Custom client builds
BLP Experiential Studio · Experiential marketing ยท Brand activations
BLP: what one trade show actually earned.
After every trade show BLP Experiential Studio asks what it did. I built the tool that answers, and refuses to count anything it cannot tie to the event.
Sweep the posts
Find who was there
Check every picture
Count what is realWhat the run found, one real trade show
ONE TRADE SHOW, MEASURED
What the measurement tool found.
Posts read
Inside the event window
Of the 10,665 read.
Images checked
Against the real booth.
Sweep the public posts
10,665 read
Find who was there
2,757 inside the window
Check every picture
1,946 checked against the booth
Counted only what ties to the event
10,665 read.
2 counted.
Real numbers from one BLP trade show. Not a live dashboard, and not every event will look like this.
- Client
- BLP Experiential Studio
- Sector
- Experiential marketing
- Built
- Measurement tool and client-ready reports
- Status
- Delivered to BLP
The problem
The recap deck had photos. It had no numbers.
An activation can cost a brand tens of thousands of dollars, and the marketing manager who approved it has to defend it upstairs. The recap proved the booth looked good. It did not prove anyone saw it.
Doing it by hand meant opening the accounts of people you remembered being there, scrolling, screenshotting, and missing every post where the brand was on screen but nobody tagged it.
Buying it was worse. The tools that spot a logo in a photo are sold as yearly subscriptions for always-on brand monitoring. An agency needs one report for one weekend in one hall.
What I built
Every platform in, one honest ledger out.
One run takes the brand, the event dates, the hashtags, the venue, a few accounts known to be there and photos of the real booth. What comes back is a private report page the agency can put in front of its client.
- 01Sweep the public postsInstagram, LinkedIn, X, Threads, Facebook, YouTube and press coverage. Public posts only, read logged out, no platform logins.
- 02Find the people who were thereEveryone with evidence of attending gets their own posts checked too, which is how the untagged posts get found.
- 03Look at every pictureA vision model checks images against photos of the actual booth and packaging. When a picture is the only link to the event, a second model has to agree before it counts.
- 04Apply the counting rulesA post counts only when the brand is in it and something ties it to this event. Everything else is listed with the reason it was left out, and kept out of the totals.
- 05Write the reportReach, engagement, the full ledger with a thumbnail per post, the biggest voices, what people said, and a methodology section that says plainly what the tool cannot see. Every number is labeled measured or estimated.
What changed
The first real run said no to almost everything. That was the point.
The first client run was Shan Foods at Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim, one of the biggest natural products trade shows in the country. Shan is popular all year, so its tagged posts were full of recipe creators who had never been near the booth.
Counting every tagged post would have produced a reach figure in the hundreds of thousands. The tool counted the 2 posts it could tie to the show and listed the rest, each with its reason. One early vision check had passed a big reel because it mistook another company's snack for the client's, which is why a second model now has to agree.
Build notes
- Seven public sources: Instagram, LinkedIn, X, Threads, Facebook, YouTube, press
- Vision checks with a second-opinion model on picture-only matches
- 140+ automated tests on the counting rules and formulas
- Every paid call cached, so nothing is ever paid for twice
- Private, password-protected report page per event
- No media-value inflation and no invented targets, by rule
Scope and limits
This is one real run, for one brand at one trade show. The counting rules are strict on purpose, so the totals it reports are small.
Matt Smith, Chicago. matt@visibilitybuddy.com