Sean Riley: You are listening to Unpacked with PMMI, where we share the latest packaging and processing industry insights, research, and innovations to help you advance your business.
Hi, and welcome to Unpacked with PMMI. I'm your host, Sean Riley. In this episode, we welcome Jessica Lawshe from PMMI and Don Kline from Map Your Show. Together, they explain how AI-powered tools are making it easier for buyers to find the right exhibitors and to better navigate trade shows. We also cover how exhibitors can use tools like Sales Accelerator and strong online listings to better connect with the right audience and drive real, actionable business results. Let's have a listen.
So, with all the fancy introductions out of the way, welcome to the podcast, Jessica and Don. Welcome, Jessica.
Jessica Lawshe: Hi, Sean. Thank you for having me.
Sean Riley: And welcome, Don.
Don Kline: Hey, Sean. How are you today?
Sean Riley: I'm great. I'm going to start my first question with Jessica. I understand you've been working on this pretty big project to help buyers, regardless of their industry knowledge, quickly and easily find the products and companies that they need. So, can you tell me a little bit more about what you've been working on and how this is going to impact the exhibiting experience?
Jessica Lawshe: So, what we've been working on is a new AI-powered search tool called OmniSearch. It's one unified search experience designed to connect buyers to the right exhibitors more efficiently. And what makes it unique is that it's a single search query with two different types of search results simultaneously on the same page. So, the first is category-based recommendations. When a buyer types in a general term, let's say beverage packaging, the OmniSearch, which is trained specifically on our packaging and processing product categories, produces the most relevant categories for them. So, in that example, you'd see results like bottles and jars, cans and canisters populate, along with "Did you mean" suggestions to help refine further. Every one of those results links directly to a filtered list of exhibitors in the Map Your Show directory, specifically the ones who've selected that category in their online listing.
Now, the second type of result is a step-by-step guide tailored to the buyer's end product, with the option to generate a packaging guide or a processing guide. So, if someone searches for pet food and selects packaging, they'd receive a guide walking them through each stage of that packaging process, with each step tagged to relevant equipment categories, all linking back to the exhibitor listings on Map Your Show. So, as an exhibitor, that means you're not just getting found in a search—you're getting in front of a buyer at each specific stage of their process.
Sean Riley: Very cool.
Jessica Lawshe: So, the great thing about our OmniSearch is that a buyer enters their query once, and both sets of results generate simultaneously on the page. Essentially, it's one destination, one search. And for exhibitors, that means two powerful layers of exposure, all leading back to the listing and putting them in front of the right buyers.
Sean Riley: Very neat. If I picked beverage packaging, what would pop up for "Did you mean," or what did you mean?
Jessica Lawshe: The user starts with a general term, then the results produce recommended categories, but essentially it's to help the user refine their search and find what they need better.
Sean Riley: It's helping them along because it can be daunting to come up with a specific search, so I love that it's giving them terms for that. That's really cool.
Don, so I've been to entirely too many PACK EXPOs to count. I'm a big fan of Map Your Show for how it's helped me get around the show floor. And it seems like every year you guys have something new—every show you have something to enhance the show experience. And from what I understand, one of the newer ones is this Map Your Show Connected. So, what is Map Your Show Connected, and how does it work? How is it going to impact my trade show planning or an attendee's trade show planning?
Don Kline: I can't tell you how well it dovetails with what Jessica was just talking about in creating these experiences for the attendee. There's this whole AI revolution going on out there, and folks are talking about large language models, and there's all this stuff that's happening. And really, what it comes down to is, as a user going to PACK EXPO—as a technology provider—what do we need to provide? And when we saw the power of what can happen in AI, just as Jessica was talking about earlier and what PMMI is doing, we saw this really fit well with the attendee experience.
So, as an attendee to PACK EXPO—and I've stood on that show floor many times myself—it's overwhelming. But what we're trying to do with MYS Connected is unify this experience. And so we're bringing in all the information that is available to us as Map Your Show as a provider. So that's exhibitor information, it's session information. We're going out and doing some searching, even on websites, to get more information around exhibitors and what they may have.
And as the attendee interacts with Connected, it's learning. It's learning what the attendee wants; it's focusing on that behavior. And so we then start to really drill down and provide a unique, hyper-personalized experience for every single attendee. So, if you're interested—and you're just talking about beverages—and you're interested in certain types of beverage packaging, which, having been on that show floor, I can only imagine there are thousands of different kinds of packaging solutions for different things, we can help tailor that experience and help that attendee find what they're actually looking for.
And then, because it's artificial intelligence and because you have this LLM backing it, you actually start to suggest things. It becomes a discovery tool. And then we can create these hyper-personalized suggestions for the attendee to go visit more companies and exhibitors, to go visit and really find the education and the sessions they're looking for.
And because, as you can imagine from Map Your Show being a mapping tool, we can then look at this from a logistical standpoint—how does that attendee, you walking miles on-site, whether it's Chicago or Las Vegas—we're trying to reduce that journey so you're seeing more exhibitors and more sessions in the time that you have. So, we can not just get into suggestions; we can actually help you navigate and find the best journey through the show.
It's really revolutionary stuff for trade shows, and it's because of AI and the power of that in the background—what we can do with all of the data, and we can do it so quickly now. That is really one of the things that's almost mind-boggling. You look at this, and all of this stuff is happening, and for every single attendee, you're creating a unique experience for them.
And it's something we've been trying to do in the trade show industry for years. New technologies that have been available have really... We're excited to launch this. We can't wait to see this at PACK EXPO. It's really an ideal use case for it because, frankly, the show is so complicated. I can't wait for your feedback on how this product actually works in action because that's what we're trying to position it as.
And then, feeding off what Jessica said, we're trying to put more attendees in front of these exhibitors. We're trying to provide more value to that exhibitor who's investing in the event. And we do that by creating more connections, facilitating that connection between the buyer and seller. That's what we've always done as the trade show industry, and this helps that.
Sean Riley: That sounds amazing. You touched on the exhibitor a bit, but how about—from what I understand—there's also this newer option for exhibitors to gain similar insights from attendee behavior called Sales Accelerator. Could you touch on that a little bit?
Don Kline: Yeah, I'd be happy to. And that was actually our first foray into using this to try to help with the return on investment to exhibitors, looking at attendee behavior and then informing the exhibitor what these attendees' intentions were, and then providing these overlapping areas of interest between the attendee and the exhibitor and putting reports in the lead section in Map Your Show for the exhibitor and making that available so you can see behavioral intentions. Then we do data enrichment with that product as well.
And so we're adding, in this case, ZoomInfo to the product—that's got company info—but then we can also add additional context to that as well. It's providing more value. It's getting you deeper into that organization and what those attendees are searching for and what their behavior is to provide more context when you're trying to reach out. And because LLMs are excellent with communication, we can provide email templates for that exhibitor to reach out with that context to that attendee. It's a wonderful tool to start that sales process. And, as a recovering salesman myself, I wish I had that back in the day. It would have made me a lot more effective.
Sean Riley: It streamlines a lot of the admin parts of it.
Don Kline: You're really focusing on what's important, right? You're drilling down and saying, let's start trying to contact these attendees that may be interested in what I'm doing. But it's not a cold introduction—it's, "Hey, we'd like to show you more about this that you may be interested in," because you know that these are things they've searched on. And because we can see behavior across their entire agenda planner, we can get pretty detailed into the kind of information we provide the exhibitor on how to talk to that attendee and meet them where they are.
And that's such an important part of communication nowadays and marketing. We've all come to just expect it. When we get a cold email or a cold outreach, it goes right into the delete folder because we know that person doesn't know us. And what we're trying to do is give that exhibitor a chance to get past that, get through the door.
Ultimately, in this B2B environment—especially one as highly engineered as the packaging industry—providing that context really puts you in favor with that attendee right away because you're not wasting time. As you said, you've attended so many of these shows that the last thing you want to deal with is a bunch of correspondence coming back to you where no one really knows why you were there and what you're doing. It's a waste of the company's time that's doing the outreach, and it's a waste of your time on the receiving end. We've tried to get in front of that with that product, and we're obviously excited about that.
And then you bring in what PMMI is doing on the front end, you bring in what the MYS Connected product does in creating more leads. All those products build on themselves to provide value for the exhibitor. And that's really what's so exciting to me, because in order for all of us to be successful, we need to provide as much value as we can to the exhibitors and to the attendee.
Sean Riley: Yeah, and it sounds like from what both of you have said that this has made the online listing in the exhibitor directory even more important than it was before. Making sure that your online listing is completely up to date and filled in as much as possible—could you emphasize for our listeners the importance of fully filling out that listing?
Jessica Lawshe: Yeah. For OmniSearch, it's only as effective as the information behind it, and that comes directly, as you said, Sean, from the online listing. The results route buyers to filtered lists of exhibitors based on product categories, and it's based on what they've selected. So if their listing isn't accurate, they're not going to show up. It's definitely very important to select accurate categories. It's not about the most categories—the more accurate your listing reflects what you actually offer, the more qualified the buyers will be.
Don Kline: Yeah, and if I could just chime in there as well—we have broad experience across many industries at Map Your Show. I can tell you, it's not just a PACK EXPO or PMMI situation—this is for all trade shows. Having great data provides better results to everyone. Great data is a better exhibitor experience because they're going to get better outreach from the attendees and it's a far better experience for your attendee having that listing filled out. And the way that all of this works in the background with large language models and the databases that are built off of that, if you don't have good data populating it, the results on the other side aren't as good.
And now keep in mind, we don't just look at exhibitor listings. We're looking at, we're going out and doing a little bit of digging on the internet as well, so we're trying to bring in more information. We're also very keyed in on behavior. So to match all of that up and come up with those overlapping areas of interest, filling out your listing as an exhibitor, priority number one. Making sure you have the right categories, what you do, putting all the categories in, that shotgun approach will not be effective anymore, not with the way AI works. You really want to drill down to the right categories and focus on that. If it's a stool, think of it, the third leg of that stool, is making sure you take advantage of the opportunities that are provided either in press releases and/or products that could be uploaded. PMMI has great packages for listings that you can put in on the show and provide more information. All of that is read by these LLMs and all of that is indexed to make sure that we're providing the right information back to the attendees.
So taking advantage of everything that's given to you by the association in this case and making sure that you're filling all of that in is an absolute must. And I can tell you, from the broad experience that I mentioned, it's amazing how many exhibitors don't take advantage of the things that are given to them. And that are not a cost, something that they need to be doing and filling out, it's really important.
Sean Riley: Speaking of things that are going to be available to them, we touched on two great, or a bunch of great products and projects you guys are working on. Are these things ready to go? Are they coming down the pike? When can our listeners expect to see them?
Jessica Lawshe: Exhibitors can expect Omnisearch to launch in early May. So between now and the launch dates is important of getting the online listing updated, that way, as soon as it goes live, they're ready to be found the moment buyers start searching.
Don Kline: Yeah. And Sales Accelerator is part of the buying process right now for packages. And the exhibitors can go in and look at that. They can, in many cases, run free reports to see what it's all about and to see what that looks like. So that functionality is available. MYS Connected, that's going to launch right around the same time, I believe in May, it'll be on the website. And that's plenty of time for the attendees that are planning. If anything, now attendees are going closer to the show for their planning. Planning is condensed, not extended, even though those things will be available in advance. And so May timeframe for Connected.
Sean Riley: Perfect. This has been great. It really hammered home the all roads kind of lean back to the online listing for exhibitors, making sure your data is correct, is going to help with both of these products. So I want to thank you, Jessica, and thank you, Don, for taking time out of your days to come on here and help our listeners out.
Jessica Lawshe: Thank you.
Don Kline: Yeah, happy to. It was fun. Thank you.
Sean Riley: Thanks for listening to this episode of Unpacked with PMMI. If you liked what you heard, be sure to follow or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen so you won't miss any of the industry insights coming your way. While you're there, we'd really appreciate a rating or review. Want more? Visit pmmi.org/podcasts for all of our past episodes and additional resources. Thanks again for tuning in. I'll see you next time.
