MediaRadar’s new product helps event organizers maximize sales

MediaRadar CEO Todd Krizelman describes his company as having "a very specific objective, which is to help media salespeople sell more advertising" by providing them with crucial data. And with today's launch of MediaRadar Events, Krizelman hopes to do something similar for event organizers.

These customer groups might actually be one and the same, as plenty of companies (including TechCrunch) see both advertising and events as part of their business. In fact, Krizelman said customer demand "basically pushed us into this business.

He also suggested that after years of seeing traditional ad dollars shifting into digital, "the money is now moving out of digital into events."

If you're organizing a trade show, you can use MediaRadar Events to learn about the overall size of the market, and then see who's been purchasing sponsorships and exhibitor booths at similar events.

The product doesn't just tell you who to reach out to, but how much these companies have paid for booths and sponsorships in the past, whether there are seasonal patterns in their conference spending and how that spending fits into their overall marketing budget - after all, Krizelman said, "In 2019, very few companies are siloed by media format as a buyer or a seller. Anyone doing that is putting their business at risk."

He also described collecting the data needed to power MediaRadar Events as "much more complicated than we expected," which is why it took the team two years to build the product. He said that data comes from three sources - some of it is posted publicly by event organizers, some is shared directly by the event organizers with MediaRadar and, in some cases, members of the MediaRadar team will attend the events themselves.

MediaRadar Events support a wide range of events, although Krizelman acknowledged that it doesn't have data for every industry. For example, he suggested that a convention for coin-operated laundromat owners might be "too niche" (though he hastened to add that he meant no offense to the laundromat business).

In a statement, James Ogle - chief financial officer at Access Intelligence (which owns the LeadsCon conference and publications like AdExchanger) - said:

Hosting events and the resulting revenue that comes from them is a big part of our business. However, the event space is getting more and more crowded and also more niche. Relevancy equals value, so we want to make sure our attendees are within the right target market for our exhibitors. MediaRadar provides critical transparency into the marketplace.

eMarketer predicts digital ads will overtake traditional spending in 2019