Experience Intelligence: 3 Insights on Measuring Business Impact – Event Marketer

A brand new methodology helps manufacturers like IBM design for what issues most.

When an trade commonplace doesn’t exist, create one. It’s the mentality of a rising variety of high experiential manufacturers and company companions who’re embracing portfolio-wide measurement methods to higher observe the often-long-range ROI of dwell occasions.

“It’s a fundamental gap for our industry,” says Fiona Bruder, world CEO at expertise advertising company George P. Johnson (GPJ). “Advertising has always had standard metrics that everyone stands behind. But with the expectations put on the CMO role in the last 10 years to drive business results, more investment in experiential means more accountability. It’s our job as leaders to invest not just in the future of our agencies, but in the future of the industry.”

GPJ’s inside technique and choice science practices assist purchasers plan for and, extra importantly, design for ROI. The company lately formalized its proprietary measurement methodology with the launch of Experience Intelligence System, developed and examined throughout a number of world occasions, in response to the workforce.

“Experiential is now the tip of the spear, the primary channel for go-to-market, encompassing a growing share of overall spend, but the shift toward experiential-first campaigns is coming with the performance expectations marketers had for other channels,” says Brendan Brown, GPJ’s world head of technique and planning.

We sat down with the workforce behind the methodology to discover three selections that may assist guarantee occasion information interprets into enterprise intelligence.

Decision 1: What are your stakeholders’ objectives?

Event entrepreneurs typically set their goals across the outcomes of the expertise itself—impressions, attain, complete variety of badge scans. But GPJ argues that 75% of measurement can and may happen earlier than the occasion. This contains conducting discovery calls with quite a lot of inside stakeholders, from product builders right down to the gross sales pressure, aligning on goals, choosing KPIs and growing a knowledge seize plan.

For instance, moderately than assign an arbitrary badge-scan complete, talk about up entrance what firm or attendee profile might characterize a chance, after which design a way to trace that.

“One shift we’ve noticed is our clients talking about cohort buying, how multiple stakeholders within the same customer organization, attending your event, shortens the lead lifecycle,” says Mike Paglia, director of Decision Science at GPJ. “So, you might measure data around the percentage of cohorts coming back to your event, or what actions they took, which is data you can serve up directly to sales and help prove the event sped up that conversion.”

Longtime GPJ consumer IBM establishes what success appears like throughout viewers participation, model sentiment and enterprise impression—emphasis on viewers participation. For Sarah Meron, chief communications and model officer at IBM, this strategy lets the group “think intentionally” in regards to the journey it desires attendees to take with the model.

“What do we want them to experience? What do we want them to understand? And what action or conversation do we want that experience to create?” Meron says.

Decision 2: Is your portfolio ‘benchmark-optimized’?

IBM’s AI Sports Club is a car for simply that. The model engaged GPJ to create the touring sponsorship activation that makes summary B2B know-how culturally related and delivers on YOY metrics. What started as a brief pop-up in New York City for the 2025 US Open has turn into a worldwide experiential platform for activating IBM’s marquee sports activities sponsorships, together with at The Masters, for UFC and for Scuderia Ferrari.

The objective of the activation is to make AI approachable via hands-on experiences, connecting followers and attendees to applied sciences and improvements powering completely different sporting experiences. It is storytelling that pursuits a broad viewers that features followers, locals, vacationers, enterprise leaders, college students, “anyone curious about technology in general,” Meron says.

“The same three questions apply to a booth in Singapore and the AI Sports Club in New York: how did people take part, how did they feel about the brand, and what did it do for the business?” she says. “Asking them the same way every time means each event teaches the next one. We can see which moments pulled people in, which ones led to a real conversation, and which leads actually moved through the pipeline. We understand how the experience lifted the brand and moved the business.”

Standardizing the way you’re measuring throughout all experiences, Brown provides, “unifies a team under a single source of truth so everyone knows what winning looks like. Clarity breeds motivation, so when a team sees their Experience Intelligence System score move in real time, it creates feedback loops that drive continuous iteration, but also alignment with teams so that they’re all rowing in the same direction.”

Decision 3: How will the info help development?

As Paglia places it, “Data gets better with age.” The AI Sports Club permits groups to look throughout the portfolio and determine what’s value constructing on. Goals aligned with the enterprise and an occasion technique that units the workforce up for benchmark information result in portfolio-level steady enchancment, funding and strategic readability that issues to the ever-expanding CMO position.

“The biggest shift is to stop thinking of measurement as a scorecard at the end of an event and start treating it as a learning loop. Yes, there is value in simply knowing how an activation performed but using those learnings to make the next experience better is always the focus,” Meron says. “I’d encourage leaders to look at their portfolio over time rather than evaluating every activation in isolation. A standardized approach gives you the ability to identify what is consistently driving engagement and make smarter decisions about where to invest. For IBM, that means continually asking how we can create experiences that people genuinely want to engage with. The opportunity is to show up in culture in ways that are useful, unexpected and human.”

Ultimately, the strategy transforms experiential from a finances line merchandise to a strategic communications and advertising channel, as a result of it’s designed for a number of stakeholders. And because the GPJ workforce describes it, creating “executive-ready proof” of impression.

Featured Photo: George P. Johnson