The Challenge
ICIS 2024 ran for four days in Bangkok under the theme Digital Platforms for Emerging Societies, examining how information technology reshapes economies and societies worldwide. It is a conference about digital transformation, attended by the people who study it.
Which made the photo problem slightly awkward. Photographers were producing hundreds of high-quality images every day. More than 1,600 attendees needed to receive them. The conventional answer - a shared drive, a folder per day, a link in a closing email - would have asked an audience of digital platform researchers to scroll through thousands of images hunting for themselves.
Organizers set three hard requirements before selecting a solution:
- Ease of use, for organizers uploading and attendees retrieving
- No mobile app, because a download requirement kills participation before it starts
- Personalized discovery, so attendees find their own photos immediately - while still being able to explore the full gallery if they want to
AIS selected Kampfire as the official photo-sharing solution for the conference.
What Kampfire Did
The activation had to work at daily cadence, not as a single post-event drop.
During the conference:
- Fast, reliable uploads: With hundreds of photos generated per day across four days, organizers used Kampfire’s proprietary Uploading Pad to move each day’s shoot into a single unified gallery - no folder structures, no manual sorting
- Instant retrieval by selfie: Attendees took one selfie and immediately received their own photos, along with featured images from previous days
- Nothing to install: Everything ran in the browser
After the conference:
- Sustained fresh content: Organizers kept uploading, so attendees had reasons to return rather than a single static archive
- Distribution beyond the room: The campaign link was shared across social platforms, extending reach past the attendee list
- One-click sharing: Attendees downloaded and shared conference photos either through Kampfire or natively from their devices
- Engagement analytics: Organizers could see how attendees interacted with conference content, not just that it had been sent
The Results
ICIS 2024 is the clearest cost case in the Kampfire set: a 1,360.8% return over the cost of the platform.
The engagement behind that number holds up to inspection. 497 attendees claimed personalized albums, and those attendees downloaded 3,221 photos - roughly 6.5 each. Against 3,014 campaign views, that is more than one download per visit: attendees weren’t browsing, they were collecting.
The distribution flowed outward from there, producing 51,887 total impressions - over a hundred per claiming attendee, in front of academic and professional networks the conference never paid to reach.
There is also an asset-utilization story that matters more than it first appears. 1,230 photos were uploaded, and close to 100% of them were used. The normal outcome for conference photography is that most of it is never seen by anyone after the photographer delivers it - commissioned, paid for, and left in a folder. Here, nearly the entire library reached someone who wanted it.
Why This Matters
Most event photography is a sunk cost. It gets commissioned, shot, delivered, and quietly abandoned, and no one measures the waste because no one ever expected otherwise.
ICIS 2024 shows what changes when the delivery mechanism is built around the attendee instead of the archive. Removing the app requirement removed the barrier to participation. Making discovery personal - your photos, first - turned a scrolling chore into a reason to come back. And instrumenting the whole path meant organizers could report on outcomes rather than on effort.
For an association running a flagship annual conference, that combination converts a recurring line item into something with a defensible return. AIS didn’t just distribute photos from Bangkok. They got a measured 1,360.8% back on the spend, and a record of exactly how it happened.
