply put, Jack Morton’s growing tech capabilities allow us to achieve extraordinary things for our clients. We have a great team at the moment and some really cool and creative thinkers in all areas who are early tech adopters and want to really live life on the bleeding edge. It is also without this team we wouldn’t be able to match our client’s ambition for success. We work closely with our suppliers to use a variety of cutting-edge technologies to enhance the experiences we deliver. Recently, our experienced team have been collaborating with a supplier to create an immersive stand made up of over 102 square meters of transparent LED. This innovative use of LED meant that the stand we built was the star of the show (in our eyes).
If you have any questions about our tech or measurement and want to learn more about experience technology, please contact Rod on rod.vowell@jackmorton.com.au.
