Ferrite Labs, a Midwest marketing tech startup based in Milwaukee, Wisc., launched a new online platform in February that will create an additional revenue stream for event organizers, while helping tradeshow marketers become data-driven in their event marketing.The platform, Who Attended, uses cryptography—the same technology featured in The Imitation Game—to securely match the marketer’s database of customers and prospects with the event organizer’s database of attendees.
“In today’s data-driven marketing environment, it’s imperative that exhibitors and sponsors have all the information they need to get the most out of their event marketing budgets. The competitive landscape simply demands it,” says Steve Robinson (pictured above), founder and CEO of Ferrite Labs, adding, “This data is invaluable to data-driven marketers because it lets them personalize communications and better measure the impact of an event beyond the leads they capture. Who Attended also helps marketers connect the dots between sales and their past participation at a tradeshow.”
Understanding who attended a show, but maybe didn’t provide contact information in the booth, enables data-driven marketing techniques such as content personalization and attribution modeling. Attribution modeling assigns a portion of the total revenue from each sale to one or more touches that a brand had with the buyer. This allows marketers to gauge the return on their investment for each touch, like a booth visit.
Prior to using Who Attended, marketers would have had to ask event organizers for a list of all attendees to calculate their ROI—a request that violates the privacy of attendees and cuts into the show’s revenue stream. Who Attended bridges that gap by inviting show organizers to upload their list to the online platform. Marketers can then upload their sales or marketing database to Who Attended, and the platform will tell the marketer how many of their contacts match the show attendees for free.
“This information is valuable in its own right to help marketers know how a given event’s audience compares to their sales prospects,” says Robinson. If the marketer wants to know who those matches are, they can pay a fee to the organizer and the software will return a list of the attendees, containing only the contact information the marketer uploaded in the first place.
The software uses cryptography to make sure that no contact information can ever change hands between the event organizer and the marketer. All lists are immediately converted into a random string of letters and numbers, or hashes, in a process called cryptographic hashing, so no personal data is ever stored in Who Attended. The system then compares the hashes from the show’s attendee list to the hashes from the marketer’s list to determine who was at the event and who wasn’t. The process is one-way. No supercomputer in the world can turn the hashes back into useful data. This means under no circumstances can personal data jump from marketer to show organizer or vice-versa, helping both parties respect the privacy of their audiences and stay in compliance with their own data policies and government privacy regulations such as GDPR.
Costs range from 15 to 50 cents per match, and are set by the event organizer. Who Attended makes its money by taking a 30 percent cut of every transaction.
Ferrite Labs is a software as a service (SaaS) company on a mission to eliminate waste in marketing. Their namesake product enables marketers to easily measure, compare and optimize marketing tactics across mediums and channels. For more info, visit www.FerriteLabs.com. For more info on Who Attended, Ferrite Labs, or measuring results from trade show or event marketing, contact Steve Robinson at steve.robinson@ferritelabs.com or (414) 218-4747 or visit www.WhoAttended.com.
