CHAPTER 6Reaching the Right Audience at the Right Time
The dizzying array of potential opportunities to collect and utilize data can be intimidating to the uninitiated, but understanding data's potential is vital for event experience managers in the age of disruption.
The transformation that the events industry is about to undertake is not unlike the one that advertising went through in the mid-1990s, as it made the jump from television, radio, billboards, and fliers to digital advertising channels like banner ads and social media content.
As with most jumps from the physical to the virtual world, digital advertising began by taking traditional ad content and simply moving it online. Instead of posting a billboard on the side of a highway, early digital advertising sought to place a version of that same billboard at the top of a popular web page. The key difference was that users could interact with the ad. Specifically, they could click on it in order to be taken to the advertisers' website or landing page.
The first banner ad was launched on October 27, 1994, on a website called HotWired, Wired magazine's online offshoot at the time. The website charged advertisers an upfront fee to place a banner ad on the site for three months, similar to a traditional magazine or billboard ad.
Soon after, advertisers realized that they didn't need to serve the same ad to every single visitor on the website; they could actually increase the effectiveness of each advertisement they served ...
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