Despite the popularity and enormous scale of pharmaceutical and biotechnology conferences in the industry, these events often fail to capture audience attention, leaving attendees without any sort of message or call to action.
That’s why events need the latest attention-grabbing pharmaceutical technology.
Read on to find out why you should utilize event technology at your next pharmaceutical conference, the top 5 technologies used today, and how to apply these devices and systems at your event.
Benefits of Event Technology
Every additional piece of technology plays its own role in shaping any great event. Pharmaceutical event organizers are consistently integrating tech stacks into their experiential design each year because they see how impressive the benefits really are.
Here are some of the key reasons that pharmaceutical meeting planners use event technology (featuring statistics by EventMB):
- Engages Audiences – According to almost 40% of event planners, the most important factor of live events is audience engagement.
- Promotes Future Attendance – By creating a memorable and mesmerizing attendee experience at your conference, you’ll give people something to tweet about. Studies show that technology can increase event attendance by 20%.
- Collects Valuable Data – The best way to improve events and troubleshoot during events is to continuously and meticulously collect data. Insights generated from these findings help fuel analysis of what works and what doesn’t. Whether this is through measuring traffic flow inside the conference area, using surveys, or tracking email open rates, data collection is a vital asset for any event.
- Measures Success – While collecting general data allows organizers to improve current and future events, measuring success helps assess if these changes worked or not. While every conference has different standards of—and goals for—success, measuring whatever metrics you decide on is crucial.
- Keeps Communication Consistent – Planning an event in the pharmaceutical industry involves much more time investment than the span of the conference itself. The weeks or months approaching the event, as well as the weeks following, are vital for planning and iteration. New developments allow for communications to not only be timely and relevant, but personalized.
Why not join the 71% of event organizers increasing their event tech budget in 2020 and invest in some thrilling, immersive, and effective technology for your own conference? Read on for our Top 5 Picks!
Types of Event Technology for Pharmaceutical Conferences
The top 5 technologies pharmaceutical conferences can’t go without, include:
- Mixed Reality
- Custom Event Mobile Applications
- Virtual Event Streaming
- Smart Flooring
- Facial Recognition Technology
Each of these technologies amp-up pharmaceutical events in their own way. Read on to learn what they are, how they work, and why you should have them at your next conference.
#1 Mixed Reality
Mixed reality just means a combination of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). With AR, think Pokémon Go or those Snapchat filters that make you look like a dog. For VR, think everything and anything—with VR, your creative and immersive experiences are unbound by reality. You can have a demonstration of a new medical device on zombies in space, for example (if zombie-loving astronauts happen to be the audience you’re trying to impress).
Implementing mixed reality helps break the monotony of traditional pharmaceutical conferences by crafting an epic digital environment for attendees and finding a creative way to drive home the primary messaging of any event.
These mixed reality experiences can be customized to meet any conference goal. Use MR for the following:
- Product demos
- Attention-grabbing social media content
- Interactive maps of the venue
- Engaging branding
- Transparent displays
- Simulations
- Immersive art displays
- Amazing photo opportunities
Here’s why pharmaceutical event organizers invest the time and money into mixed reality:
- Reduces physical space needed for ambitious displays or workshops
- Attracts attendees to specific booths, talks, or workshops
- It grabs audience attention and prompts them to engage more
- The potential of mixed reality is endless, thanks to its creative and spatial flexibility
- It can set a conference apart from the rest (and it’s super fun)
- Virtual guests can pay for an event ticket and attend from home
#2 Custom Event Mobile Applications
Nothing makes more sense than putting the conference experience straight into the user’s hand via a mobile phone app. Streamline your event communications by giving attendees the freedom and flexibility they need to monitor their experience remotely.
With custom event apps, attendees can:
- View and rearrange their schedule
- Interact and connect with other conference-goers
- Access important information
- Access conference map and FAQs
- Sign up for workshops and talks
- Offer convenient and direct feedback
- Ask questions in real-time
To achieve these capabilities, event apps must feature:
- A schedule tab
- An interactive, modular agenda page
- Venue maps, vendor, and sponsor information
- Presentations with RSVP capabilities
- A chatbot messenger
- Surveys and questionnaires
- A personalized recommendations feature
Event apps are invaluable tools for customer satisfaction and data collection both during and after any conference. According to data by EventMB (2019), “100% of event organizers across industries agree that real-time agenda information is a critical app feature.” This same study found that “10% of event apps use gamification to drive their desired action from attendees,” which could be an effective strategy, depending on the conference.
#3 Virtual Event Streaming
Despite increased interest in conference attendance, not everyone will be able to make it to part or the entirety of an event. Furthermore, organizers may be interested in advertising their event while it’s happening.
Thanks to live streaming, all is possible!
Affordable, easy, and far-reaching, live streaming is an excellent way to gain a large audience online and share relevant and interesting aspects of the conference to as many eyes as desired. Here are some creative applications of live streaming that have been used in the past:
- Streaming special interviews
- Behind-the-scenes coverage
- Sharing exclusive content
- Announcing special giveaways
- Sharing full-length presentations or workshops
What’s better is that these live streaming services are widely available—and free—through Youtube, Facebook, Twitch, and more.
With live-streaming, conferences and pharmaceutical trade shows can showcase all the latest biotech and pharmaceutical technology on display to an even wider audience, all without reducing attendance. In fact, conference attendance actually increases when events offer a virtual option, with 30% of livestream viewers attending those same events the year after.
#4 Smart Flooring
Put frankly: Smart flooring is really cool. Flooring tiles are embedded with a thin layer of sensors which send radio signals to a server, and even generate electricity, Sure, it isn’t a special kind of dance floor that compliments you on your dance knowledge and skills, but it is a fascinating, unobtrusive data collection method that conference organizers love.
Here is how pharmaceutical conferences aim to use smart flooring:
- To perform real-time analysis and identification of traffic flow patterns
- To quickly identify and tackle bottlenecks
- To recognize key locations for sponsorships and monetize on them in real-time
- To access critical event data during the current event instead of waiting for the next one
That last point is the true key to smart flooring: why iterate later, when you could iterate now? This clever piece of technology allows conference planners to improve their event while it’s happening.
#5 Facial Recognition Technology
Waiting in line is a part of life—you do it at the grocery store, at amusement parks, and at the DMV. Don’t you wish that it wasn’t, though? Although there is nothing we can currently do to get the line down at Disneyland (The happiest place on Earth would get a little happier), there is a solution for conference lines: facial recognition technology.
Facial recognition technology is a high quality biometric software with visual imaging capabilities and robust algorithms. Here’s how it works:
- An attendee first submits their photo during online registration
- The software analyzes their facial structure to produce a “facial fingerprint”
- Upon arrival, all they need to do is glance at the camera for it to work
- It usually only takes about 5 seconds to verify someone’s identity!
Here’s how conferences benefit from facial recognition technology:
- It streamlines event check-in by identifying attendees
- Increases security at events as an efficient way to monitor conference-goers
- Eliminates time-sinks and bottlenecks
- Saves on money and materials for manual identification cards and badges
- Helps streamline social media processes by automatically tagging attendees in photos
- No more party crashers—ensures that people are who they say they are
A Note on Bandwidth
With all of these new technological advances and increasingly plugged-in attendees, it is absolutely vital that conferences also have a strong internet infrastructure to support audience bandwidth requirements.
Here is a breakdown of how event managers categorize different levels of usage demand:
- Average – Denotes casual web browsing and email activities.
- High – Describes frequent audio streaming and usage of web-based applications like cloud servers, VPN, etc.
- Extreme – This is when attendees and organizers are frequently engaging in online learning applications, file transfers, or live streaming.
Scroll down Vario’s Interactive Event Technology & Entertainment page to use their bandwidth calculator, so you can determine the usage demands of your next conference.
Integrating a Tech Stack at Your Next Conference
Clearly, the potential of event technology is endless, allowing for conferences to reach new heights of audience interaction, engagement, and satisfaction. The only thing between an ambitious organizer and a strong conference is an integrated event management service.
That’s where Vario comes in.
Vario helps fulfill your needs with precision and speed by offering services in:
- Planning & Problem Solving
- Production Vision & Entertainment
- Technology & Interactive Services
If you want to implement any—or all—of these technologies in 2020, Vario can help you take that big step into the future. If words aren’t enough, check out Vario’s most recent pharmaceutical conference that implemented mind-blowing technological advances to craft a mesmerizing experience for attendees. If that event seems like anything you would want to put together yourself, then you’re in the right place.
