Talking event tech with Gaby Appleton and Brian Brittain
As Chief Operations Officer and Chief Digital Product Officer, Brian Brittain and Gaby Appleton are driving the future of RX tech innovation and reshaping the event experience. In this conversation, they talk digital breakthroughs, big bets, AI—and sausages!
The events industry thrives on connections - bringing buyers and sellers together to spark new opportunities and fuel business growth. While some feared the pandemic would lead to digital solutions replacing in-person events, the opposite happened. It triggered an acceleration of event technology which is making participation easier, more engaging, and more productive for all.
Before joining RX as Chief Digital Product Officer in 2021, Gaby was seconded to the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) and was responsible for the Covid-19 contact tracing app, which was the second-most downloaded free app in the UK in 2020, with some thirty million overall users. It couldn’t have been a better training ground for her new role.
“The pandemic made clear to me how willing people are to embrace modern technology if it offers genuine benefits, highlighting the huge potential for digital tools to help our customers connect,” said Gaby. “I also learned that governments can do amazing things at scale when they put their mind to it. RX serves millions of customers in over 20 countries so the opportunity to have impact at scale was something I really treasured and took away.”
Thanks to Brian and his team, RX’s global technology platform was already in great shape when Gaby arrived. “By 2021, many of our events were using our proprietary global event platform and registration system,” explained Brian. “These are underpinned by a global business system which captures and manages all our customer data and interactions from sales, marketing, finance and our product systems consistently. With Gaby’s support, we were able to expand our product team and start turning our product ideas into scalable solutions across multiple events.”
RX focuses on how technology can be used to improve the event experience. Today, RX’s suite of Business Builder tools includes solutions for capturing and qualifying leads, boosting brand and product awareness, collecting company and product information from the show floor, and improving event outcomes using real-time data and analytics. So how have the team arrived at these solutions?
“We start by asking our customers what they want from our events,” said Gaby. “From extensive research and many customer conversations, we know that our exhibitors focus is on generating leads and launching products, while visitors are looking for inspiration and new products. Both exhibitors and visitors ultimately want to grow their businesses by making new connections. We constantly query our customers and the event data to identify areas where digital products could make a difference, helping us focus on solutions that improve event outcomes.”
In the early days, a big part of the challenge was waking up non-digital natives to the potential for digital event tools. An example Gaby likes to cite is a trip she made to a German manufacturing event shortly after joining RX. “One of the event directors said to me, ‘Gaby, this digital stuff is great, but my customers aren’t really that tech-savvy.’ He told me he had a client who puts a plate of sausages out on the front of the booth and judges whether they’ve had a good show by how quickly the sausages get eaten. My response was "Does that exhibitor have a smartphone?" If so, there’s an opportunity to introduce digital tools in a way that makes sense to them.”
Gaby and the team quickly realized that education was key - not just for customers, but also for the sales teams, so they could confidently explain the value of digital solutions. “Fast forward to 2024, and that same show generated over 42,000 digital leads for exhibitors,” revealed Gaby. “The shift didn’t happen overnight, but in just a couple of years, we’ve seen incredible adoption and results!”
Customer-driven innovation – and education
Harnessing event tech to add value
While most people now have a smart phone and are comfortable using it, some RX solutions have been made possible by the alignment of several other factors accelerated by the pandemic.
Colleqt QR Code is a new RX solution that allows visitors to scan exhibitor QR codes with their mobile phones to get the product information they want in exchange for their contact details.
"Before the pandemic, QR codes weren't widely used or understood in many areas," said Brian. "Now, venues have better connectivity and Wi-Fi, which allows real-time data access. Plus, with the development of progressive web technology, attendees can access our user-friendly app without needing to download anything. So, visitors can get the information they need in a sustainable, easy-to-share format, and exhibitors can generate additional leads, even when they are engaged with another client. It’s a win-win.”
Colleqt is just the latest data-collection solution in RX’s exhibitor arsenal. Others include Lead Manager App, which allows exhibitors to capture and qualify leads by scanning attendee registration badges; and Lead Booster, which generates brand awareness and additional leads through special offer programmes. All this lead data is available for exhibitors to view on their own personalised Exhibitor Dashboard, enabling them to measure their results using real time data and analytics, and benchmark their performance against their competitors.
“With this data now at their fingertips, we can clearly show them: Here’s who you connected with. These are the leads you gained. This is the exposure your brand received. This is how you performed against competitors in your sector. And this is what you should do to improve your results next time. This data-driven approach makes our sales conversations more insightful, strategic, and valuable for everyone involved.”
Of course, not all digital solutions make the grade. How does RX determine which ones to run with and which ones to abandon?
“Our CEO Hugh Jones is a big believer in placing bets. We take a structured approach to digital innovation, setting guardrails and checkpoints to cut losses early,” said Brian. “One example was a virtual marketplace we believed would transform the industry which ultimately lacked the ‘stickiness’ needed for year-round engagement. Another example was an ‘Exhibitor Not Present’ concept during the pandemic. So, for example, if a Japanese exhibitor couldn’t attend a show in China, we’d set them up on an iPad to interact with our visitors remotely. It seemed like a smart fix- but it flopped. People crave face-to-face interactions, and when buyers connected over video, they expected to meet product specialists, not sales reps.
“It was a mismatch of expectations that taught us a lot about the value of in-person connections,” agreed Gaby. “Plus, zoom fatigue is real. There’s something irreplaceable about the buzz of an event - taking time away from the office, reconnecting with peers, and discovering new products. That kind of energy is hard to replicate online.”
Learning from failures
What’s next? AI and personalisation
So, what can we expect next from RX in terms of digital innovation? And what role will AI play in its development?
“We have a small R&D team that has used Gen AI to try to tackle some customer problems that we hadn’t been able to do efficiently in the past, and which we are building into our new suite of products that are coming out this year,” revealed Gaby. “We are using AI to improve the quality of our recommendations and to reduce work that exhibitors have to do to set up their show, for example, by drafting exhibitor directory profiles for them to modify, rather than having to start them from scratch. That is leading to longer exhibitor profiles, which we know from experience get better attendee engagement.”
“As far as our existing solutions go, I think we've done a good job for exhibitors so far, helping them to collect more leads; and we’re working on solutions to take that a stage further to help them understand and follow up those leads more efficiently,” Gaby continued. “The other exciting area is on the visitor side, exploring ways to help them navigate our events more efficiently. Given that everyone is walking around with a smart phone in their hands, we are looking at how can we use that phone to curate a more personalised visit, by targeting exhibitor recommendations, seminar opportunities and so on more accurately to them. That’s what we get excited about when we think about the next year or so.”
RX is part of RELX, a global provider of analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers with some 13,000 technologists across the organisation. Brian believes this gives RX’s Global Tech team a huge advantage when it comes to developing the next generation of event tech.
“RELX has been experimenting with AI tools for the best part of two decades,” he explained. We have constant conversations on the product side about best practice and on the technology side about how to leverage and learn from each other. So, if one of our sister companies is one step ahead of us, we can pick up the phone to them instead of having to figure things out from scratch.”
“The same goes for our global platform,” Brian continues. “Many folks in the industry rely on event-specific solutions, making data sharing difficult and technology hard to reconcile. At RX we can scale digital solutions worldwide across 250+ shows without having to reinvent the wheel each time. We’re constantly leveraging what we have for maximum customer benefit and return on investment – and we’re not planning to slow down any time soon.”
The RELX advantage
For more information on how RX is using digital and data analytics to enhance our face to face events and drive growth for our customers, check out our Business Builder suite of digital solutions and get up to date with our latest digital developments.
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