Creative Group推出i|mpactIQ数据索引以重塑战略设计与客户交付模式

One year into her role as global head of creative & marketing, Hillary Smith Stone is changing the way Creative Group works with its clients. Though there was never any formal announcement of a shift in direction, Creative Group’s senior leadership team, led by Janet Traphagen, decided that the company was no longer going to be known just for management and logistics, Stone said.

“Execution should be table stakes for a 56-year-old company. We shouldn’t be proving ourselves on logistics any more. That is the expectation. What are we doing on top of that?”

As she described it: “We really burned down the building, phoenix-style, and are building everything up so there’s a central brain.”

At the center of it all is i|mpactIQ, an ROI index developed under the guidance of senior vice president of technology and data Melissa Van Dyke. The index will centralize, analyze, and measure data from thousands of participant surveys from past programs and use that to predict design.

“How do we look at different attendees, how they behave, how their interests have changed over the last three to five years, where the gaps are in behavior, sentiment, motivation?” Stone asked. “Then how do we arm our strategists and designers with that information to bring that to the client in the design process?”

Van Dyke came up with the idea for the ROI index several years ago, but it never got off the ground. Now, with the help of Amazon Quick, the company’s central AI system, and a team of analysts, it will be released in January.

The company used its internal Key Partner Forum this summer for a trial run and has been beta testing i|mpactIQ with long-term client Genentech, which, Stone said, has now asked them to do the same analysis for all of their events. 

Rethinking Assumptions to Appeal to AI-First Buyers

Since she took on her role, Stone — whose background in strategy and creative traces back to PRA Business Events and the global agency Koncept Events before founding her own agency, Smith + Stone — has also been rethinking how Creative Group delivers things like graphics-heavy proposals for a new generation of AI-first buyers.

“They are going to take all their proposals and put them into AI against my RFP and prompt my robot with a bunch of questions,” she said. “So if I look at AEO (answer engine optimization) versus SEO, I need to know what the large language models are consuming from a visual story. Does that even work any more?”

The same goes for rethinking the actual questions in the RFPs, she said. “We’re looking at trends on changes of questions in RFPs in the last three years.”

Will the same questions work three years from now? “Look at the age of our key buyers,” she said.

Incentive program measurement is another area that’s shifting, according to Stone. Incentives are being analyzed differently, from a culture and a loyalty perspective, not just how much they grew revenue.

“The destination, the gifting, the leisure, the awards ceremony — different data can inform us on how to design an incentive today. We didn’t have that before. We worked on instinct. 

“I’m looking at this as: These are the things that matter most to this group. Here’s the historical data that proves it. Here’s how we can pull all of this measurement together into an index so you can see it in one place.”

In preparation for the rollout of i|mpactIQ, the company is focusing on data security and continuing to refine the technology. 

“Turning around a 56-year-old company is so big,” said Stone. “It’s not a speedboat, it’s not a cruise ship, it’s a freight liner. There's also the emotional side of that — the legacy, the core, where we really need to be protective over what not to lose.

“But at the same time, we don’t want to become Blockbuster Video.”