IT Mídia: No-Shows Fell From 2.8 to 0.6

At IT Forum the meeting is the product. Guests were missing an average of 2.8 booked meetings each, and the market had decided this was simply the nature of technical audiences. In 2017 the average fell to 0.6.

IT Mídia is the publisher behind IT Forum, the event where the CIOs of the largest companies in Brazil meet the sponsors who want to sell to them. Fernando Palacios was contracted as the narrative architect of the event, and the project ran from 2015 to 2019, with the first edition under the new model in 2016. This page is written for the event or marketing lead who has to justify a format change to a sponsor.

The Situation: A Giant With a Quiet Leak

IT Forum was a consolidated event, in its seventeenth edition, with 178 CIOs in 2015 and 188 in 2016, and 66 sponsors. In the words of Miguel Petrilli, then VP of IT Mídia, more than 80 percent of everything sold in technology in Brazil was concentrated in that room.

The business model rests on one-to-one meetings. The sponsor pays for the agenda, the guest books the slots, and the meeting is what changes hands. The leak was in that exact place: each guest booked and then failed to appear at an average of 2.8 commitments. Everyone knew. Nobody talked about it. The industry filed it under temperament, the idea that the technology executive books the meeting and stays away.

What Was Built

The answer was a storyworld with a game inside it. The event became the Saga of Time, told through the Order of the Guardians of Time, a fiction with a steampunk aesthetic and an internal schism over how time should be used. Arriving guests enlisted in one of three leagues.

The narrative started before the door. A book, Autobiography of Time, arrived by mail. There was a hotsite, actors playing the leaders of the leagues, theatrical cutscenes, and newspapers in the hotel rooms. By the time the guest reached the venue, the guest was already inside the story.

The decisive piece was the coupling. The core gameplay was attached to the business objective of the event, so attending a talk, booking an extra meeting and interacting in the app all scored points, and the points materialized as physical badges on the credential lanyard. Showing up became a move in the game.

That is also where the reframing did its work. For the guest who found networking uncomfortable, the act changed names. Networking was an ordeal. Advancing in the mission was motivation.

The Results

Missed commitments per guest fell from 2.8 to 0.6, a reduction of 78.6 percent.

The base. 2.8 missed booked meetings per guest was the historical average of the event, measured against the same population of invited executives.

The period. The 0.6 figure was measured in 2017, consolidating the storytelling and gamification model started in 2016.

What it means. The sponsor was paying a premium for a meeting that did not happen, and the market treated the absence as the natural behavior of a technical audience. The number measures behavior. Satisfaction and brand recall measure how people felt; the no-show measures what people did, in an audience nobody believed could be changed. The drop also has a traceable mechanism, because the core gameplay tied the score to the act of attending.

Business meetings rose 16 percent in the first measured edition, from 2,060 to 2,397, at IT Forum in April 2016, measured against the previous average of the same event.

Client revenue grew 50 percent. The base is the revenue of IT Mídia, the client, over the period of the project, 2015 to 2019. What it means: narrative work on a corporate event moved the client's top line. New sponsors and new sponsorship formats were created because the story had room for them.

The project won Caio Awards, several gold statuettes over the three years. The documented one is 2016, in the Corporate Event category, for the IT Forum case. The base: the Caio Award is the award of the Brazilian events industry, given by the sector the event serves. The period: across the three years of the project. What it means: the award came from the industry the event serves, and it went to a technology event for having become a narrative experience. That is external validation of Strategic Entertainment.

In the 2016 edition, 100 percent of guests and 100 percent of sponsors said they would return. The base is the post event survey of that edition, answered by the invited executives and by the sponsors. What it means: the redesign moved satisfaction and behavior at once, and the two audiences whose money is in the room both said yes.

What This Case Proves

The behavior of an audience is designed, and it can be redesigned. The technology executive who booked and disappeared was responding to a frame in which the meeting was an obligation. Inside a story with a mission, the same person kept the appointment.

Three pieces did the work together: the storyworld, the core gameplay and the transmedia layer that started before the event. The available record does not isolate the effect of any single one of them, and this page does not claim otherwise.

The Method Behind It

The discipline here is Strategic Entertainment, described in the method, and applied to live events in storytelling for corporate events and keynotes. The measurement logic behind this case is discussed in storytelling ROI.

The other two cases with numbers attached are Yamaha and Mini Schin, in the case index.