Impact TL;DR

• Two sides of the event tested together. Rand and Rand could explore how prospective attendees and sponsors responded to the same agenda, while keeping their different motivations visible.
• Topics tested before production. Session themes, framing, and emerging subjects could be evaluated while the agenda was still easy to change—not after speakers, venues, and campaigns were committed.
• A clearer reason behind every choice. iMario helped the team move beyond simple topic rankings to understand what created relevance, urgency, differentiation, or hesitation for each audience.

Our partner

Rand and Rand is a research and content production agency that helps organizations shape events, exhibitions, workshops, and conferences. Its work starts well before the doors open: defining an agenda that can attract the right participants, give sponsors a credible reason to invest, and create a point of view strong enough to stand out in a crowded calendar.

"iMario turns agenda planning from an internal debate into an audience-informed decision."

Chris Rand, Head of Research & Content Production, Rand and Rand

The problem

An event agenda has to work for more than one audience.

Attendees ask whether a session is relevant to their role, whether they will learn something they cannot get elsewhere, and whether the day is worth taking away from other priorities. Sponsors look for a strong audience fit, a credible commercial context, and themes they are willing to associate their brands with.

Those needs overlap, but they are not identical. An agenda that sounds intellectually interesting may still be too broad to drive registration. A commercially attractive topic may appeal to sponsors but feel promotional to attendees. An emerging theme may create curiosity in one group and confusion in another.

Traditionally, much of this is resolved through the experience of the content team, a small number of stakeholder conversations, and feedback gathered once the agenda is already in market. By then, changing the structure can mean revisiting speakers, sponsorship packages, and campaign assets.

Rand and Rand wanted to bring audience evidence into the process earlier, when it could still shape the event rather than simply evaluate it.

The partnership: Rehearsing the market before publishing the agenda

Working with iMario, Rand and Rand could create synthetic audiences representing the types of attendees and sponsor decision-makers an event needed to reach. Draft agendas, session descriptions, and alternative themes could then be placed in front of both groups before production began.

The purpose was not to predict exact registration or sponsorship revenue. It was to expose the reasoning behind likely reactions: which topics felt immediately relevant, which required clearer framing, what appeared too familiar, and what was missing altogether.

Because both sides could respond to the same material, Rand and Rand gained a more useful decision frame than a single overall score. The team could see where attendee interest and sponsor value reinforced each other—and where the agenda needed to make a deliberate trade-off.

Use-case 1: Testing whether attendees see a reason to participate

A session title can sound strong in a planning meeting and still fail to answer the prospective attendee's first question: why should I spend my time on this?

iMario allowed Rand and Rand to present draft agendas to different attendee profiles and explore their reactions at several levels. Which sessions would they notice first? Which felt relevant to the problems they were facing? Which sounded generic, overly technical, or too promotional? What would they expect to take away from the day?

The qualitative explanation mattered as much as the preference itself. A weak response might point to an unimportant topic, but it might also reveal that a valuable session had been framed in language the audience did not use. That distinction gave the content team something actionable: remove the topic, reposition it, or make the promised outcome more concrete.

Use-case 2: Giving sponsors an early view of audience and theme fit

Sponsors evaluate an event through a different lens. They need to understand who will attend, why the conversation matters now, and whether participation supports their own market position.

Rand and Rand could use iMario to simulate how different sponsor profiles interpreted the agenda and its commercial context. The team could explore which themes offered a natural reason to participate, which audience descriptions felt credible, and where a sponsorship proposition risked feeling disconnected from the event itself.

This did not replace direct sponsor conversations. It helped the team enter those conversations with sharper hypotheses and a clearer articulation of value.

"iMario lets us see what is likely to excite attendees and sponsors while there is still time to improve the event."

Chris Rand

Use-case 3: Finding emerging themes without chasing novelty

The strongest agenda is not always the one built entirely around today's most familiar topics. Events also need to identify what audiences will care about next.

Through open-ended interviews with synthetic audiences, Rand and Rand could test early-stage themes that had not yet become standard conference language. The team could compare how different groups understood a new subject, what questions it prompted, and whether it represented a meaningful shift or novelty without substance.

That made emerging-theme discovery more disciplined. Instead of adding a topic because it was trending, the team could examine who found it relevant, why it mattered to them, and how it should be translated into an agenda people would choose to attend.

From internal expertise to audience-informed judgment

Rand and Rand's expertise remained central to the process. iMario added an earlier layer of audience response around it: fast enough to use while ideas were still fluid, broad enough to compare different participant perspectives, and detailed enough to reveal the reasoning behind a reaction.

The result was not an automatically generated agenda. It was a better-informed content decision—one that could balance attendee value, sponsor relevance, and emerging conversations before the cost of change became high.

Related: what synthetic individuals are, how iMario research reports are built, the cost-time-learning-speed framework.