Over the last three years, I have put together the content for two events — one on the news business and another on television. It is an unusual kind of assignment. One has to figure out the theme, topics, right speakers, and the formats; in short everything that constitutes the content that the audience would consume. Since these are hardcore business-to-business events, the content has to be compelling. Getting television industry people to pay for and to sit through a television business event is otherwise impossible.
One thing came across strongly — that media companies may be spoiling the whole business — not just from a profitability perspective, but also from a content one.
First a bit of background. The Rs 800 crore events business in India was dominated for long by professional firms such as Wizcraft, Encompass or DNA Networks among others. While they do a lot of consumer-centric events (music shows, film awards), their margins come from corporate events, conferences and from brand promotions (activations). These could be for other companies or for industry bodies — say, a CII or a Ficci.
In the last few years, many TV, radio, publishing and internet media companies have got into the event business. If a client was spending, say, a crore in a year, throwing in events with ads could up the top line by 20-40 per cent. Alternatively, offering discounted advertising to a lead sponsor on an event could top up revenues. This has increased supply and destroyed margins, especially in the lucrative corporate and business-to-business events segment.
A standalone event company works on an operating margin of 20-40 per cent on an event. A media firm may or may not make money on it since events are a tool for rate maintenance or hanging onto advertisers. Taken separately, events bring in just about 4-10 per cent of top line for most media companies. Therefore, the effort that goes into putting together a conference is zilch. The result is beginning to tell.
Notice how many conferences there are and how many hideously boring ones there are. A quick survey of how these are designed — the thoughts that went behind the topics, the speakers and why they were chosen, reveal why they are so boring. The people thinking about what should be discussed are organisers, not domain experts. So, for instance, a conference on health care or telecom is not put together by people with domain knowledge of the issues, the key people and the dynamics of the industry.
There is zero innovation in formats; a panel discussion is everyone’s favourite. Many of the speakers are sponsors. Others may or may not have been chosen because they have something to contribute to a topic. Usually speakers are not always briefed and anchors are rarely chosen for their subject or anchoring competency. The result is, panel discussions go way over the allotted time with panellists totally disregarding the audience or the other speakers and making 20-minute corporate presentations in a 45-minute discussion.
In fact, I have seen the head of one large media company make the same presentation at two different conferences. In another, one speaker was completely silent throughout a discussion. It later turned out that he was a key sponsor who insisted on being on the panel, because it had some nice names!
On most days there are more students in the audience, all invited to fill up the room. One broadcast CEO told me that he was happy not to be inundated by students asking questions or pushing CVs onto him at this conference. While my experience is limited to media conferences, friends in other industries (notably telecom and IT) have similar stories to share.
Little wonder then that getting senior people to speak at or attend conferences is getting harder. When was the last time you sat through a conference because you wanted to hear what was being said?
That is a pity. Done well, conferences can fill in the need for good content, especially in fast-growing industries where there is a paucity of it. Maybe making events a separate profit centre will work at pushing both investment and innovation in content.
