EVENT AT A GLANCE Objective: Improve networking and expand attendees’ social circles; add value for sponsors. Strategy: Give attendees an innovative, organic way to network with each other and interact with sponsors. Tactics: Create an engaging interactive experience with sequential, incremental clues in which participants must interact with one another as they compete to win a prize. Results: Forty-one percent of all attendees participated in the game, nearly three times the pre-show projection. Survey results and nTag electronic tracking showed much-improved perception about the conference and highlighted intermingling between new and alumni attendees.

he morning after the opening reception at the Corporate Event Marketing Association’s (CEMA) 2006 Summit, Kris Knight awoke to find an envelope containing one numbered chip and an anonymous message under her hotel room door. The message read: “You seem to have met the right person and will be rewarded accordingly. Take this token to the coffee shop for a free beverage of your choice. There, you will receive further information to bring you closer to the edge.”

Knight, the vice president of sales and marketing for Digital Pond in San Francisco, had been involved with CEMA — a nonprofit targeted exclusively to event marketers in the technology sector — for more than a decade. But on that morning, she suddenly realized she wasn’t just attending a conference. She was now on a mysterious secret mission.

The In Crowd

Founded in 1990, CEMA has been successfully hosting summits since 1991 — but in 2005, there was a call for change. That year, CEMA’s attendee survey came back with specific complaints that alumni attendees were not interacting with first timers. More worrisome was the fact that the comments weren’t coming in response to a specific survey question. People were using the open comment space on the survey to express their feelings that the summit felt cliquish. It was a wake-up call.

“Like any group that gets together on a regular basis, people had made their own connections over time,” says Erika Brunke, executive director of CEMA. “But the concerns were legitimate. 2005 was a rebuilding year for us; we were still recovering from post-9/11 economic issues and the dot-com blow up. So we were reaching out to past members and really pushing hard for new members.” Given the push, the fact that so many new attendees — who comprised about 40 percent of the more than 200 total attendees in 2005 — felt excluded was a big problem.

Brunke turned to Image Work Communications, the Woodland Hills, CA-based creative-services group for ideas. As it turns out, her timing was serendipitous. When he got Brunke’s call, Victor Ortado, a producer and director with Image Work, was shaping a new concept he called I2M. Derived from alternate-reality games, I2M blends messaging and entertainment to engage audiences in a variety of tasks — from visiting a Web site to physically traveling to a destination — creating a branded experience and leading audiences to a pre-determined outcome.

The alternate-reality-games concept gained international attention back in 2007 when the band Nine Inch Nails launched its album “Year Zero.” Concertgoers who bought tour shirts noticed that some letters were printed in bold; stringing those letters together created the phrase “I am trying to believe.” When people typed the phrase into a Web browser, they landed on a site that sparked a global chase involving cryptic messages, secret Web sites, answer-only cell phones, packed chatrooms, and an ongoing quest for information about the band’s new album.

Ortado thought a scaled-down version of the approach could address Brunke’s objective to create a lively atmosphere that would encourage chatter between attendees at all levels. “One of the main purposes of I2M is to make networking easier by putting people in situations where they interact naturally,” Ortado says. So his team created an interactive sleuthing challenge to engage, shake up, and mix up CEMA’s crowd at the 2006 summit.

But increasing interaction was only one part of Brunke’s goals. She also hoped to find creative ways to add more value to the event for the summit’s sponsors. In the past, the only way for companies to gain added exposure was by sponsoring a meal, a reception, or a giveaway, or by participating in a roundtable discussion. “We don’t have an exhibit hall and we have a no-selling policy,” Brunke says. “The summit is really about relationship building.”

In a two-birds-with-one-stone move, Ortado’s I2M game plan would allow three existing CEMA sponsors to play a more prominent role in the three-day event by literally putting their products in attendees’ hands: the promotion would use nTag data-collection devices; send attendees to an AOL-sponsored Internet café to follow clues; and deliver prizes from MTI Marketing — all CEMA Summit sponsors.

“We had to offer something people hadn’t seen before, and this audience has seen it all,” Ortado says.

Finding Mr. Right

The I2M game was the biggest piece of Brunke’s plan to address the concerns expressed in the survey. But to further engage first-time attendees, she also scheduled a first-timers reception in advance of the larger welcome reception so that new attendees would have a chance to meet each other and go into the larger setting with some contacts in place. CEMA also assigned board members to meet and greet specific first-time attendees.

On the first night of the summit, the audience arrived at what appeared to be a typical welcome reception. The summit’s larger themes, “marketing on the edge” and “the next level,” were subtly introduced by the virtual mascot, an audio waveform inspired by HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey.” The mascot, represented on a plasma screen by a jagged line with peaks and valleys like a heart monitor, suggested attendees get to know each other, cautioning that some people may not be who they seem.

Posing as a new member of CEMA, an Image Work plant mingled at both the first-timers and welcome receptions. The actor was indistinguishable from any other new attendee; he had been thoroughly briefed on the industry’s lingo and mingled with drink in hand. And just like the rest of the attendees, the mole was equipped with an nTAG Interactive Networking device, a touchscreen-enabled badge with his contact information and areas of expertise preloaded. As he worked the crowd, the badge tracked his interactions and collected data from those he met.

At the end of the night, using the data captured from the mole’s nTag device, Image Work sent a text message to everyone with whom the mole interacted, or “the chosen people,” as they were now known, reading: “You have met the right person and will be rewarded accordingly. Take the black token to the Fidalgo Bay Coffee Shop for a free beverage of your choice. From there, your journey to ‘The Next Level’ begins. Hurry. You have until 12 noon today.” When the chosen people woke up, they found envelopes containing the tokens had been slid under their doors.

When the chosen ones swapped the tokens for caffeine, the baristas — who had been prepped by Image Work — delivered the beverage in cups wrapped in a custom sleeve with another cryptic message: “Going to the next level can make you thirsty. Refuel and find me at www.i2m.biz. Don’t give up now … the edge is near. Will you be the first to reach it?”

Limiting the sleeves to those with tokens added a velvet-rope feel, Ortado says, and sparked conversation among the attendees. “People were talking about it, and it was getting competitive,” Knight says. Around the hotel, questions were being asked. Why did that person get free coffee? How can I get free coffee? What are people looking for?

The on-site AOL Internet café gave the chosen ones an immediate opportunity to race to the Web address they had found on their cup sleeves. There, participants found an interactive questionnaire that asked them to select their favorite flavor and vacation destination, among other things. After completing the questions, participants received another enticing message: “You are now one step closer to the edge. Be prepared.”

Talk to Me

To build buzz, the mascot and live emcee, speaking from plasma screens positioned throughout the hotel, rallied the audience, saying, “Some people have met the right person. They have gone on to the next level. Others have not.” Attendees were told they had to find the right person (the mole) by 5 p.m. This tactic inspired people to talk to one another, asking who they had met, and looking to interact with new people in an attempt to meet “The One.”

Throughout the day, at meals, roundtable sessions, and group events, the mysterious “right person” handed out his business cards printed with the company name Immersive Interactive Marketing and an e-mail address. Now savvy to the interactive experience going on around them, attendees on alert caught the clue and, eager to get in on the action, e-mailed the address on the card. An automated response linked them to the questionnaire. Those who went to the Web site listed on the card were redirected to the survey as well. “We wanted people to participate, but we didn’t want to hit them over the head; we wanted to maintain a sense of self-discovery,” Ortado says.

Those who completed the questionnaire awoke the third morning to find a postcard and a baggage-claim tag attached to their doorknobs. Each participant’s response to the survey determined the image on his or her postcard, such as a ski slope or a sandy beach.

Fortune cookies, also delivered with the cards, came in one of three flavors, again determined by a survey question from the previous day. When participants cracked their coconut, vanilla, or chocolate fortune cookies, they found the next clue: “What does your future hold? The answer is a phone call away. (818) 903.4408.”

Participants who called the number reached the “hotel concierge” (actually the mole), who told them that they had something waiting for them at the front desk. As attendees made their claims at the desk, they received envelopes containing a photo designed to look like a secret agent’s profile, along with the note, “Find me for your final clue. Bring me this letter and I will give you a key to the next level. Be warned, only one key will work. Will you be the one that makes it to the edge? Hurry.”

When participants found the agent, a representative from CEMA sponsor MTI Marketing, he gave them a luggage tag with a number on it, which was used in the final name drawing.

Toward the end of the evening on the event’s final day, the emcee congratulated those who successfully reached the next level, and then held a drawing to determine which of those attendees won high-end travel bags provided by MTI Marketing.

Look Who’s Talking

The sly networking-incentive program far exceeded expectations. Image Work tracked participation at three key stages: when the data from the nTag devices was collected on day one (22-percent participation), when word of mouth started on day two (36-percent participation), and at the end of the summit when 41 percent of the 218 attendees were in on the game. “To be honest, I thought that if we got 10 to 15 percent of attendees participating that would be pretty good,” Ortado says.

The 2006 post-event-survey results backed up the success seen on site. “There were far, far fewer comments about groups or cliques,” Brunke says. Additionally, post-show reports from the nTag devices (on which each group — board members, first-timers, and alums — were represented by different-colored dots) indicated significant interaction between the groups, proving that the first-timers reception and CEMA’s concerted efforts to pair board members with new attendees had all paid off.

Attendee response was great too. “This was head and shoulders above what anyone else had done,” Knight says. “It was smart and different and had some humor; it was one of those things that just clicked. I absolutely got out of my usual social circle.”

With this one program, CEMA was able to solve its interaction problem, engage veteran and novice attendees alike, and add value for its sponsors — all while “marketing on the edge” and taking its event to “the next level.” e