IBM Australia was struggling to open the door to the Marketing department – they were usually relegated to conversations with the IT department. The problem was, most major technology decisions around Big Data and Analytics, now involve Marketing stakeholders.

We needed to change the conversation.

Unfortunately, Marketers are notoriously difficult to impress – they know all the tricks. It wasn’t enough to simply invite them to a software demonstration – we’d tried that. We needed something more compelling. Something unexpected.

The Vivid festival of light is a highly anticipated event each year. Families flock to the shores of Sydney harbor to see the collision of art and science. Families which include the city’s top Marketers.

We created IBM ‘Heart of the City’ – a sculpture which visualised real-time data from the Vivid Light Walk. Sensors identified when WiFi-enabled devices were nearby. This data is analysed in the cloud in real-time and we could see the patterns made by foot traffic.

This data was then projected in our sculpture – a huge, anatomically correct chrome heart via a light projection. Viewers can see the direction of foot traffic, visitor dwell time and the area’s busiest zones.

We then amplified this data at two key events – an Idea Exchange for CMOs and a networking event for top-tier Marketers.

1,400,000 people attended Vivid in 2014 and we collected data from 55% of them. That’s 766,795 unique visitors IBM detected, analysed their data and then projected into the ‘Heart of the city’. That’s a huge amount of data we used to impress our Marketing audience.

The two events we held with our Marketing Leaders were over subscribed:

- 106 client prospects attended the Ideas Exchange – 6% above target.

- Similarly, we had 60 client prospects attend the Networking event – 20% above target.

- These two events generated 166 new conversations and 9 new client engagements.

The sculpture itself generated additional, measurable results. We had 22,284 people visit the installation with an average dwell time of 10+ minutes. That’s a total of more than 155 days of dwell time. We also had 356 social posts reaching 386,407 users.