March 13, 2025 • 39 mins
In this episode, YS Chi speaks with Brian Brittain, Chief Operations Officer, and Gaby Appleton, Chief Product Officer at RX, the global events business.
The events industry is all about connecting buyers and sellers and bringing people together to enable them to grow their business. Far from being a threat to in-person events, as many feared, the pandemic triggered an acceleration in the development of technology which is transforming the customer experience, making participation easier and more productive. What does that look like in practice and how is technology changing the customer experience? Brian and Gabby discuss technology, data, AI and more. They even share some ‘spectacular’ failures.
Listen to the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-fcgETVd04.
We've also curated a 10mnm version for those in a rush: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwFKCZKRdlQ&t=8s
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Unknown (00:00):
Music.
YS Chi (00:09):
Brian, Gaby, welcome.
Before we get going, can I askyou to please make a few
introductory remarks aboutyourselves?
Gaby Appleton (00:19):
Sure. Thankyou, YS. My name is Gaby Appleton and
I'm the Chief Product Officer atRX. I've been with RELX about 15
years, which YS will know,because he interviewed me way
back when, when I joined theElsevier division, the science
publishing division. I have beenat RX about four years and I
joined in the middle of thatpandemic that you referred to,
(00:42):
to see if I could help, togetherwith Brian, build the digital
offering. I've got two childrenwho grew up their early years in
Amsterdam, when we worked forElsevier, and now we're based in
London.
YS Chi (00:53):
Thank you, and Brian.
Brian Brittain (00:55):
Hello. I'm Brian Brittain, Chief Operating
Officer for RX global. As withGaby, my family and I are also
international. We've been herein the UK now for 17 years, and
I'm lucky enough to be with mywife and my son, who's at
university here in the UK. Mycareer has taken me through
multiple industries, includingRX here for the last seven
years.
YS Chi (01:17):
Like all of our businesses, RX is made up of
leaders of extraordinarydiversity of every category we
can think of. You two come fromvery different backgrounds, yet
you are joined at the hip now inthis digital effort, what has it
been like?
Gaby Appleton (01:37):
Oh, that's a great question. I always say I
was very fortunate to join RX atthe time that I did for two
reasons. One, because of thepandemic, it was becoming really
obvious that digital tools weregoing to be important ways to
help our customers connect. Somy timing... it felt like a good
time to do this job. But alsobecause when I joined RX, the
(01:58):
technology platform itself wasalready in really good shape. So
as a product person who wants tobuild great stuff for customers,
Brian and his team had alreadysorted out a lot of the global
plumbing and roll out that weneeded to do that successfully.
YS Chi (02:13):
Brian, you built the plumbing, then you brought in
the chef.
Brian Brittain (02:18):
Yes, that is a great way to describe it
actually, YS. We've gotten to astage where most of the back
office was well understood whatwe were doing, and we were well
down that path. We had fairlygood understanding of where we
wanted to go on the digitalside, and we had a team in place
already, but we were able, withGaby's help and guidance, to
expand that team and really takeon a global challenge, and move
(02:41):
it from ideation and multiple ofour events into much broader
scale.
YS Chi (02:47):
I know Gaby's background better, so I do have to ask this
question. Before you joined, youwere seconded to the
government...
Gaby Appleton (02:54):
Yes, I was.
YS Chi (02:55):
...during Covid to help NHS. How did that kind of shape
your mind about buildingsomething as a digital product?
Gaby Appleton (03:06):
The thing that I learned working for the
government during the pandemicwas governments can do amazing
things when they put their mindto it, and they can really do it
at scale. I learned that, aswell as learning this at
Elsevier, also at thegovernment, I love doing stuff
that scales to big numbers andhas big impact on people. And RX
is the same. We serve thousandsof customers in 20 plus
(03:29):
countries across the world in 43sectors. So that opportunity to
have impact at scale issomething I really treasured and
took away. The other thing Ilearned is the way we do Product
Management at RELX is really ofhigh quality and can be
reapplied in so many other areasof product management of
(03:49):
different industries. We shouldbe proud of the way we listen to
customers, we use data to makedecisions, those kinds of
things, and those are applicableanywhere in a product management
career.
YS Chi (03:58):
Good. Let's jump into it then. Exhibition business, face
to face, person to person. Nowyou're putting this enormous
effort into digital tools andaids, obviously, to make the
experience even better. Howbetter? Why, tell us what's
behind it all?
Brian Brittain (04:18):
Yeah, YS that's a spectacular question, why
would we go do this after goingthrough the pandemic and
understanding the face to faceis so important? In our view, we
always start actually with thecustomer challenge. What is the
customer need? What's thecustomer wants? In our world,
it's both exhibitors andvisitors. And through lots of
research and lots ofconversations and knowing our
(04:38):
customers very well, weunderstand that for exhibitors,
leads and product launches arethe two big things to do for the
attendees. They want to beinspired, they want to find new
products, and both of them aretrying to grow their businesses.
That's really what we're herefor. We were able to determine
very, very quickly that therewere some gaps and some gaps
where digital products couldactually turn around and make it
(05:01):
a wee bit better for everyone,and that's really what we
focused on. We always start offwith understanding the problem
area, and then turn around andask our technology and Gaby,
you've got a great example ofwhat we've done recently at ATM,
that's made such a bigdifference.
Gaby Appleton (05:15):
Yeah, I think our focus is always on, how can
digital enhance the outcomesfrom the event overall.
YS Chi (05:21):
Right, so it's an add on, as opposed to the first
driver.
Gaby Appleton (05:24):
Yes, absolutely.
What our customers tell us theywant is more leads and to meet
more customers. Our goal withdigital is, not only do
customers take the space, thebooth at the event, but we use
the digital tools to help themget more return on their
investment in that space. And sofor our example, at Arabian
Travel Market in Dubai, we hadone customer who used to spend
(05:45):
about 40,000 pounds on a booth,and after a conversation with
one of our sales reps, they wereconvinced to use some of our
digital tools that promote theirpresence at the event. And after
seeing that, by using thesetools, they got more leads out
of the event the year over year.
Then they started to think, wow,this is the really the event for
us. We can see and we canbenchmark with data that we're
(06:07):
doing better than before andbetter than our competitors.Then
they grew their overall spend onthe event, including the space
spend. So that's the kind ofoutcome we want.
YS Chi (06:20):
Did you start out with a blueprint, or did these things
just kind of accumulate one byone, by going to the shows and
listening to the customers preand post show?
Brian Brittain (06:33):
Interestingly enough, we actually had an idea
of what the blueprint could looklike. But to your point, it was
only when we got things intocustomer hands and really
understood that a networkingevent is dramatically different
than a B2C, like a comic conevent is very different, and the
needs. Although it still comesdown to leads for exhibitors and
new business and being inspired,the 'how' is different. So as
(06:57):
you go through differentgeographies, you get slight
variances on how products work,and some products work
incredibly well in some types ofevents, and they don't work
quite as well. So I'd say we hada blueprint, but not necessarily
a rock solid foundation, that weknew exactly where we're
building this and this and thisand this.
YS Chi (07:15):
Did you feel like you had to start somewhere
geographically first because youfelt that the digital knowledge
was better embedded? Or was it aacross the world, one at a time?
Gaby Appleton (07:27):
I think we started with two ideas. One is
the global platform that we usefor promoting our events and
providing information aboutevents. The website that's
pretty fundamental. So we knewwe could be uniform with that
platform. We knew we had a fewbig geographies that have a lot
of our events, so we could reacha lot of customers more quickly
(07:47):
by focusing on those areas. Sowe started there, and then as
time goes by, you have thesuccess stories. You prove the
case, you prove it with data,and then you go to the events
that maybe look a bit differentor are in smaller markets, or
whatever. So that's how we'vethought about roll out
generally.
YS Chi (08:02):
Since you mentioned the word data, we cannot avoid
talking about it, right? Becausenone of these digital products
would be very meaningful withoutgood data, depth of data,
breadth of data. Tell us how youare collecting data and, how are
you surprised by some of thedata points that you are
(08:23):
collecting?
Gaby Appleton (08:24):
Yeah, maybe I'll talk about it from the product
side and then Brian can talkabout the tech. One good
example, we last year, startedto launch a product called
'Colleqt' which allows visitorsto use their mobile phones to
scan exhibitor stand QR codesand collect information about
that. In 2023 we piloted withseven shows, and because we
(08:45):
could see the data in thatproduct about what was working
and what was not, where mostleads were being generated, we
were able to see that shows thatare very heavily product led,
where exhibitors want to meet. Alot of exhibitors collect a lot
of product information anddetailed specifications. That
type of show was real winner forthis particular product. So
(09:07):
then, because we can see acrossall of our 280 odd events across
the whole portfolio, we're ableto say, okay, where have we got
more shows that look like thatone, and prioritise those for
the roll out? It's helped usfind product market fit more
quickly, I would say.
Brian Brittain (09:23):
As far the, from my perspective, the extremely
interesting nature of Colleqt,using that as an example. A
number of things had to line upquite nicely YS. The first one
is, before the pandemic, not allof our folks actually understood
what QR codes were. They hadseen them, but they hadn't
necessarily experienced them,and that's kind of the roots of
(09:44):
your question of in somecountries, they were extremely
well understood. In othercountries, it wasn't, still
barcodes. It wasn't the samething.
YS Chi (09:52):
Bar codes, yeah.
Brian Brittain (09:53):
If you start thinking about what has to line
up to make a product likeColleqt work, you have to have a
QR code in place. You have tohave a mobile app that actually
folks will utilise, that doesn'trequire something out of the App
Store, which has very lowdownload rates. There are a
number of things that get toline up, when you're able to
connect that data, which is inreal time, with the exhibitor
(10:15):
data and the attendee data andeverything else that we have
underlying. Now, you can createdifferent data products. It
gives you deeper insight intospecifically who the attendee is
and why they're interested inthis product, which enables us
to give more recommendations andmake that event to be even more
successful for that attendee.
That's why we always start with,forget the tech for a second,
(10:36):
let's talk about what thechallenges that the attendee is
trying to solve for theexhibitor.
YS Chi (10:42):
We can think of all these digital experience as
being the experience on site.
But I'm sure you planned forbefore and well after as well.
Tell us a little bit about thebreadth of the digital solutions
that you have to design to getthe so called ROI.
Gaby Appleton (11:02):
Yep, well before the show, we know that many of
our visitors plan theirexperience at the show. They've
taken two days out of theoffice. Maybe they want to get
maximum return for their timespent, and they really want to
meet the right people. We cansee in our exhibitor directories
who's looking at whichexhibitor, and we use that
(11:23):
information to do two things.
One is help exhibitors preparetheir show and make sure that
they are promoting their standand their presence appropriately
to the right visitors. We havesome products that can target
the right subset of visitors forthem, but we also know that we
have some visitors who arereally uber planners. I mean,
they really go through everysingle exhibitor and work out
who they should meet and plan.
(11:45):
So we have different shows thathelp people plan their time in
different ways. I've also metpeople who, their plan for the
show was written on the back ofthe airline boarding pass on the
way that they get there. They'rea bit more like me, and we know
that those people we need tohelp them at the show. In the
moment of the show and providethem the tools on the day that
help them navigate, find people,et cetera.
YS Chi (12:08):
How about post show?
Brian Brittain (12:10):
Yeah, post show is both reminding the attendees
about who they saw, what theirnext steps could be, and the
exhibitor, it's all about theleads. It's actually figuring
out. It actually then movesdirectly into the conversation
of next year or the next event.
Some of our events that areactually multiple times a year.
Because now we have the data tosay this is what happened. This
(12:32):
is what who you saw. These arethe leads that you got out of
it. This is the exposure thatyou got. What would you like to
do for next year? Do you haveproduct launches? Therefore do
we take a different product setto you, or are you going to do
the same type that you did lastyear? So it helps us to have a
much more data led conversationin the sales relationship.
YS Chi (12:54):
For this community, who put up booth and also come to
visit the booth, has it beensurprisingly digital savvy or
have there been more frictionwith them to really appreciate
the tools you are providing forthem?
Gaby Appleton (13:10):
This is actually one of my favorite topics with
our teams around the world. I'lltell you a story about when I
first joined RX, I went to meetthe event directors of one of
our German manufacturing shows.
They said to me, Gaby, thisdigital stuff, it's all great,
but my customers are not reallythat digital. He said to me, I
have a client who puts a plateof sausages out on the front of
(13:33):
the booth at the event, and hejudges whether or not he's had a
good show by how quickly thesausages get eaten and how good
people he's met. I said, ahokay, does that guy also have a
smartphone in his pocket? Doeshe use that kind of technology?
And if he does, maybe we canhave a conversation. So we
started to realise that wereally had to educate our
(13:55):
customers in what these toolscan do, and also our sales
people, so that they feltconfident in explaining the
value of digital tools to thatcustomer. Now in 2024 that show
generated over 42,000 digitalleads for the customers of that
show. That journey can take youa year or two years, maybe.
But...
YS Chi (14:15):
Hey, two years is not that slow, huh?
Gaby Appleton (14:18):
Yeah.
Brian Brittain (14:18):
Yeah, I completely agree with Gaby on
that one. One of the... whereyou brought up data earlier YS,
the way we actually measurewhat's actually happening on the
products themselves, who's usingthem, how using them. That's
used to actually convince ourown teams as well that the
products work. Because if youthink about the way we're
geographically dispersed, youdon't necessarily hear in France
(14:42):
what's working well in the US,or what's working well at a
specific event in China, or howJapan has rolled out a specific
registration that everyone elsecould benefit. Being able to
show that data that says this iswas what they have versus this
is what you have. Do you thinkwe need to talk? That data
drives those conversations.
YS Chi (15:01):
You jump to my next question already, but I'm going
to expand a little bit, and thatis, we talked about external
friction with our exhibitors andvisitors, but I'm sure there
were enormous amount of internalfriction as well. You talk about
the fact that we're a globalcompany, therefore different
parts of our organisationprobably reacted differently as
well. You've just given me agood example. Were there are
(15:25):
other surprise frictions inimplementing this digital
strategy out over the lastthree, four years?
Gaby Appleton (15:33):
I do think you have to take different
geographies that representdifferent customers on their own
merit. For example, we have donea lot of work with our Chinese
teams recently to understandwhat the value of digital is
there, and our default mindsethas been where possible, we want
to use global solutions thatscale, that we can invest the
(15:54):
most money in, that we canmeasure the results. But
sometimes things are justdifferent, and in China, it's
just a little bit differentbecause most of our customers,
whether they're visitors orexhibitors, are using local apps
like WeChat to connect. They'realready scanning each other
using WeChat. So you have tothink about how to operate in
that local technology andsometimes government regulation
(16:18):
environment as well. That canneed a lot of discussion
sometimes, but I think the wayto unlock that conversation is
always to start with thecustomer. If you go deep on,
what is the customer doing? Whatdo they value? What do they
need? I think you can alwayscome to alignment in the end.
YS Chi (16:34):
Did you create any kind of competition between your
people to see if it's anincentive for each other?
Brian Brittain (16:42):
Yes, we did.
Interestingly enough, havingworked in multiple industries,
this is not new. This is, quitefrankly, the infamous 'Who Moved
My Cheese?' If you want to goway, way, way back, one of the
books I was given when I wasstarting out...
YS Chi (16:57):
Dr Johnson.
Brian Brittain (16:57):
Exactly. You run an event, you run a very
successful event, and it worksincredibly well. High NPS
scores, our renewal rates arehigh. Attendees are just banging
at the door to get in. We rockup and go. We've got these new
tools, and there's going to makeyour life so much better and
(17:18):
your attendees and yourexhibitors. You already have a
long list of things that you'redoing for that event, but that
are all successful, and we'regoing to give you more, but I
have to get your attention. Bythe way, it doesn't matter what
the product is. It doesn'tmatter what the new thing is in
any industry, it's that samething. You have to show the
proof. You have to get on theirradar. You have to understand.
(17:40):
You have to help themunderstand. And then from there,
you can have a realconversation. But that's the
internal... and you see it inevery industry.
Gaby Appleton (17:50):
But I would say actually, our ability to measure
things in standardised, globalways, has helped foster that
spirit of competition, and it'squite a cheerful spirit of
competition now. Some of our...
I'm really proud of some of ourteams in the US and the UK and
other geographies, and they donow look around the world and
say, well, what are ourcompetitors in other business
units doing? Who's winning? Howcan we be better? I think as a
(18:11):
central, global team, the numberone request we get from those
teams is, how can you help melearn faster? Have you got best
practices from other businessunits that I can learn from,
that you can share? How werethey thinking about delivering
this in this kind of show, onthat kind of thing? I think that
means the organisation has comea long way in thinking about how
(18:32):
to deploy technology at shows.
YS Chi (18:37):
On the other side of the coin, to put you on the spot,
tell me about one or twodisappointments or spectacular
failures of something you tried.
Brian Brittain (18:51):
Yes, that's the nature of the beast.
YS Chi (18:55):
It has to be, no?
Brian Brittain (18:56):
It has to be.
You can't always succeed? Itwould be great if you could. But
unfortunately, that's not life.
We follow the standard practicesthat everybody in RELX does,
where we actually walk throughand put guardrails in and make
sure that we get to phase gates.
If something doesn't look right,then we shut it down, rather
than spending a quantity of cashthen turn around and just say
(19:19):
this doesn't work. That's themechanics we use. An example of
one, we chased a marketplace,which I assume at some point
we'll have a conversation aboutvirtual as well, because that's
a digital example that has notworked well in the industry. But
we had this marketplace that wewere absolutely convinced would
work. Not only were we convincedit'll work, the event teams were
(19:41):
convinced it'll work, the sectorwas convinced. They were doing
articles about how thismarketplace we were building
would completely revolutionisethe value exchange and, more
importantly, the content that'sproduced, even for our
televisions. We chased thatquite literally for years.
Continued to adjust, continuedto adjust, continued to adjust.
(20:02):
Some of our competitors aredoing the exact same thing.
Unfortunately, it didn't work,and we found out later, really
why it didn't work, because itdidn't have the stickiness that
you would need for a year roundmarketplace. That's really one
of the challenges behindmarketplaces, is you have to
have a reason to come back overand over and over again. In that
business, it's very cyclical inits nature. You're very
(20:25):
interested two or three times ayear. You're not necessarily
interested on pick your famous,favorite e-commerce site, where
you have boxes showing up atyour house three or four times a
week. It didn't have that levelof stickiness. We have had some
interesting failures where welearned a lot, we're able to
take all of that and reapply itto other places. But didn't work
out quite like we thought itwould.
Gaby Appleton (20:49):
We've had a few experiments where we tested
virtual reality headsets atshows, and I think that is a
combination of the technology isstill not quite there from a
usability perspective yet. Sopeople keep trying at events,
and it keeps not quite gettingthere - that's one. In the
pandemic, we had an at showproduct called 'exhibitor not
(21:10):
present,' where, for example, ifwe were running a live show in
China that would normally havejapan, Japanese exhibitors who
couldn't travel to China, wewould literally put the
exhibitor on an iPad and show itto, the visitor at the show. We
thought that would be a greatsolution to the problem. Didn't
work at all. Turns out thatpeople really want the face to
face interaction, and wouldprioritise that. Also, if you
(21:33):
connect someone over video, thebuyer, the visitor really
expects to see the productspecialist and not just the
sales persons. There's kind ofmismatches of expectations about
what those things would bring.
YS Chi (21:46):
Obviously, we know the value of face to face as a
company. So do our customers,especially post pandemic. At the
same time, we know that thingslike webinars and digital
meetings work. So where is thegap? Where's the bridge that's
not there yet for virtualexhibition?
Brian Brittain (22:10):
Yeah, so interestingly enough, I'm not
convinced there's actually agap. I think it's just a miss.
To your point, webinars workvery, very well. If you think
about the mechanics of awebinar, forget the technology.
It's literally you have aproduct pitch, or you're trying
to launch into another countryand someone like us will figure
(22:30):
out how to get key buyers thatwould help you ease into that
new product or that new country.
But it's timed, right? You'rethere for literally 30 minutes
or 45 minutes, you know whyyou're pitching as an exhibitor.
The visitors knows exactly whyhe's on the call. When you talk
about a virtual event, theattendee is going to dedicate
(22:51):
somewhere in the neighborhood oftwo days online on their
computer. I think we all get alittle tired...
YS Chi (23:00):
No, I don't think so.
Brian Brittain (23:03):
...Zoom and Teams and the rest. We all get a
little tired. We gettired.There's problem number
one. Problem number two is theface to face peice of it, is
literally the important part.
You're there to be inspired.
You're there to build thatconnection between two people
that says, I want to do businesswith YS. I want to do business
with Gaby, and you want to findout more and to follow up.
(23:25):
Again, something that you reallycan't do virtually. You can have
a one on one if I know exactlywho I need to talk to in this
company. But it isn'tnecessarily works that well.
Gaby brought up earlier theexample of, we thought
'exhibitor not present' would bea brilliant solution. But
interestingly enough, in thatworld, there is a complete
(23:47):
mismatch of... no, no. I want totalk to the product expert. I
want to talk to the engineer.
Not all companies want theirengineers in front of their
customers. There's multiplechallenges in that space. Will
we ever get to a true virtualexhibition? I'm not sure, but I
do know that our products canactually enhance the exhibitions
(24:10):
that we have, and that does makea big difference.
YS Chi (24:14):
Yes.
Gaby Appleton (24:15):
I would just add one thing, which is, at RX, we
talk a lot about the magic ofthe event. The buzz, the
excitement and particularly forthe visitor, there's something
really amazing about taking twodays out of your office life and
all of your...
YS Chi (24:28):
I can attest to that.
Gaby Appleton (24:29):
...emails and regular meetings and going and
learning something new, talkingto people you haven't seen for a
while, reconnecting, seeingother people's latest products,
and it's really hard to recreatethat focus and buzz online.
YS Chi (24:43):
It is. There are a few shows that I go to every year,
or at least every other year,that has to be on my calendar
because it's actually a point ofenergy builder around that. I
can see that. It is, in thisconversation, it's clear that we
are trying to make one plus oneequal three. It's not that we
(25:07):
have to stick with just theperson in person or just the
digital. By adding digital to inperson, we want to make third
leg work. Two questions, so youcan both answer them, or you can
answer them, you know, one each.
How far do you see this digitalexperience being able to enhance
(25:30):
our in person experience? Justhow far do you imagine being
able to take it. Obviously,Brian, according to you, it's
not all the way to replace.
That's my first question. Thesecond question is, is there a
(25:51):
visible return to us for thisinvestment in technology?
Because it's not cheap.
Brian Brittain (25:59):
Gaby why don't you take the first, I'll take
the second.
Gaby Appleton (26:04):
How far does technology go? If you go to a
trade show, everybody is walkingaround with their mobile phone
in their hand anyway, all thetime. Technology is already
infused into every aspect of theshow. What I see from our side
is on the visitor experience, wecan certainly make that a lot
better and a lot moreproductive. I think we've done
(26:25):
quite a good job for exhibitorsso far at helping them collect
leads, and we'll continue towork on that. Exhibitors ask us,
okay, I've got these leads. Canyou tell me a bit more about
them? How big is their company?
Is their company doing deals atthe moment? Those kinds of
questions. We're reallyinterested in taking that one
step further beyond collectingleads to help exhibitors
understand their leads better.
(26:48):
That's one. The second is on thevisitor side. If I'm the person
on the plane planning my show onthe back of my airplane boarding
pass, I might need some helpbeing more efficient navigating
that show, and we can do, Ithink, much more using the
smartphone that is in everyone'shands to do that and make it an
easier experience. That willalso give us data about what
(27:10):
those people are doing at theshow, who, where they're going,
who they're interested in, whatseminars they attended, and that
helps us as an organisation tomake sure the show is really
targeted appropriately to thepeople who are there. That's
kind of what I get excited aboutworking on in the next couple of
years.
YS Chi (27:25):
Thank you.
Brian Brittain (27:26):
And your second question, how do we measure,
basically, return on investmentor return on spend? That's one
of the massive advantages thatwe have as RX, because we're on
a single set of platforms,because we're rolling out
specific digital solutions, butwe're doing it globally. It lets
us scale. We don't have toreinvent the wheel over and over
(27:47):
and over again. If you look atthe industry as a whole, that's
a challenge for most folks inthe industry. It is literally
solutions for this event or forthis cluster of events, which
makes it really hard to sharedata around. You have to use
some technology that is hard toreconcile and doesn't
necessarily benefit you thatmuch, but you can kind of make
(28:10):
it work. We achieve our scaleand we can roll out to 253
shows. That's a very differentmodel, a very different style.
We can take the best ofcapabilities of every event as
we roll out and modify and everyother event automatically gets
it. That's how you get return.
You don't have to do it over andover and over again. You
(28:32):
leverage what you have.
YS Chi (28:34):
We cannot have a talk about digital solution without
talking about the buzz word ofthe past two years. AI, my
goodness. How do you embed AI,particularly Gen AI, into what
RX is trying to develop for thecustomer experience?
Brian Brittain (28:59):
Any of the AI techniques, including Gen AI is
something that we always lookat. Again, we look at from the
what problem are we trying tosolve first, before we actually
look at the technology to apply.
We do have a small R&D team thatlooks at just the technology to
see how we could apply thatspecific piece of tech, but it's
almost always starts withcustomer first. AI has been
interesting because we can seethe the areas that it works
(29:23):
quite well, and we can see theareas where it doesn't quite get
there, and we've all experiencedit. My always dead indicator
that I use is, why do we stillhave keyboards on our laptops?
YS Chi (29:39):
Yeah.
Brian Brittain (29:40):
Speech, voice recognition should be just an
automatic and yet we still allhave keyboards. It's not a
panacea. I think the flip side,though, is it will change, and
continues to change how ourlives work, and it will. There's
no doubt about that. Newtechnologies will always do
that. The iPhone, sorry, theiPhone, Android, pick your
(30:03):
favorite. That has made dramaticdifferences in our daily lives.
When mobile phones came out,that wasn't the first thought.
It wasn't really thought of thatway. New technology, whatever it
happens to be, AI or otherwise,will always make a difference,
and it's up to us to figure outhow to leverage it to solve our
customer problems. Since youasked specifically about Gen AI,
(30:25):
which has been two years, andeveryone has been talking about
it. We have been doing R&D andit has unlocked some rather
interesting customer behaviourthat we did not expect. Even
being in the industry forliterally decades, where your
next set of recommendations thatcould come down. People assumed
that they knew how to dorecommendations. Interestingly
(30:49):
enough, when you look at amassive data set and you apply
some of the AI techniques on it,you actually end up with a
different way to dorecommendations, which is kind
of core to what we do and whatwe're building into our new
suite of products that arecoming out this year. That's one
example of. But again, it comesback down to what's the problem?
The problem is we need betterrecommendations, more of them,
(31:11):
so you have a better outcome.
Brilliant. What techniques do wewant to use? That one happens to
be one that works along withsome coaching in other areas.
Gaby Appleton (31:21):
Yeah, and we're starting to experiment with
things like, one of the thingsthat exhibitors find difficult
is to write good descriptions oftheir companies, and what they
do. Starting from a blank sheetof paper is just quite hard.
We've been testing, can the AIwrite starting point
descriptions that the exhibitorsthen can modify and add to. We
(31:41):
found that leads to slightlylonger company descriptions
being produced, which tend toget more viewer and visitor
engagement, which then mightlead to a few more conversations
and a few more leads for theexhibitor. So sometimes it's
like the one and two steps onfrom from AI as a prompt, where
the value can be.
YS Chi (32:00):
Interesting. I think there's going to be a lot more
to come in this area. Clearly,we are learning today in this
conversation that the tools areindeed important, but so is data
itself. Whether it's a singledata platform or collecting more
data to be able to do evendeeper support of both the
(32:24):
exhibitors and the visitors.
Data is critical and RELX is adata company. It's a company
that has deep experience and anincredible depth and breadth of
data collection, curation,organisation and even
certification method. I hopeyou're learning a lot of these
from your sister companies.
Gaby Appleton (32:44):
I feel so blessed to have worked for a different
division in Elsevier, andtherefore you're able to see not
only the parallels in terms ofbusiness models and technology
sometimes. But you have anetwork of people that you can
call and ask for advice. My teamis thinking about how we do
tracking and analytics withinour products and what software
we might use, and also what goodpractices we need to have inside
(33:07):
our own product teams to dothat. Two weeks ago, I was on
the phone to some folks atElsevier, saying, remind me, how
do you do this at Elsevier? Ithink you might be one step
ahead of us. Can you give ussome tips and tell us how you've
got where you are. I thinkthat's an enormous advantage of
being part of RELX and my teamreally enjoy those interactions.
Brian Brittain (33:27):
Yeah, completely agree with Gaby. We're
incredibly fortunate that weshare across the four major
divisions, both product andtechnology, meaning there are
constant conversations on theproduct side about what's best
practice into the customer.
There's also constantconversations on the technology
side about how to leverage andhow to learn from so if a...
YS Chi (33:47):
...this is through the CTO form.
Brian Brittain (33:48):
Through the CTO form. And there's also a product
form as well. If you think aboutsome of the new techniques that
are coming down, using AI as anexample, some of the new AI
techniques. One of our sistercompanies can actually take a
lead on that and we can leveragefrom it. We don't have to learn
from scratch. That's incrediblyhandy to have, but it also
(34:09):
enables data to be sharedacross, and you can basically
establish business relationshipbetween. If LN, LexisNexis has
data that we need, we canactually establish a proper
business connection between thetwo and start sharing data back
and forth. That's the power ofleveraging RELX. You get to
understand how the technologyworks. You understand the best
(34:30):
way to approach customers andproducts, and you're able to
leverage data across thecompanies themselves. Absolutely
brilliant.
Gaby Appleton (34:37):
I would just add to that. One of the components
of being a successful productand tech organisation is the
people, and we also have theopportunity to move talent
around between the divisions.
YS Chi (34:47):
Yes.
Gaby Appleton (34:48):
In my team, we have one person who used to work
at LexisNexis, two that used towork at Elsevier. I don't have
anyone from Risk yet, butthere's still time, and that
really brings fresh perspectiveas well.
YS Chi (35:02):
Gaby, if you have any message to people at RX and
within RELX even, of what youaspire to see in the journey for
the next couple years. Whatwould that wisdom be that you
want to share as a Chief ProductOfficer.
Gaby Appleton (35:20):
We always say the mission of our team is to
enhance the value of our eventsby using digital tools and
technology so that we candigitise all the behaviour at
the events and create more valuefor our customers. So really,
that's our mission and ourrallying cry, and we're trying
to spread that far and wideacross the organisation. My
other message is always, I don'tthink we have to invent all of
(35:42):
this ourselves. Our value is inhow we understand our customers
and how we apply technologythat's been proven in a lot of
cases to make our events betterand meet our customer needs, and
we can learn a lot of that fromour sisters and brothers in
RELX.
YS Chi (35:57):
So, Brian. What is the indication that says, this has
been all worth it. What is that,which you will look at and say,
'see, we did it right?'
Brian Brittain (36:13):
As always, there's a number of answers to
it.
YS Chi (36:15):
Go ahead.
Brian Brittain (36:16):
First one, you can see it in the NPS. You see
the net promoter scores, we canmeasure the difference between
those customers that use ourproducts and those that do not
use our products. There's nodoubt whether or not the
products work. We can also seehow the customers themselves are
using the products, so we canenhance. We actually had a
change that we made this year onsomething we call the 'customer
(36:38):
hub' that encouraged usage ofanother product, and we saw that
product usage jump by 30%. Imean, it was a fairly
straightforward change but itjust wasn't to the top of the
list. You can see it in thenumbers, whether or not the
customers are using it. You cansee whether the customers are
happy that they're using it.
Now, that's the customer side.
(36:59):
Now, let's talk about from thecompany side, we can see one of
the things that we do as part ofRELX is we are constantly asking
our employees what they think.
We have opinion scores from ouremployees, and we can see how
engaged they are and we can seeour engagement growing. Another
indicator that what we do, whichis help companies build their
(37:19):
business, works and that folksare engaged. They're empowered,
they feel. We can see thatmeasure as well. Another thing
that my role looks at, and lastbut not least is, can we see it
in the revenue.
YS Chi (37:34):
The revenue side, right?
Brian Brittain (37:36):
You asked a question earlier about, how do
we handle the cost, becausethese things are not cheap. We
handle it by scale, being ableto roll out to 250 events, but
we can also see the revenuecoming in from it. As you can
see in our annual reports,percentage of digital continues
to grow. We have happy customersthat are using the tools,
(37:59):
employees that feel like theyare truly empowered and engaged,
and you can see our growth inour revenue stream. Those are
some pretty good metrics of whatI use to see...
They are good indicators.
Gaby Appleton (38:12):
It was brought home to me recently where me and
one of my team were invited byour international sales leader
to go to China and to help trainnot only our own Chinese sales
force, but also the agents whosell on behalf of RX in China to
our international events. Iwould have thought in the past
it was a touch and go thing asto whether these agents, sitting
(38:33):
in quite far flung corners ofChina would be at all interested
in the digital tools. But theysat and listened to us for two
hours about the value that theycould bring to their customers
by putting digital tools intheir hands, and therefore the
revenue that they can generateand the livelihoods they can
build for their own families.
That was a remarkably rewardingmoment for me.
YS Chi (38:52):
I bet it was. Well, thank you very much today for
sharing your insights andexperience. It sounds like
you're in a very excitingjourney, and we're just at the
very beginning part of it. Wouldyou say chapter two over now?
Gaby Appleton (39:09):
I think so. Yes, yes.
Brian Brittain (39:10):
We're looking forward to three and four.
YS Chi (39:13):
There's going be a lot more than that Brian. I have a
feeling that this is gonna be a10 chapter book.
Brian Brittain (39:17):
Sounds good.
Gaby Appleton (39:18):
Have you help write it, sorry.
YS Chi (39:20):
Thank you again for participating today in this
podcast and look forward tohearing more about it as to how
it develops in a year or twotime.
Gaby Appleton (39:30):
Thank you, YS.
Brian Brittain (39:31):
Thank you.
Music.
YS Chi (00:09):
Brian, Gaby, welcome.
Before we get going, can I askyou to please make a few
introductory remarks aboutyourselves?
Gaby Appleton (00:19):
Sure. Thankyou, YS. My name is Gaby Appleton and
I'm the Chief Product Officer atRX. I've been with RELX about 15
years, which YS will know,because he interviewed me way
back when, when I joined theElsevier division, the science
publishing division. I have beenat RX about four years and I
joined in the middle of thatpandemic that you referred to,
(00:42):
to see if I could help, togetherwith Brian, build the digital
offering. I've got two childrenwho grew up their early years in
Amsterdam, when we worked forElsevier, and now we're based in
London.
YS Chi (00:53):
Thank you, and Brian.
Brian Brittain (00:55):
Hello. I'm Brian Brittain, Chief Operating
Officer for RX global. As withGaby, my family and I are also
international. We've been herein the UK now for 17 years, and
I'm lucky enough to be with mywife and my son, who's at
university here in the UK. Mycareer has taken me through
multiple industries, includingRX here for the last seven
years.
YS Chi (01:17):
Like all of our businesses, RX is made up of
leaders of extraordinarydiversity of every category we
can think of. You two come fromvery different backgrounds, yet
you are joined at the hip now inthis digital effort, what has it
been like?
Gaby Appleton (01:37):
Oh, that's a great question. I always say I
was very fortunate to join RX atthe time that I did for two
reasons. One, because of thepandemic, it was becoming really
obvious that digital tools weregoing to be important ways to
help our customers connect. Somy timing... it felt like a good
time to do this job. But alsobecause when I joined RX, the
(01:58):
technology platform itself wasalready in really good shape. So
as a product person who wants tobuild great stuff for customers,
Brian and his team had alreadysorted out a lot of the global
plumbing and roll out that weneeded to do that successfully.
YS Chi (02:13):
Brian, you built the plumbing, then you brought in
the chef.
Brian Brittain (02:18):
Yes, that is a great way to describe it
actually, YS. We've gotten to astage where most of the back
office was well understood whatwe were doing, and we were well
down that path. We had fairlygood understanding of where we
wanted to go on the digitalside, and we had a team in place
already, but we were able, withGaby's help and guidance, to
expand that team and really takeon a global challenge, and move
(02:41):
it from ideation and multiple ofour events into much broader
scale.
YS Chi (02:47):
I know Gaby's background better, so I do have to ask this
question. Before you joined, youwere seconded to the
government...
Gaby Appleton (02:54):
Yes, I was.
YS Chi (02:55):
...during Covid to help NHS. How did that kind of shape
your mind about buildingsomething as a digital product?
Gaby Appleton (03:06):
The thing that I learned working for the
government during the pandemicwas governments can do amazing
things when they put their mindto it, and they can really do it
at scale. I learned that, aswell as learning this at
Elsevier, also at thegovernment, I love doing stuff
that scales to big numbers andhas big impact on people. And RX
is the same. We serve thousandsof customers in 20 plus
(03:29):
countries across the world in 43sectors. So that opportunity to
have impact at scale issomething I really treasured and
took away. The other thing Ilearned is the way we do Product
Management at RELX is really ofhigh quality and can be
reapplied in so many other areasof product management of
(03:49):
different industries. We shouldbe proud of the way we listen to
customers, we use data to makedecisions, those kinds of
things, and those are applicableanywhere in a product management
career.
YS Chi (03:58):
Good. Let's jump into it then. Exhibition business, face
to face, person to person. Nowyou're putting this enormous
effort into digital tools andaids, obviously, to make the
experience even better. Howbetter? Why, tell us what's
behind it all?
Brian Brittain (04:18):
Yeah, YS that's a spectacular question, why
would we go do this after goingthrough the pandemic and
understanding the face to faceis so important? In our view, we
always start actually with thecustomer challenge. What is the
customer need? What's thecustomer wants? In our world,
it's both exhibitors andvisitors. And through lots of
research and lots ofconversations and knowing our
(04:38):
customers very well, weunderstand that for exhibitors,
leads and product launches arethe two big things to do for the
attendees. They want to beinspired, they want to find new
products, and both of them aretrying to grow their businesses.
That's really what we're herefor. We were able to determine
very, very quickly that therewere some gaps and some gaps
where digital products couldactually turn around and make it
(05:01):
a wee bit better for everyone,and that's really what we
focused on. We always start offwith understanding the problem
area, and then turn around andask our technology and Gaby,
you've got a great example ofwhat we've done recently at ATM,
that's made such a bigdifference.
Gaby Appleton (05:15):
Yeah, I think our focus is always on, how can
digital enhance the outcomesfrom the event overall.
YS Chi (05:21):
Right, so it's an add on, as opposed to the first
driver.
Gaby Appleton (05:24):
Yes, absolutely.
What our customers tell us theywant is more leads and to meet
more customers. Our goal withdigital is, not only do
customers take the space, thebooth at the event, but we use
the digital tools to help themget more return on their
investment in that space. And sofor our example, at Arabian
Travel Market in Dubai, we hadone customer who used to spend
(05:45):
about 40,000 pounds on a booth,and after a conversation with
one of our sales reps, they wereconvinced to use some of our
digital tools that promote theirpresence at the event. And after
seeing that, by using thesetools, they got more leads out
of the event the year over year.
Then they started to think, wow,this is the really the event for
us. We can see and we canbenchmark with data that we're
(06:07):
doing better than before andbetter than our competitors.Then
they grew their overall spend onthe event, including the space
spend. So that's the kind ofoutcome we want.
YS Chi (06:20):
Did you start out with a blueprint, or did these things
just kind of accumulate one byone, by going to the shows and
listening to the customers preand post show?
Brian Brittain (06:33):
Interestingly enough, we actually had an idea
of what the blueprint could looklike. But to your point, it was
only when we got things intocustomer hands and really
understood that a networkingevent is dramatically different
than a B2C, like a comic conevent is very different, and the
needs. Although it still comesdown to leads for exhibitors and
new business and being inspired,the 'how' is different. So as
(06:57):
you go through differentgeographies, you get slight
variances on how products work,and some products work
incredibly well in some types ofevents, and they don't work
quite as well. So I'd say we hada blueprint, but not necessarily
a rock solid foundation, that weknew exactly where we're
building this and this and thisand this.
YS Chi (07:15):
Did you feel like you had to start somewhere
geographically first because youfelt that the digital knowledge
was better embedded? Or was it aacross the world, one at a time?
Gaby Appleton (07:27):
I think we started with two ideas. One is
the global platform that we usefor promoting our events and
providing information aboutevents. The website that's
pretty fundamental. So we knewwe could be uniform with that
platform. We knew we had a fewbig geographies that have a lot
of our events, so we could reacha lot of customers more quickly
(07:47):
by focusing on those areas. Sowe started there, and then as
time goes by, you have thesuccess stories. You prove the
case, you prove it with data,and then you go to the events
that maybe look a bit differentor are in smaller markets, or
whatever. So that's how we'vethought about roll out
generally.
YS Chi (08:02):
Since you mentioned the word data, we cannot avoid
talking about it, right? Becausenone of these digital products
would be very meaningful withoutgood data, depth of data,
breadth of data. Tell us how youare collecting data and, how are
you surprised by some of thedata points that you are
(08:23):
collecting?
Gaby Appleton (08:24):
Yeah, maybe I'll talk about it from the product
side and then Brian can talkabout the tech. One good
example, we last year, startedto launch a product called
'Colleqt' which allows visitorsto use their mobile phones to
scan exhibitor stand QR codesand collect information about
that. In 2023 we piloted withseven shows, and because we
(08:45):
could see the data in thatproduct about what was working
and what was not, where mostleads were being generated, we
were able to see that shows thatare very heavily product led,
where exhibitors want to meet. Alot of exhibitors collect a lot
of product information anddetailed specifications. That
type of show was real winner forthis particular product. So
(09:07):
then, because we can see acrossall of our 280 odd events across
the whole portfolio, we're ableto say, okay, where have we got
more shows that look like thatone, and prioritise those for
the roll out? It's helped usfind product market fit more
quickly, I would say.
Brian Brittain (09:23):
As far the, from my perspective, the extremely
interesting nature of Colleqt,using that as an example. A
number of things had to line upquite nicely YS. The first one
is, before the pandemic, not allof our folks actually understood
what QR codes were. They hadseen them, but they hadn't
necessarily experienced them,and that's kind of the roots of
(09:44):
your question of in somecountries, they were extremely
well understood. In othercountries, it wasn't, still
barcodes. It wasn't the samething.
YS Chi (09:52):
Bar codes, yeah.
Brian Brittain (09:53):
If you start thinking about what has to line
up to make a product likeColleqt work, you have to have a
QR code in place. You have tohave a mobile app that actually
folks will utilise, that doesn'trequire something out of the App
Store, which has very lowdownload rates. There are a
number of things that get toline up, when you're able to
connect that data, which is inreal time, with the exhibitor
(10:15):
data and the attendee data andeverything else that we have
underlying. Now, you can createdifferent data products. It
gives you deeper insight intospecifically who the attendee is
and why they're interested inthis product, which enables us
to give more recommendations andmake that event to be even more
successful for that attendee.
That's why we always start with,forget the tech for a second,
(10:36):
let's talk about what thechallenges that the attendee is
trying to solve for theexhibitor.
YS Chi (10:42):
We can think of all these digital experience as
being the experience on site.
But I'm sure you planned forbefore and well after as well.
Tell us a little bit about thebreadth of the digital solutions
that you have to design to getthe so called ROI.
Gaby Appleton (11:02):
Yep, well before the show, we know that many of
our visitors plan theirexperience at the show. They've
taken two days out of theoffice. Maybe they want to get
maximum return for their timespent, and they really want to
meet the right people. We cansee in our exhibitor directories
who's looking at whichexhibitor, and we use that
(11:23):
information to do two things.
One is help exhibitors preparetheir show and make sure that
they are promoting their standand their presence appropriately
to the right visitors. We havesome products that can target
the right subset of visitors forthem, but we also know that we
have some visitors who arereally uber planners. I mean,
they really go through everysingle exhibitor and work out
who they should meet and plan.
(11:45):
So we have different shows thathelp people plan their time in
different ways. I've also metpeople who, their plan for the
show was written on the back ofthe airline boarding pass on the
way that they get there. They'rea bit more like me, and we know
that those people we need tohelp them at the show. In the
moment of the show and providethem the tools on the day that
help them navigate, find people,et cetera.
YS Chi (12:08):
How about post show?
Brian Brittain (12:10):
Yeah, post show is both reminding the attendees
about who they saw, what theirnext steps could be, and the
exhibitor, it's all about theleads. It's actually figuring
out. It actually then movesdirectly into the conversation
of next year or the next event.
Some of our events that areactually multiple times a year.
Because now we have the data tosay this is what happened. This
(12:32):
is what who you saw. These arethe leads that you got out of
it. This is the exposure thatyou got. What would you like to
do for next year? Do you haveproduct launches? Therefore do
we take a different product setto you, or are you going to do
the same type that you did lastyear? So it helps us to have a
much more data led conversationin the sales relationship.
YS Chi (12:54):
For this community, who put up booth and also come to
visit the booth, has it beensurprisingly digital savvy or
have there been more frictionwith them to really appreciate
the tools you are providing forthem?
Gaby Appleton (13:10):
This is actually one of my favorite topics with
our teams around the world. I'lltell you a story about when I
first joined RX, I went to meetthe event directors of one of
our German manufacturing shows.
They said to me, Gaby, thisdigital stuff, it's all great,
but my customers are not reallythat digital. He said to me, I
have a client who puts a plateof sausages out on the front of
(13:33):
the booth at the event, and hejudges whether or not he's had a
good show by how quickly thesausages get eaten and how good
people he's met. I said, ahokay, does that guy also have a
smartphone in his pocket? Doeshe use that kind of technology?
And if he does, maybe we canhave a conversation. So we
started to realise that wereally had to educate our
(13:55):
customers in what these toolscan do, and also our sales
people, so that they feltconfident in explaining the
value of digital tools to thatcustomer. Now in 2024 that show
generated over 42,000 digitalleads for the customers of that
show. That journey can take youa year or two years, maybe.
But...
YS Chi (14:15):
Hey, two years is not that slow, huh?
Gaby Appleton (14:18):
Yeah.
Brian Brittain (14:18):
Yeah, I completely agree with Gaby on
that one. One of the... whereyou brought up data earlier YS,
the way we actually measurewhat's actually happening on the
products themselves, who's usingthem, how using them. That's
used to actually convince ourown teams as well that the
products work. Because if youthink about the way we're
geographically dispersed, youdon't necessarily hear in France
(14:42):
what's working well in the US,or what's working well at a
specific event in China, or howJapan has rolled out a specific
registration that everyone elsecould benefit. Being able to
show that data that says this iswas what they have versus this
is what you have. Do you thinkwe need to talk? That data
drives those conversations.
YS Chi (15:01):
You jump to my next question already, but I'm going
to expand a little bit, and thatis, we talked about external
friction with our exhibitors andvisitors, but I'm sure there
were enormous amount of internalfriction as well. You talk about
the fact that we're a globalcompany, therefore different
parts of our organisationprobably reacted differently as
well. You've just given me agood example. Were there are
(15:25):
other surprise frictions inimplementing this digital
strategy out over the lastthree, four years?
Gaby Appleton (15:33):
I do think you have to take different
geographies that representdifferent customers on their own
merit. For example, we have donea lot of work with our Chinese
teams recently to understandwhat the value of digital is
there, and our default mindsethas been where possible, we want
to use global solutions thatscale, that we can invest the
(15:54):
most money in, that we canmeasure the results. But
sometimes things are justdifferent, and in China, it's
just a little bit differentbecause most of our customers,
whether they're visitors orexhibitors, are using local apps
like WeChat to connect. They'realready scanning each other
using WeChat. So you have tothink about how to operate in
that local technology andsometimes government regulation
(16:18):
environment as well. That canneed a lot of discussion
sometimes, but I think the wayto unlock that conversation is
always to start with thecustomer. If you go deep on,
what is the customer doing? Whatdo they value? What do they
need? I think you can alwayscome to alignment in the end.
YS Chi (16:34):
Did you create any kind of competition between your
people to see if it's anincentive for each other?
Brian Brittain (16:42):
Yes, we did.
Interestingly enough, havingworked in multiple industries,
this is not new. This is, quitefrankly, the infamous 'Who Moved
My Cheese?' If you want to goway, way, way back, one of the
books I was given when I wasstarting out...
YS Chi (16:57):
Dr Johnson.
Brian Brittain (16:57):
Exactly. You run an event, you run a very
successful event, and it worksincredibly well. High NPS
scores, our renewal rates arehigh. Attendees are just banging
at the door to get in. We rockup and go. We've got these new
tools, and there's going to makeyour life so much better and
(17:18):
your attendees and yourexhibitors. You already have a
long list of things that you'redoing for that event, but that
are all successful, and we'regoing to give you more, but I
have to get your attention. Bythe way, it doesn't matter what
the product is. It doesn'tmatter what the new thing is in
any industry, it's that samething. You have to show the
proof. You have to get on theirradar. You have to understand.
(17:40):
You have to help themunderstand. And then from there,
you can have a realconversation. But that's the
internal... and you see it inevery industry.
Gaby Appleton (17:50):
But I would say actually, our ability to measure
things in standardised, globalways, has helped foster that
spirit of competition, and it'squite a cheerful spirit of
competition now. Some of our...
I'm really proud of some of ourteams in the US and the UK and
other geographies, and they donow look around the world and
say, well, what are ourcompetitors in other business
units doing? Who's winning? Howcan we be better? I think as a
(18:11):
central, global team, the numberone request we get from those
teams is, how can you help melearn faster? Have you got best
practices from other businessunits that I can learn from,
that you can share? How werethey thinking about delivering
this in this kind of show, onthat kind of thing? I think that
means the organisation has comea long way in thinking about how
(18:32):
to deploy technology at shows.
YS Chi (18:37):
On the other side of the coin, to put you on the spot,
tell me about one or twodisappointments or spectacular
failures of something you tried.
Brian Brittain (18:51):
Yes, that's the nature of the beast.
YS Chi (18:55):
It has to be, no?
Brian Brittain (18:56):
It has to be.
You can't always succeed? Itwould be great if you could. But
unfortunately, that's not life.
We follow the standard practicesthat everybody in RELX does,
where we actually walk throughand put guardrails in and make
sure that we get to phase gates.
If something doesn't look right,then we shut it down, rather
than spending a quantity of cashthen turn around and just say
(19:19):
this doesn't work. That's themechanics we use. An example of
one, we chased a marketplace,which I assume at some point
we'll have a conversation aboutvirtual as well, because that's
a digital example that has notworked well in the industry. But
we had this marketplace that wewere absolutely convinced would
work. Not only were we convincedit'll work, the event teams were
(19:41):
convinced it'll work, the sectorwas convinced. They were doing
articles about how thismarketplace we were building
would completely revolutionisethe value exchange and, more
importantly, the content that'sproduced, even for our
televisions. We chased thatquite literally for years.
Continued to adjust, continuedto adjust, continued to adjust.
(20:02):
Some of our competitors aredoing the exact same thing.
Unfortunately, it didn't work,and we found out later, really
why it didn't work, because itdidn't have the stickiness that
you would need for a year roundmarketplace. That's really one
of the challenges behindmarketplaces, is you have to
have a reason to come back overand over and over again. In that
business, it's very cyclical inits nature. You're very
(20:25):
interested two or three times ayear. You're not necessarily
interested on pick your famous,favorite e-commerce site, where
you have boxes showing up atyour house three or four times a
week. It didn't have that levelof stickiness. We have had some
interesting failures where welearned a lot, we're able to
take all of that and reapply itto other places. But didn't work
out quite like we thought itwould.
Gaby Appleton (20:49):
We've had a few experiments where we tested
virtual reality headsets atshows, and I think that is a
combination of the technology isstill not quite there from a
usability perspective yet. Sopeople keep trying at events,
and it keeps not quite gettingthere - that's one. In the
pandemic, we had an at showproduct called 'exhibitor not
(21:10):
present,' where, for example, ifwe were running a live show in
China that would normally havejapan, Japanese exhibitors who
couldn't travel to China, wewould literally put the
exhibitor on an iPad and show itto, the visitor at the show. We
thought that would be a greatsolution to the problem. Didn't
work at all. Turns out thatpeople really want the face to
face interaction, and wouldprioritise that. Also, if you
(21:33):
connect someone over video, thebuyer, the visitor really
expects to see the productspecialist and not just the
sales persons. There's kind ofmismatches of expectations about
what those things would bring.
YS Chi (21:46):
Obviously, we know the value of face to face as a
company. So do our customers,especially post pandemic. At the
same time, we know that thingslike webinars and digital
meetings work. So where is thegap? Where's the bridge that's
not there yet for virtualexhibition?
Brian Brittain (22:10):
Yeah, so interestingly enough, I'm not
convinced there's actually agap. I think it's just a miss.
To your point, webinars workvery, very well. If you think
about the mechanics of awebinar, forget the technology.
It's literally you have aproduct pitch, or you're trying
to launch into another countryand someone like us will figure
(22:30):
out how to get key buyers thatwould help you ease into that
new product or that new country.
But it's timed, right? You'rethere for literally 30 minutes
or 45 minutes, you know whyyou're pitching as an exhibitor.
The visitors knows exactly whyhe's on the call. When you talk
about a virtual event, theattendee is going to dedicate
(22:51):
somewhere in the neighborhood oftwo days online on their
computer. I think we all get alittle tired...
YS Chi (23:00):
No, I don't think so.
Brian Brittain (23:03):
...Zoom and Teams and the rest. We all get a
little tired. We gettired.There's problem number
one. Problem number two is theface to face peice of it, is
literally the important part.
You're there to be inspired.
You're there to build thatconnection between two people
that says, I want to do businesswith YS. I want to do business
with Gaby, and you want to findout more and to follow up.
(23:25):
Again, something that you reallycan't do virtually. You can have
a one on one if I know exactlywho I need to talk to in this
company. But it isn'tnecessarily works that well.
Gaby brought up earlier theexample of, we thought
'exhibitor not present' would bea brilliant solution. But
interestingly enough, in thatworld, there is a complete
(23:47):
mismatch of... no, no. I want totalk to the product expert. I
want to talk to the engineer.
Not all companies want theirengineers in front of their
customers. There's multiplechallenges in that space. Will
we ever get to a true virtualexhibition? I'm not sure, but I
do know that our products canactually enhance the exhibitions
(24:10):
that we have, and that does makea big difference.
YS Chi (24:14):
Yes.
Gaby Appleton (24:15):
I would just add one thing, which is, at RX, we
talk a lot about the magic ofthe event. The buzz, the
excitement and particularly forthe visitor, there's something
really amazing about taking twodays out of your office life and
all of your...
YS Chi (24:28):
I can attest to that.
Gaby Appleton (24:29):
...emails and regular meetings and going and
learning something new, talkingto people you haven't seen for a
while, reconnecting, seeingother people's latest products,
and it's really hard to recreatethat focus and buzz online.
YS Chi (24:43):
It is. There are a few shows that I go to every year,
or at least every other year,that has to be on my calendar
because it's actually a point ofenergy builder around that. I
can see that. It is, in thisconversation, it's clear that we
are trying to make one plus oneequal three. It's not that we
(25:07):
have to stick with just theperson in person or just the
digital. By adding digital to inperson, we want to make third
leg work. Two questions, so youcan both answer them, or you can
answer them, you know, one each.
How far do you see this digitalexperience being able to enhance
(25:30):
our in person experience? Justhow far do you imagine being
able to take it. Obviously,Brian, according to you, it's
not all the way to replace.
That's my first question. Thesecond question is, is there a
(25:51):
visible return to us for thisinvestment in technology?
Because it's not cheap.
Brian Brittain (25:59):
Gaby why don't you take the first, I'll take
the second.
Gaby Appleton (26:04):
How far does technology go? If you go to a
trade show, everybody is walkingaround with their mobile phone
in their hand anyway, all thetime. Technology is already
infused into every aspect of theshow. What I see from our side
is on the visitor experience, wecan certainly make that a lot
better and a lot moreproductive. I think we've done
(26:25):
quite a good job for exhibitorsso far at helping them collect
leads, and we'll continue towork on that. Exhibitors ask us,
okay, I've got these leads. Canyou tell me a bit more about
them? How big is their company?
Is their company doing deals atthe moment? Those kinds of
questions. We're reallyinterested in taking that one
step further beyond collectingleads to help exhibitors
understand their leads better.
(26:48):
That's one. The second is on thevisitor side. If I'm the person
on the plane planning my show onthe back of my airplane boarding
pass, I might need some helpbeing more efficient navigating
that show, and we can do, Ithink, much more using the
smartphone that is in everyone'shands to do that and make it an
easier experience. That willalso give us data about what
(27:10):
those people are doing at theshow, who, where they're going,
who they're interested in, whatseminars they attended, and that
helps us as an organisation tomake sure the show is really
targeted appropriately to thepeople who are there. That's
kind of what I get excited aboutworking on in the next couple of
years.
YS Chi (27:25):
Thank you.
Brian Brittain (27:26):
And your second question, how do we measure,
basically, return on investmentor return on spend? That's one
of the massive advantages thatwe have as RX, because we're on
a single set of platforms,because we're rolling out
specific digital solutions, butwe're doing it globally. It lets
us scale. We don't have toreinvent the wheel over and over
(27:47):
and over again. If you look atthe industry as a whole, that's
a challenge for most folks inthe industry. It is literally
solutions for this event or forthis cluster of events, which
makes it really hard to sharedata around. You have to use
some technology that is hard toreconcile and doesn't
necessarily benefit you thatmuch, but you can kind of make
(28:10):
it work. We achieve our scaleand we can roll out to 253
shows. That's a very differentmodel, a very different style.
We can take the best ofcapabilities of every event as
we roll out and modify and everyother event automatically gets
it. That's how you get return.
You don't have to do it over andover and over again. You
(28:32):
leverage what you have.
YS Chi (28:34):
We cannot have a talk about digital solution without
talking about the buzz word ofthe past two years. AI, my
goodness. How do you embed AI,particularly Gen AI, into what
RX is trying to develop for thecustomer experience?
Brian Brittain (28:59):
Any of the AI techniques, including Gen AI is
something that we always lookat. Again, we look at from the
what problem are we trying tosolve first, before we actually
look at the technology to apply.
We do have a small R&D team thatlooks at just the technology to
see how we could apply thatspecific piece of tech, but it's
almost always starts withcustomer first. AI has been
interesting because we can seethe the areas that it works
(29:23):
quite well, and we can see theareas where it doesn't quite get
there, and we've all experiencedit. My always dead indicator
that I use is, why do we stillhave keyboards on our laptops?
YS Chi (29:39):
Yeah.
Brian Brittain (29:40):
Speech, voice recognition should be just an
automatic and yet we still allhave keyboards. It's not a
panacea. I think the flip side,though, is it will change, and
continues to change how ourlives work, and it will. There's
no doubt about that. Newtechnologies will always do
that. The iPhone, sorry, theiPhone, Android, pick your
(30:03):
favorite. That has made dramaticdifferences in our daily lives.
When mobile phones came out,that wasn't the first thought.
It wasn't really thought of thatway. New technology, whatever it
happens to be, AI or otherwise,will always make a difference,
and it's up to us to figure outhow to leverage it to solve our
customer problems. Since youasked specifically about Gen AI,
(30:25):
which has been two years, andeveryone has been talking about
it. We have been doing R&D andit has unlocked some rather
interesting customer behaviourthat we did not expect. Even
being in the industry forliterally decades, where your
next set of recommendations thatcould come down. People assumed
that they knew how to dorecommendations. Interestingly
(30:49):
enough, when you look at amassive data set and you apply
some of the AI techniques on it,you actually end up with a
different way to dorecommendations, which is kind
of core to what we do and whatwe're building into our new
suite of products that arecoming out this year. That's one
example of. But again, it comesback down to what's the problem?
The problem is we need betterrecommendations, more of them,
(31:11):
so you have a better outcome.
Brilliant. What techniques do wewant to use? That one happens to
be one that works along withsome coaching in other areas.
Gaby Appleton (31:21):
Yeah, and we're starting to experiment with
things like, one of the thingsthat exhibitors find difficult
is to write good descriptions oftheir companies, and what they
do. Starting from a blank sheetof paper is just quite hard.
We've been testing, can the AIwrite starting point
descriptions that the exhibitorsthen can modify and add to. We
(31:41):
found that leads to slightlylonger company descriptions
being produced, which tend toget more viewer and visitor
engagement, which then mightlead to a few more conversations
and a few more leads for theexhibitor. So sometimes it's
like the one and two steps onfrom from AI as a prompt, where
the value can be.
YS Chi (32:00):
Interesting. I think there's going to be a lot more
to come in this area. Clearly,we are learning today in this
conversation that the tools areindeed important, but so is data
itself. Whether it's a singledata platform or collecting more
data to be able to do evendeeper support of both the
(32:24):
exhibitors and the visitors.
Data is critical and RELX is adata company. It's a company
that has deep experience and anincredible depth and breadth of
data collection, curation,organisation and even
certification method. I hopeyou're learning a lot of these
from your sister companies.
Gaby Appleton (32:44):
I feel so blessed to have worked for a different
division in Elsevier, andtherefore you're able to see not
only the parallels in terms ofbusiness models and technology
sometimes. But you have anetwork of people that you can
call and ask for advice. My teamis thinking about how we do
tracking and analytics withinour products and what software
we might use, and also what goodpractices we need to have inside
(33:07):
our own product teams to dothat. Two weeks ago, I was on
the phone to some folks atElsevier, saying, remind me, how
do you do this at Elsevier? Ithink you might be one step
ahead of us. Can you give ussome tips and tell us how you've
got where you are. I thinkthat's an enormous advantage of
being part of RELX and my teamreally enjoy those interactions.
Brian Brittain (33:27):
Yeah, completely agree with Gaby. We're
incredibly fortunate that weshare across the four major
divisions, both product andtechnology, meaning there are
constant conversations on theproduct side about what's best
practice into the customer.
There's also constantconversations on the technology
side about how to leverage andhow to learn from so if a...
YS Chi (33:47):
...this is through the CTO form.
Brian Brittain (33:48):
Through the CTO form. And there's also a product
form as well. If you think aboutsome of the new techniques that
are coming down, using AI as anexample, some of the new AI
techniques. One of our sistercompanies can actually take a
lead on that and we can leveragefrom it. We don't have to learn
from scratch. That's incrediblyhandy to have, but it also
(34:09):
enables data to be sharedacross, and you can basically
establish business relationshipbetween. If LN, LexisNexis has
data that we need, we canactually establish a proper
business connection between thetwo and start sharing data back
and forth. That's the power ofleveraging RELX. You get to
understand how the technologyworks. You understand the best
(34:30):
way to approach customers andproducts, and you're able to
leverage data across thecompanies themselves. Absolutely
brilliant.
Gaby Appleton (34:37):
I would just add to that. One of the components
of being a successful productand tech organisation is the
people, and we also have theopportunity to move talent
around between the divisions.
YS Chi (34:47):
Yes.
Gaby Appleton (34:48):
In my team, we have one person who used to work
at LexisNexis, two that used towork at Elsevier. I don't have
anyone from Risk yet, butthere's still time, and that
really brings fresh perspectiveas well.
YS Chi (35:02):
Gaby, if you have any message to people at RX and
within RELX even, of what youaspire to see in the journey for
the next couple years. Whatwould that wisdom be that you
want to share as a Chief ProductOfficer.
Gaby Appleton (35:20):
We always say the mission of our team is to
enhance the value of our eventsby using digital tools and
technology so that we candigitise all the behaviour at
the events and create more valuefor our customers. So really,
that's our mission and ourrallying cry, and we're trying
to spread that far and wideacross the organisation. My
other message is always, I don'tthink we have to invent all of
(35:42):
this ourselves. Our value is inhow we understand our customers
and how we apply technologythat's been proven in a lot of
cases to make our events betterand meet our customer needs, and
we can learn a lot of that fromour sisters and brothers in
RELX.
YS Chi (35:57):
So, Brian. What is the indication that says, this has
been all worth it. What is that,which you will look at and say,
'see, we did it right?'
Brian Brittain (36:13):
As always, there's a number of answers to
it.
YS Chi (36:15):
Go ahead.
Brian Brittain (36:16):
First one, you can see it in the NPS. You see
the net promoter scores, we canmeasure the difference between
those customers that use ourproducts and those that do not
use our products. There's nodoubt whether or not the
products work. We can also seehow the customers themselves are
using the products, so we canenhance. We actually had a
change that we made this year onsomething we call the 'customer
(36:38):
hub' that encouraged usage ofanother product, and we saw that
product usage jump by 30%. Imean, it was a fairly
straightforward change but itjust wasn't to the top of the
list. You can see it in thenumbers, whether or not the
customers are using it. You cansee whether the customers are
happy that they're using it.
Now, that's the customer side.
(36:59):
Now, let's talk about from thecompany side, we can see one of
the things that we do as part ofRELX is we are constantly asking
our employees what they think.
We have opinion scores from ouremployees, and we can see how
engaged they are and we can seeour engagement growing. Another
indicator that what we do, whichis help companies build their
(37:19):
business, works and that folksare engaged. They're empowered,
they feel. We can see thatmeasure as well. Another thing
that my role looks at, and lastbut not least is, can we see it
in the revenue.
YS Chi (37:34):
The revenue side, right?
Brian Brittain (37:36):
You asked a question earlier about, how do
we handle the cost, becausethese things are not cheap. We
handle it by scale, being ableto roll out to 250 events, but
we can also see the revenuecoming in from it. As you can
see in our annual reports,percentage of digital continues
to grow. We have happy customersthat are using the tools,
(37:59):
employees that feel like theyare truly empowered and engaged,
and you can see our growth inour revenue stream. Those are
some pretty good metrics of whatI use to see...
They are good indicators.
Gaby Appleton (38:12):
It was brought home to me recently where me and
one of my team were invited byour international sales leader
to go to China and to help trainnot only our own Chinese sales
force, but also the agents whosell on behalf of RX in China to
our international events. Iwould have thought in the past
it was a touch and go thing asto whether these agents, sitting
(38:33):
in quite far flung corners ofChina would be at all interested
in the digital tools. But theysat and listened to us for two
hours about the value that theycould bring to their customers
by putting digital tools intheir hands, and therefore the
revenue that they can generateand the livelihoods they can
build for their own families.
That was a remarkably rewardingmoment for me.
YS Chi (38:52):
I bet it was. Well, thank you very much today for
sharing your insights andexperience. It sounds like
you're in a very excitingjourney, and we're just at the
very beginning part of it. Wouldyou say chapter two over now?
Gaby Appleton (39:09):
I think so. Yes, yes.
Brian Brittain (39:10):
We're looking forward to three and four.
YS Chi (39:13):
There's going be a lot more than that Brian. I have a
feeling that this is gonna be a10 chapter book.
Brian Brittain (39:17):
Sounds good.
Gaby Appleton (39:18):
Have you help write it, sorry.
YS Chi (39:20):
Thank you again for participating today in this
podcast and look forward tohearing more about it as to how
it develops in a year or twotime.
Gaby Appleton (39:30):
Thank you, YS.
Brian Brittain (39:31):
Thank you.
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