Before Splash, the Publicis Sapient team was relying on manual processes to run their event programs. This resulted in excess work, inaccurate and usable attendee data, and delayed customer communications. The team set out for a solution and found the automation they needed in Splash’s customizable integrations and self-service tools. Today, the Publicis Sapient team has eliminated manual tasks, reducing their event set up time from two weeks to 36 hours. This improved turnaround time allows their team to go to market faster, enabling them to prove the full ROI and impact of their event program.
Publicis Sapient is a global digital transformation consulting company with over 20,000+ employees in 53 offices worldwide. They help established companies in their digital transformation journeys, both in the way they work and the way they serve their customers. With experience spanning technology, data sciences, and consulting, Publicis Sapient accelerates their customers’ businesses by designing the digital products and services their customers value.
For the last few years, data has taken over as the most valuable resource on the planet.
And for good reason: It helps companies close more deals, improve their offerings, and make decisions.
For event marketers, data helps us move away from how event programs were often judged in the past: a feeling, an anecdote, or the qualitative feedback on the post-event survey. It helps us create customized experiences that drive results and learn what’s not working so we can make positive changes.
Nearly 10 years ago, Vickie Rosone, Publicis Sapient’s Director of Event Marketing, joined the company with the goal of building the event marketing program from the ground up. She had no technology, no exhibitry, no processes, and — you guessed it — no data.
Fast forward to today: Vickie is leading a team of tech-savvy marketers who are driving data-first event programs. We sat down with Vickie to learn more about her event data challenges and the steps she took to overcome them.
The event marketing and marketing operations teams at Publicis Sapient knows a thing or two about the importance of event data. And not simply having the data, but connecting it across marketing technologies so it moves in real time and inspires fast follow-up.
Publicis Sapient hosts events all over the map — literally and figuratively. They work across the globe to reach various audiences spanning the entire buying journey. Their bread and butter: in-person sponsorships and adjacent events at large, premier industry events, like Adobe Summit and Dreamforce.
The team would spend days hosting ancillary events at these large, tech-focused conferences with goals of building brand awareness, generating new leads, and nurturing their existing customers. And when you’re a technology company, checking your guests in with a piece of paper and pen just won’t cut it.
“That’s when we saw a need to have better data,” said Vickie. “We’re a technology company. We shouldn’t be checking people in manually at our events.
“So, we worked with one of our web developers to create a homegrown event check-in and badge-printing tool, but it would break often. And if we were on-site with a technology issue, there was no support team to help us. Eventually, our web developer left and we knew we had to fill this gap.”
And even though checking guests into events manually was a pain point, there was an even bigger burden on the team: access to accurate, usable attendee data in a timely manner.
“After checking people in, we’d have to clean up that list,” said Vickie. “Then, we’d format it for our marketing operations team so they could upload it into a Salesforce campaign and manually mark everyone who attended.”
All of this manual, time-consuming work meant an increased chance the data wasn’t clean and delayed follow-ups.
“Our post-event emails would be delayed by a day or two,” said Vickie. “It was causing a ton of work for my team, as well as our marketing operations team.”
We recently launched a virtual event series, and we got the entire series up and running within 36 hours. If we didn’t have a platform that empowers self-service like Splash does, it would've taken us two weeks to get that project completed.
Vickie Rosone, Director of Event Marketing
Vickie knew the next step for her team was non-negotiable: searching for an event marketing platform that would help them build a more effective, scaled event data strategy.
“One of the most important things we wanted in a platform was flexibility with our integrations,” said Vickie. “We looked at a few tools, but didn’t like how some of them had restrictions on things like matching registrations in Salesforce. We really needed a flexible and customizable platform that would help us eliminate these manual data processes and become more agile in our event programs.
“Along with some of the integrations requirements, we also wanted a platform that would empower us to own every part of our events through self-service capabilities. If I found a copy mistake in the past, for example, it would take a day to get that copy mistake fixed.
“If we wanted to add an email to our process, we’d have to go to our marketing operations team and they may have 10 other projects in the queue. Or our web team would have to do hard coding to make bigger changes. So to be able to do these things ourselves easily and with a quick turnaround is huge.”
After researching multiple event marketing platforms, Vickie and her team decided that Splash would best fit their needs.
The ease of use, speed to market, and agility we get from using Splash makes us look good. It’s not all me or my team — it takes a village. And in this case, Splash is part of the village. It’s been a lifesaver for us, and we don’t know what we’d do without it.
Vickie Rosone, Director of Event Marketing
Event marketing at Publicis Sapient looks much different today than it did 10 years ago. Gone are the days of pen-and-paper check-ins, manual list uploads, and multi-week turnarounds.
“We were spending way too much time on manual tasks,” said Vickie. “Splash has helped us own our projects and be more in control of our events.
“We recently launched a virtual event series, and we got the entire series up and running within 36 hours. That was one hub page and four event pages, plus all emails, forms, and confirmations, within a day and a half. If we didn’t have a platform that empowers self-service like Splash does, it would have taken us two weeks to get that project in internal queues and completed.
“Splash allows us to go to market much faster, which often results in better event turnout and thus better return on our investment. And we can prove the ROI and impact quickly.”
At the beginning of 2020, Vickie and her team experienced something along with all other event marketers: the COVID-19 pandemic that forced event cancellations around the globe. Since Publicis Sapient’s event efforts went primarily toward ancillary events at large conferences, their event strategy needed a rehaul.
“For the first five days, I was trying to mitigate any potential losses,” said Vickie. “We were successful, which was great, but then we had to get to work. How else were we going to deliver our content? We knew we had to focus on virtual.”
Although they had to seek out a new webinar platform and redesign their events, Vickie and her team found comfort in the fact that marketing their events would not change.
“We are still getting our event pages up in Splash, and one thing that’s been especially helpful is having a webinar template,” said Vickie. “It’s allowing us to get new events up very quickly because we already have the copy, the language, the format, and more. We just have to plug and play.
“And when the webinar is going on, we’re able to run attendee check-in in real time. By the time the session is over, we already have check-in data in Splash, and it’s already synced to our Salesforce campaign. So we’re able to get our follow-ups ready to go right after the session ends.”
Whether virtual or in-person, it’s safe to say that event data challenges are history for Vickie and her team at Publicis Sapient.
I feel empowered. I feel smart. I feel confident that I’m bringing something to the table that’s beneficial. I’m able to show ROI quickly and work smarter, and I feel like I’m doing something great for my marketing organization.
Vickie Rosone, Director of Event Marketing
