Optimising venue insights to elevate experiences
At a glance
Developing a new digital tool using Wi-Fi network data and footfall counting cameras to optimise event insights for exhibition organisers and enhance understanding of visitor habits and profiles during events.
The challenge
As a top European event destination, the Birmingham National Exhibition Centre (NEC) offers versatile event spaces, including 18 interconnected halls with 182,000 sqm of exhibition space. It is the UK's largest exhibition venue, hosting over 500 events annually, with 2.3 million visitors and 45,000 exhibiting companies.
To help exhibition organisers better understand the visitor habits and profiles during their events, we partnered with the NEC Group to develop a data analytics platform that extracts meaningful event insights from the Wi-Fi network data and footfall counting cameras installed at the venue, as part of a NEC’s £7 million technology infrastructure investment.
The solution, as part of GHD’s Venue Insights offering, incorporated cloud technology for scalability and efficient data processing. It integrated data ingestion APIs, utilised advanced spatial data analytics, machine learning technologies, and provided automated performance monitoring and dashboard reporting post-events.
Our response
We worked closely with both the NEC’s insights team and event organisers to strategically prioritise and refine the most valuable insights and formulate these into a product roadmap. We brought together teams of data scientists and software engineers to execute the plan within the agreed timescales and reconciled our technology approach with the NEC’s digital, marketing, and operational stakeholder teams. Our long-standing relationship with the hardware manufacturer (Cisco), also enabled us to solve issues quickly and efficiently with the hardware by accessing their expertise.
The NEC Venue now utilises our proprietary tool called Show Insights, producing data dashboard that integrates multiple technologies ensuring simple and clear usability for organisers and their teams:
The impact
After the official launch of the product, event organisers at NEC can now receive an in-depth insights package from the venue post-event.
Combining Wi-Fi data with capacity counting technology, Show Insights provides event organisers with GDPR compliant, anonymised, and aggregated insights not previously available. The dedicated online dashboard provides a simple and clear user interface. It presents key information that enhances organisers’ understanding of the performance of their event in terms of attendance, trends and specific areas of interest to attendees over the course of the event. It also helps NEC to optimise its strategy for increasing sales and to identify the aspects of high value, i.e., areas of greatest interest to attendees, to show organisers. The solution will be used as the foundation to deliver bespoke and more in-depth insights as required by show organisers in the future. It can also be adopted at other public venues to understand visitors’ movement behaviours.
Wi-Fi mapping provides insight into where our attendees spend most of their time. This information enables us to both improve our shows for attendees and develop them in a way that is beneficial and profitable for all our stakeholders, partners and customers.”