Top takeaways from International Confex 2024, Excel - London

Together with some of my team, we headed down to Excel for the yearly pilgrimage to International Confex. It’s the holy grail for the events industry; where innovations are discovered and a general feel of the sector is gauged. As this is our playground with what we do, it’s essential I understand what is going on.

After a slow start, it was busy. This was exciting to see and proves that even with a raft of redundancies in the tech sector - the events sector is doing well.

The overwhelming themes of the show were gamification, photos & badging/lead gen. 

A lot of companies were fighting for attention in these spaces displaying arcade machines, selfie booths, AI photo booths and VR. Some of it was really nice - like the lovely team over at Nimlock who have split away from the traditional trade show stand model and added some web based games mixed in with physical machines. Also a big shout to Clue Go - a nice map based trail game, that’s like our CrowdGame model. They had good footfall and a lovely team.

But a lot of the selfie booths were just adaptations of an industry that has been around for 20 years - and they were expensive (we’ll get on to that in a second).

The bit I was most interested in was event badging, lead generation and social marketing - as I have products in this space (and soon to be in this space). 

There were a lot of vendors also fighting in this arena - but all offering pretty much the same thing. It was all geared towards larger events and no real financial saving for the smaller event market. Lead generation tools were ALWAYS an upsell, with one company saying they openly sell to an event organisers’ attendee list as part of the contract.

Talking of lead generation - we met the team of an app which does just that bit. After 10 minutes I was still confused. I won’t name them as it’s not fair, but they seemed to have a lack of knowledge and expertise to showcase what they do?

Plus an unwillingness to tell us how much it was…

And that’s the main thing I want to address - pricing.

Apart from a couple of companies - pricing was this mysterious art. Even though I was clear with my brief, it was always “well, um…it depends on a lot of factors”. I did get to ascertain that to badge a 600 person event was around £8-10k with 1 person and 2 printers - and the lead gen tools were upwards of £100 per license. For selfie booths - 5 hours worked out at £2k and some robotic arms were £6-10k an event.

I do think pricing needs to be clearer - it does seem like some people are throwing a figure in the air even when you have a focussed brief.

Before I go it was great to see Corporate Events at the show, with Andy and the team in fine spirits. I’m looking forward to working with Phoebe and the team on selection of upcoming events in London - when I get my VoiceOver hat back on. Also a big shout to Baked Bird - the food was awesome and they were doing a clucking trade!

Should you go to International Confex? Absolutely - it’s a brilliant day where you bump into a lot of industry professionals and get excited about the year ahead. If you’re reading this on Thursday 29th Feb - you have chance to pop down today - so, make sure you go!