UFI, The Global Association of the Exhibition Industry, has named the event marketing software company Feathr as winner of its prestigious UFI Technology Award.

With a focus on “Digital innovation”, this year’s competition set out to find the best new technologies that support the exhibition industry.

international panel of exhibition professionals selected Feathr for its innovative Event Marketing Cloud, a suite of tools designed to help event organisers “know, grow, engage and monetise their digital audiences”.

“At UFI’s ICT Committee we strive for excellence and innovation. Feathr was a good example of both! Its solution perfectly combines the magic of face-to-face and digital,” said Maria Martinez, director at Madrid’s trade fair institution IFEMA (Spain), and Chair of the UFI ICT Committee, which has run the annual award since 2008.

Making more of event audiences Feathr’s Event Marketing Cloud helps organisers make the most of digital marketing – particularly online advertising – to boost attendance and engagement and open up new sources of revenue. Using features such as web analytics, email mapping and lookalike modelling, Feathr looks for relevant new audiences, and can then target “the right people with the right ads at the right time” to bring them to the event website and complete their registration. "

We are incredibly honoured to be recognised by UFI as their 2016 Technology Award winner," said Aidan Augustin, President of Feathr, who co-founded the company with Alexander Levental in 2012 making mobile apps for events.

He added, “As people spend ever more time online, exhibitions are uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between digital and in-person engagement. Our goal at Feathr is to help organisers – and their exhibitors – capitalise on this opportunity!"

Since first testing the tool in 2014 with companies such as Reed Exhibitions, ITE, UBM and dmg:events, Feathr has now been used by over 300 exhibitions and conventions worldwide.  

Augustin received the UFI Technology Award trophy before an audience of industry leaders at the 83rd UFI Congress in Shanghai in November 2016.

While there, he also presented Feathr’s Event Marketing Cloud in a special session dedicated to sharing best practice.

Over nine years, the UFI Technology Award has gained a reputation for excellence among exhibition professionals worldwide, bringing global recognition to finalists and encouraging technological innovation in the exhibition industry.

Outstanding entries are also fed into an online showcase of best practice in event technology, a resource highly appreciated by UFI’s 690-strong membership of exhibition organisers, venues and associations.

This year, UFI identified such best practices in six companies: Gleanin (UK), for their social registration platform; Info Salons Group (Australia), for their WeChat-based application Smart Coupon; Ingo (USA), for a suite of Advocate Marketing widgets; N200-GES (UK), for their registration, ticketing and data intelligence solutions; SmartXpo, described as “a SaaS business intelligence suite for events organisers”; and Expo Analytics (UK), which uses data from the venue Wi-Fi to provide visitor analytics to event organisers, owners, exhibitors and sponsors.

With so many high-quality applications for the 2016 UFI Technology Award – from a total of 11 countries – it was not easy to find one winner, according to UFI’s ICT Committee Vice Chair Matthias Tesi Baur, from MBB Media (London, UK).

However, Bauer added “Feathr demonstrated how the exhibition industry can extend engagement with visitors and exhibitors throughout the show cycle, including periods between shows. Congratulations to Feathr and all other finalists and best practice cases! Your products, projects and services are pushing our industry forward, which makes us all winners at the end.”

The 2016 UFI Technology Award was sponsored by Ungerboeck Software.