To Build a Better Trade Show

I was recently asked by the good folks at The Hired Guns for "blue sky" thoughts on what might make a trade show or conference work better, in the future. It seems that people attending these days aren't getting enough to justify the couple thou it can cost to attend, and the sponsors and exhibitors and speakers are generating the interest they would like. Maybe the typical "panel speaks, then some networking happens in little segments" format is a bit tired.

I asked "how blue sky do you want? Star ship Enterprise holodeck? MIT Media Lab? Something else?" And was told to go with the Media Lab and maybe some more pragmatics. So here, with a little editing, is what I submitted, for all to share. Love to have your thoughts, as well, through this, Twitter (@dorianbenkoil) or, if you can access it, directly into my biochip implant.

What would, both in technology and other ways of conceiving, make conferences, events, trade shows that much more effective?

Conference/Trade show, Blue Sky thoughts:

• Equip conference goers with a smart phone app that allows them to interact with each other at the conf across sessions, monitor the session they want, tap into Twitter feeds, etc. Later, aggregate those communications, and combine with Twitter hashtags and other parsing and sorting mechanism, to create an intelligent cloud of info that will inform coverage of the conf. Hook the app up to a private social network for cross-platform aggregation.
• Enable GPS monitoring of above for a geographic overlay.
• Equip conference goers with “ear-cams” small mounted cameras (and mics, perhaps) that record everything each of them see. Aggregate that video in a rich chat platform that allows someone to select an individual’s video. Allow those who pay to attend the conference special abilities to slice, dice, parse and access the videos both in real time and later. (This could also offer sponsors a further opportunity of a more packaged video product, honing in on their specific interests and target group.
  
• Cameras in the hands of all, aggregated in a video chat displayed on site, and integrated with outside video, for a flexible, video chat conference that those in the panel can also interact in real time. Similar to above, but minus the "ear cam".
  
• Audience cams. Point a handful of cameras at the audience, remote-controlled. Use these later, more packaged, as a service to sponsors, speakers, etc., to gauge the reactions to specific speakers, presentations, etc.
• Allow remote attendees to select at will from an array of cameras, audio, etc. Aggregate it with Twitter and any other feeds, coverage, etc.
• Have goers volunteer to be part of an attendee panel (panel in the media-measurement, not conference sense). Monitor their media consumption and communication before and after the show to see how the show influences it.
• Rather than separate SF and NY and LA and Boston and ... conferences, have one, but conduct them with virtual rooms, so they interact with each other in real time. Today, teleconferencing and Second Life. Tomorrow, virtual chambers, holo-deck like, as the one that’s being developed at Media Lab. This is not a stunt, but rather a real-time interaction and a way to get the geographically influenced ideas cross-pollinating.
• Discussion turned inside-out, where the participants are mic’d and the panelists circulate among them.
  
• Panel interaction with Twitter (and any other real-time chat mechanism). Those on stage are ENCOURAGED to tweet, photograph, video, etc., for a multilayered portrayal of the event, and interaction with people in a more multi-dimensional way than panel speaks, question’s asked, panelists respond. So, for example, someone watching could see not just a camera pointing at the panel with that audio, but also click to see a camera of what a panelist sees, read his/her tweets, and so on.
• Those at the event are tasked with specific brainstorming, and in breakout groups devise solutions, virtually, on site and virtual shared environments. EG, the question of the day can be “how do we come up with financial models for journalism — in 2 hours come up with a spreadsheet and mockups. Go group.” Or “Here’s the product. Spread it virally. Prove the concept. Go.”
• My friend Luke Haseloff has suggested that events, rather than allowing people to rush the stage to talk to speakers, put the speakers quickly at round tables where they can lead a sort of after-panel discussion.
  

What else? What other ideas for panel/conference/discussion that will inspire and bring this all to the next level, with or without technology?

End of the GRP and 'Oxymoron' of Targeted Reach

I was at the Streaming Media East show the week before last and a bunch of executives on a panel ("New Advertising Platforms and Networks") were talking about video measurement and what kinds of measurement is possible. They kept using common industry jargon until someone in the audience frustratedly blurted out, “What’s a GRP?!” After a little befuddled fumbling on stage, and a quiet gnashing of teeth in the audience (“how can this guy not KNOW?!” I could hear some people thinking) one panelist kindly explained that GRP is a gross rating point, a way of trying to figure out what proportion of the people in my target audience -- say men 18-34 -- have seen my message, my ad, how many times. Have 50 percent of men 18-34 seen my underarm deodorant ad five times each? Then that’s 50 x 5, or 250 gross ratings points. Gross is really the right word because it’s a very loose estimate and attempt to apply mathematics to something that’s not really all that mathematical or well-measured.

Mainly, though, I was reminded that:

1. We all have our jargon and in this converged and disrupted mediaverse we have to remember that a lot of people making a lot of decisions aren’t necessarily fluent in the currencies that other people they’re dealing with have and
2. we may be seeing the end of the GRP. I recently worked on a research report for JackMyers Media Business report about measurement in the advertising and media space and found that media buyers -- meaning the folks who take the money from companies and figure out how to spend it on ads -- were talking a lot about measurement and reaching their audiences and so on, but they weren’t talking a lot about GRPs or even necessarily TRPs -- a more refined version for more closely targeting an audience. I think we might be inching toward the end or at least gross diminishment of a measure that’s been a primary currency in the advertising business for decades.... and we’re going to increasingly see people looking to hit their targets in a very targeted way.

One of the people who makes me think this way is Dave Morgan, who told me that the “behavioral targeting” technology he helped bring into the world helped achieve the “oxymoron of targeted reach” -- a huge swath of people (reach, like an advertiser gets with, say, the Super Bowl), but in a targeted way (like an advertiser gets when they know exactly who you are because you’ve registered for soemthing and send you an ad based on your preferences). He’ll be a guest on Naked Media on Wednesday at noon, ET, then On Demand later. You can watch the first interview, with Jay Rosen, here.

The Power of "Yes"

"If you go to sleep a Yankee fan, chances are you wake up one." That was the way keynote speaker Leo Hindery today helped explain why the Yes network is more profitable than any regional sports network every constructed. Except for four nights this baseball season, Yes was the highest rated network in 8 million homes with a 3.5-4 rating night after night, he said. ("And we were playing some crap teams!")

Speaking at the Convergence 2.0 conference put on by The Deal, Hindery, managing partner at InterMedia Partners, talked about the power of enthusiast media, how hunters and fisherman pore over their magazines and all other media, how they defined "engagement" – a "dedicated, committed audience." That kind of audience, he said, is key when looking for media investments. Look for a dedicated audience – Yankee fans, Christians, Hispanics (noting that all Hispanics are not alike), outdoorsmen – some group that will avidly consume what you give them, if you give it to them in their sweet spot.

The other thing you need, he said, to really have a lasting investment over time is barriers to competition, lamenting the way cable TV had screwed up its customer service, for example niggling people over $20 worth of charges when their lifetime value was, perhaps, $2,000. "There was no reason for the satellite industry to get going except for our ineptitude in cable," he said.

Thoughts on an 'Octopus' Strategy for Newspapers

It's not news that "if you take out classified ad profits from newspapers, you take out the profit." Those were the words today of Michael Price, Senior Managing Director at private equity firm Evercore Partners, at the Convergence 2.0 conference in New York put on by deal-watching publication The Deal. But he didn't leave it there, and instead talked about what to do – at least for one anomalous newspaper with an audience most publishers would kill for.

Price went on to talk about what his firm would do if they'd bought the Wall Street Journal: "go deep on the Internet" for their passionate, C-level (meaning top executive) audience, giving everything they could want about any of various subjects they're interested in, be it credit markets, insurance, or whatever. He called it an "octopus" strategy. Unfortunately, Price said, newspapers haven't figured out how to "monetize" their good content. Leo Hindery of InterMedia Partners in a keynote Q&A said the New York Times should follow a similar strategy, out-Googling Google by, for example, giving someone searching for news on Alan Greenspan everything they could possibly imagine. Instead, he said, they're putting their newspaper content online, but in a much more fragile ad banner market.

Jeffrey Sine of UBS Securities said that while the Journal is held up as a huge success for subscriptions on the Internet, it "really is not that successful in the larger sense," which I take to mean $70 million (1 million people paying $70 per year) isn't tons of money in this realm. He added on Price's remarks saying the Journal needed to "upsell" folks on their "tiered" interest levels by selling them more on the value chain. Sine said his firm had sold Marketwatch to Dow Jones a few years back (for nearly $500 million, if you remember), which I guess gave him Street cred.

Later, Price said that that Dow Jones and Reuters have been "crushed" by Bloomberg. Another panelist – Dennis Miller of Spark Capital -- pointed out how CNN ended its 27-year relationship with Reuters, probably because Reuters was directly competing by running its material directly, with its own ads. Hindery said the folks at Bloomberg "are not unapprehensive" about the lack of a print partner.

Even for Money Guys, It's About the Operations

It can be easy to the think of the money guys as doing deals and paying attention to the income, but not the operations. At today's Convergence 2.0 conference, run by The Deal, Josh Steiner, managing principal of private equity firm Quadrangle, disabused the audience of that notion when talking about how they handled Maxim after buying Dennis Publishing. Quadrangle brought in Kent Brownridge, a former top honcho at Wenner media who helped run Rolling Stone, and Dan Rosensweig, who had been COO of Yahoo! for the digital side to help bring "new skills and perspective" for an audience that moves freely between print and online, Steiner said. Brownridge helped renegotiate printing contracts. Anyone in the biz knows that those contracts can mean the difference between operating profit or loss.

"With all due respect to former management, they had a great run of it, and they were no longer doing the basic things with respect to blocking and tackling perspective," Steiner said, referring – for those of you who may not know American football – to the basics of playing the game.