Traitors, trends and predictions: Business at breakfast

There’s something slightly surreal about starting your morning at an AEO Conference trying to work out which of your exhibitors is a traitor.

But that was exactly how we kicked off Business at breakfast this year.

Sponsored by Map Your Show, the session started with a live take on The Traitors, with volunteers from the audience tasked with working out which exhibitors were most likely to disappear from an event.

We were given clues. One exhibitor had generated plenty of leads, but they weren’t particularly good quality. Another had complained three times during the year. One wasn’t sponsoring again. Others seemed perfectly happy, were active in the exhibitor portal or had already rebooked.

Surely we could spot the ones who were going to churn?

Not quite.

After plenty of discussion and a couple of incorrect banishments, the traitors were finally revealed as Kestrel AV and Harlow and Sons.

It was a fun way to start the morning, but there was a serious point behind it. Exhibitor retention is incredibly important to the growth of our events, yet predicting who is likely to return isn’t always as straightforward as we think.

Sometimes the obvious warning signs aren’t the ones that matter most, and looking at individual pieces of information in isolation only tells you so much.

That’s where Map Your Show’s exhibitor retention prediction tool comes in.

Using machine learning and AI, the system looks across exhibitor behaviour and historic event data to identify those most at risk of churn, giving organisers that insight around two months before an event. Built using data from 10,000 events, it can predict churn with around 70% accuracy.

For me, the interesting bit isn’t simply that AI can tell you an exhibitor might leave. It’s what you can do with that information.

If you know which relationships may need attention before it’s too late, your teams have an opportunity to have better conversations, understand what hasn’t worked and potentially change the outcome. That makes the data genuinely useful rather than just another dashboard to look at.

From exhibitor predictions to political ones

We then moved from predicting exhibitor behaviour to the slightly less predictable world of Westminster.

Nick Watt, political editor of BBC’s Newsnight, joined us to share his perspective on the political and economic landscape, what it could mean for business and some thoughts on what might be coming next.

With the Government facing difficult decisions around spending, welfare, taxation and the cost of borrowing, Nick talked us through the pressures shaping those decisions and the political balancing act behind them.

Something Nick came back to was the tension between empathy and reality, which I thought was particularly interesting.

Governments understandably want policies that recognise the very real pressures people are facing, but they also have to operate within economic and fiscal constraints. Those two things don’t always sit comfortably together.

There are parallels with business too. You can have a clear idea of where you want to go, but what’s happening around you inevitably has an impact on how you get there.

For the events industry, that wider environment matters. Changes to taxation, business costs, employment and consumer confidence eventually find their way into our organisations, our exhibitors and our visitors. So having a better understanding of what’s driving those changes can only help us plan for what might be coming.

Nick also explored the political pressures coming from outside Government, including Reform UK and the Greens, the implications of the recent cabinet reshuffle and the question everyone inevitably wants a political journalist to answer: when might we see another Prime Minister?

I’m not going to hold him to every prediction just yet.

Although, conveniently, we did record the session, so after the Budget on 28 October we may have to invite Nick back and see how he did…

Spotting the signals

On paper, exhibitor retention and Westminster politics probably don’t have much in common, but there was a connection between the two conversations.

Whether you’re trying to understand if an exhibitor will return or what might happen next in Westminster, there are always signals.

The challenge is working out which ones matter.

What both conversations showed is that having more information helps, but there’s still judgement involved in what you do with it.

And if the Map Your Show game proved anything, it’s that sometimes the person you’re convinced is a traitor really isn’t.

A huge thank you to Nick Watt for joining us and giving us plenty to think about, to everyone who bravely volunteered for The Traitors first thing in the morning, and of course to Map Your Show for sponsoring Business at breakfast.