Fern Makes Strategic Investment in Audience Engagement Company KiwiLive

September 12, 2016

More and more, general service contractors are moving beyond their core business offerings to widen their services, such as Fern Exposition Services making a strategic investment in KiwiLive, a mobile web platform for audience engagement during and after live events.

As a part of Fern's investment, KiwiLive's creator and CEO, Jeff Mason, will become director of Customer Technology Innovation for Fern.

In this role, Mason will drive strategy related to the delivery of Fern services through technology.

According to Aaron Bludworth, president and CEO of Fern, Mason's specific focus will be on customer-facing technologies and customer user experience.

KiwiLive has been used by more than 2,000 events as a tool to enhance audience engagement.

KiwiLive allows speakers, presenters, associations and event organizers to perform real-time audience polling, deliver documents to audience members electronically and strengthen attendee-to-attendee networking.

"The result of using KiwiLive is that attendees immediately capture the exact information and connections they need," Mason said. "Meanwhile, event organizers can use the engagement data KiwiLive provides to serve their attendees even more effectively."

The partnership of the two companies accelerates Fern's technology-focused strategy of empowering organizations to grow relationships between audiences and brands.

Fern has numerous strategic relationships with marketing and event technology organizations, which the company will continue to build and develop to offer integrated solutions and Fern proprietary technologies.

"Fern recognizes the increasing pervasiveness of technology in every aspect of commerce, especially 'big data' for targeted networking and sales," said Bludworth. "Our partnership in this transaction has the unique dimension of bringing Jeff into the Fern organization in a very strategic forward-thinking role."

A mechanical engineer turned entrepreneur, Mason holds degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

He worked extensively as an engineer for two Fortune 500 companies before launching KiwiLive in 2014.

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