We get pitched a lot of 'Event Tech', which is always unique and game-changing but rarely actually is. GetPica.com, in my view, has the potential to merit those adjectives, and here is why.
Firstly, it has built-in facial recognition, allowing for personalisation to the individual participant - more on why that matters later. Secondly, it's a light touch, and finally, it's ahead of the curve on tedious but necessary GDPR compliance. More on that later as well.
In essence, GetPica is a platform for event organizers to deliver near real-time photos of guests, but only the photos that the individual guests appear in are delivered directly to their smartphones. This personalisation can create those magic moments and a sense of community, as well as a better way of leveraging your digital assets.
Rather than share how it all works technically, holding to the UNBOXED ethos, I will share how I would use it at a B2B event and other ideas which came up during the presentation. I also had, since the time of writing, the pleasure of experiencing it myself, and it was amazing to instantly get an album of all my photos from the event I was speaking at.
Creating Magic Moments at Live Events
Digitising Events is about using digital technologies to create magic moments at live events and delight your target audience at a personal level. We can now activate all the digital assets that event organizers have in the form of pictures from past and future events, putting your digital content to work in your experiential marketing.
Let's imagine you organise an event and have an archive of lots of photos from past editions; you could load all of those into a GetPica event album, send out a notification to past attendees, and get them to relive how they engaged with your past event editions in pictures of themselves —reminding them of their event experiences and connections as part of your experiential marketing.
What would this do to repeat visits? Quite a lot because as there is no such thing as an original idea. Someone has tried this and got 47% re-engagement with the event photos combined with a sponsor value proposition.
Now imagine the event is running, and for the first time, you have a reason to train the lens at all participants; as you upload photos to the event album, Getpica adds the event logos and sponsor branding to the photo, and participants can access theirs instantly enabling yet another experiential marketing journey at your event.
Using photos to personalise event experiences in this way is important. Why? Because people are more likely to share images of themselves on their socials, and if it's live at the event, the social engagement goes up even more; we know that pictures with people get 38% more likes than those without.
Also, how many times have you seen photos online with no idea of where, when and what event they were captured? As the event branding is added on the fly, it means more amplification for your event brand visibility for sponsors, which leads me to the next point.
Making Money With Personalised Experiences
As an event organiser, whether that is a tradeshow, corporate event or festival, you now have an engine that gives many more social shares and likes than the templated boring rubbish tradeshows rollout now; what sponsor would not be associated with that?
With GetPica, not only can all the photos be branded, but you can also add videos and other digital assets to the album experience where your participants receive their photos. The album can now communicate your sponsors' brand and product value proposition in a much more personalised way. Each social share is now a branding opportunity and creates authentic connections for this and future events.
An event that did this increased social shares brand impressions by over 200%, giving the sponsor over a million impressions around and after the event.
Sponsors also love it as it serves as a data capture and lead generation mechanism because they can access the email addresses for targeted remarketing to each participant at the event who signs in to get their personal photos.
If you are a large enough organiser to run many B2B events, this may open up significant and long-term revenue opportunities for brands specifically looking to influence a B2B audience.
You also have the option to sell the pictures, allowing participants to buy an album. It may be more relevant to consumer events and concerts, but there could be a B2B application as well.
GetPica.com is proven and being used by 1000 events around the world in more than 44 countries today, with over 1 billion photos delivered to participants at sales meetings, conferences, football matches with 80,000 people attending, weddings, holiday resorts, cruise ships, marathons, trade shows, really any live event where the host of the event is taking photos.
What else could we do at future events?
Magic moments come from creating an emotional connection, and audience reaction photos make for better images than selfies. Pictures from your event can now form part of your immersive experience design by capturing key moments like arriving at an event or enjoying the networking; as event organizers, we can create a lasting impression.
Personalised trip reports: most participants may need to do a trip report when they get back to the ranch, so to speak. We could make creating the trip report a more pleasant and personally relevant experience. We could even deliver it to each participant as a personalised thank you album.
Brand reports: This feature is on the roadmap, and it will make it easy for organisers to pull together an album showing all the places where a sponsor's branding was displayed. Badge sponsors may have a whole album because the recognition is that good.
We could also extend this to include photos in personalised RoI reports to all commercial partners at an event.
Personalised outreach: There is a potential for deeper personalisation to drive re-engagement and create moments for participants. You know that banal end-of-day-one email could now become something much more dynamic.
Privacy Control and Pricing
While tedious, it is essential; legislation is already looking at allowing or enabling individuals to take back control of their image, especially where their explicit consent was not given.
Here is where facial recognition comes into play with GetPica. Full GDPR compliance and any participant can ask to be anonymised. The platform will use AI to change the face of the participant; the photos that other participants receive will have a real face in them, not just the face of the anonymised participant. Essentially, you comply with all the boring stuff before it's a problem.
When I asked about pricing, I liked Getpicas' straightforward pricing model: 1 Euro per person daily. So, if your event is a conference with 1,200 guests for two days, the license costs 2,400 euros. For that, you get unlimited photo uploading, a customised branding experience on the pictures, unlimited videos, public images, and an actionable offer embedded in the album.
Your guest's photos are available for as long after your event as you want, and GetPica offers white-label versions and full in-app integration to make your participant experience as seamless as possible.
In Summary - GetPica for Digitising Events
I attend many events and always have to scroll through a crazy amount of pictures before finding something to use; if more events used this, I would be happy to receive all my photos directly by just scanning a QR code with my phone, and bingo, instantly only receive all the event photos in which I appear.
But on a serious note, solutions like this not only solve a logistical problem like not needing hours of studio resources but also give us a tool for our event personalization strategies, which are an essential part of Digitising Events. By creating magical moments for participants, we activate authentic connections and earn some cash in the process.
Disclaimer: This overview highlights GetPica's potential for Event Organizers to Digitising Events by leveraging their digital content as we see it. We recommend visiting the GetPica.com website to watch videos and request a live demonstration from a representative. And for the cynics among you, we do not take sponsorship from any tech providers; it allows us to be more impartial.