Two Audiences, One Goal: Stand Out
Nielsen shares with their clients exclusive insights to help them understand consumers and their behavior by Standing Out in today’s over saturated media world. Nielsen’s clients are broken into two distinct audiences; media executives who determine what people are “watching” and consumer package good executives who determine what people are “buying.”
Their major customer conference Consumer 360 has had these two distinct audiences together for this event for 5 years. Over that time in the post event surveys several people would state that they wanted more content specific to their area of interest. The Nielsen event planning team listened to their customers and designed this year’s agenda based on this input.
To do this on the first day we cut the general session time from 4 hours to 2 hours and with that extra time the attendees broke off into 2 hour super sessions specific to each area of interest, watch or buy.
Each Super Session began like most breakouts with an overall presentation followed by a panel discussion specific to each subject. Then using Facilitate Pro software which I like to think of as a “digital flip chart.” the moderators and Nielsen employees (one at each table) began typing in the attendees’ ideas on their laptops or iPads. These ideas were organized by categories and sub-categories to help better understand what their customers want.
Attendees were engaged and became active participants during these sessions. In total, over 1,200 ideas were digitally captured and Nielsen intends on taking this input to improve service and innovate their products and services. These beautifully designed sessions helped keep the interest level high and helped Nielsen listen to their clients.
In summary the General Sessions gave the audience a 30,000 foot view of what is going on globally in media, marketing and branding. The Super Session Sessions gave a 15,000 view of what is happening today in both the watch and buy worlds. The Insight Sessions (breakouts), gave “on the ground” real life examples and customer case studies so that when the audience returned home they had the insights and ideas to improve their companies performance to be more successful.
When professionals come together, listen and brainstorm as a group, great things can happen. By listening to their audience’s input from last year we were able to focus on two specific audiences to create one great event.
