Insight
As part of our ongoing Season of Strategy, Laura Whittington, Strata’s Head of Data, is joined by Group Chief Operations Officer Phil Staines to discuss audience psychology and the power of smart data analysis
There are plenty of ways to gauge if your event was a success: attendance, sentiment, pure vibes. But what some organisers are missing is that great events create great data.
When we think about big summer events – the World Cup, F1, Wimbledon, Glastonbury – the energy is unmistakable, even from a distance. If you know where to look, you can see essential context in these events, year to year. An underwhelming Wimbledon that, when you look at the forecast, was plagued by terrible weather. An oddly quiet festival, because politics or oil prices disrupted air travel. For events at this size, we sometimes imagine that they are unaffected by context, but the opposite is true: success is informed by a diverse and fascinating array of data points.
The real value isn’t in looking at one dataset, when it comes to events. It’s understanding how different factors interact to explain behaviour.
Context changes everything
The traditional prediction that England will always lose key football matches in penalties has been upheld by generations of teams, although I’m delighted to say that wasn’t the case this year! As someone who studied sports psychology, I was fascinated to learn about Gareth Southgate’s approach to the problem as manager: he didn’t simply look at whether penalties were scored. He looked at time taken to step in, reactions under pressure, and the psychology of his players.
The more data he gathered, the more insights were revealed with the potential to inform future performance. He found that England had the quickest reaction time of any national team in penalty shootouts, almost rushing1. Without looking at that data point – how quickly penalties were being taken, not just by England but by every national team – that insight might have been lost.
There is a clear parallel here with live events and sponsored events: understanding the ‘why’ behind behaviour, capturing that data, matters as much as measuring the outcome. Learnings from sports psychology often have practical applications when we look at human behaviour more broadly.
“Successful event strategies come from profiling the right people, getting the right insights from them, rather than treating all audiences the same,” adds Phil Staines, Strata’s Chief Operations Officer. “Context is so valuable.”
Before, during, after: building a complete picture
The work of data collection needs to begin from the moment planning starts. Gathering insights into who your audience are, how they act and what they want can begin during the marketing stage, and build as you see who purchases tickets, interacts with pre-event communications and the event website, and who downloads and interacts with any delegate apps or other supporting content. Travel patterns, weather forecasts and geopolitics are useful to build in to your planning, to understand how the event can be best supported.
During the event itself, data collection doesn’t pause, especially in those at great scale like big summer experiences. Crowd movement, social media use, attendance at on-site amenities, activation engagement… these data points can provide fascinating insights and direct leads.
After the event, in addition to post-event communications, there’s now an opportunity to put all your data to work. To understand what truly drove the outcomes seen on the ground. This is where we see that Wimbledon literally performs better some years because the weather materially changes attendee behaviour, and public willingness to join the ticket queue.
When you overlay data – weather, travel, attendance and engagement, for example, you stop guessing and start understanding.
Mia: AI turning insight into action
It’s this logic that helped me and my team to design Mia, Strata’s AI-supported data management tool. Mia connects disparate sources and uncovers patterns humans may miss, and it is custom-built to each client who uses it, to ensure we’re helping organisations to move strategically beyond hindsight and towards predictive insight.
Mia can identify likely behaviours, emerging risks and opportunities in real time. “Mia can help brands with the simplest question, but arguably the most important,” Phil explains. “What should we do next?”
Beyond traditional demographics
When we consider large-scale and strategically designed events, it becomes clear that the future of data is behavioural. As we are able to move beyond traditional demographic tools like age, location or job title, we enter a much more interesting playing field: understanding motivations, sentiment, and the psychology behind decision-making.
I’m seeing emerging opportunities in data analysis around brand sentiment tracking, audience reactions and real-time behavioural signals. Tools that can analyse facial expressions, pulse and body heat, or draw behavioural data down from user’s phone use within event venues. The biggest opportunities come when organisers understand not just what happened, but why audiences behaved the way that they did.
Live events are the gold standard for gathering real audience data, even for brands that exist primarily online – there’s a reason why brands like Shein and ASOS are investing in pop-ups on Oxford street!2 Online interactions can only tell you so much; data from people in real life, interacting physically with your brand, is more powerful.
Getting the right data, the best data, is the first step, but impact comes from what you’d do next. “No matter the quality of your data, if you’re collecting data and not using it to make better decisions, what’s the purpose of having it in the first place?” concludes Phil.
Laura Whittington is Head of Data at Strata. A skilled project manager, she excels at delivering digital solutions to complex client problems, including leveraging AI to produce bespoke tools.
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