Why Custom Events Have Become the New Forum for Targeted Engagement
I had the opportunity to catch up with Kirk Laughlin yesterday in New York. Kirk is Vice President and Managing Director of Events for Ziff Davis Enterprise. With all the talk about online marketing concepts, sometimes we forget how robust the custom events arena is. Kirk was kind enough to sit down and share his thoughts to talk about content quality, audience delivery and why custom events are here to stay.
Joe at Junta42 - What do you do for Ziff Davis Enterprise (ZDE)?
Kirk at ZDE - I run the live events unit at ZDE which includes over 200 custom events and about a dozen editorial conferences annually. I manage a team of over a dozen event professionals, including editors, logistics leaders, audience delivery experts and project managers.
Joe - What’s your background?
Kirk - Most of my professional life has been as a B2B editor, largely in telecom and IT, both in the US and Asia. As a result, a big part of my focus here is to engage an audience with rich, quality content that they simply can’t obtain through any other media channel. I believe I am fortunate to have grown up in editorial at a time when “reader pain points” were explored through longer-form analysis. I truly believe live events have become the new forum for this deeper level of thought and investigation.
Joe - What is a custom event?
Kirk - That’s an interesting question, since so many of us in marketing and media know all about custom white papers or magazines, but what qualifies as a premium custom event may not be widely understood. Custom events, at least at Ziff Davis Enterprise, make the client-editorial partner relationship visible through targeted audience delivery, tightly managed content development and an emphasis on highly interactive presentations. We were first in this space among the big B2B tech media companies and have established a unique formula that has generated strong affinity among our senior IT level audience. We bring to these select, qualified audiences the best thought leadership from the client and match it with our own independent editorial and deliver it to a number of different forums– whether a custom roundtable, wine tasting, half-day summit or specialty program at a museum, a golf outing, or even a microbrewery!
Joe - Talk about the importance of engagement for a bit...
Kirk - Let’s be candid – our audience of IT professionals can smell a sales pitch a mile away – whether on a website, a printed piece or on stage. They are simply not willing to be subjected to two hours of “death by Powerpoint.” These people take time away from the office and fight traffic to be part of a two-way conversation, where they interact with peers and challenge the opinions of thought leaders. Debate and exchanging ideas are key requirements for all of our live events.
Joe - Who do you work with and what do these clients want from ZDE?
Kirk - We’re very proud of our client roster, having worked with virtually every large global technology hardware and software vendor and dozens of emerging and mid-tier players seeking to up-level their message to senior IT decision makers. Our client marketers turn to us for complete confidence in managing the entire lifecycle of the event process – from establishing the topic and framework – to acquiring registrants to delivering on the day of the show. We take a lot of pride in the quality of our leads, who are part of our database of four million web visitors, print subscribers and event attendees.
Joe - What are you doing to grow your business?
Kirk - Execution is everything in our business. We work in a time sensitive, client-focused environment where we must be fundamentally nimble and proactively find solutions to all kinds of little things that pop up. We’re in a public facing environment also and everything we do – from our logistical performance to quality of audience to strength of our content – all contribute back to our growth. Finally, our core mission is to find and deliver the precise type of attendee sought by our clients, running in a vertical category, like financial services, or horizontally, such as directors of IT.
Joe - What makes you different than other custom event providers?
Kirk - Earlier on in our evolution, we tried to borrow editors from the print titles to work on events and that didn’t work. Our competitors are still stuck in that model, and clients tell us that the lack of dedicated talent always shows up at some point in the process. Our entire team is customer service oriented, which to be honest, is more similar to the way an ad agency might operate than a longstanding media brand.
Joe - What’s next?
Kirk - We’re continuing to advance our integration of live event and virtual platforms and also partnering with selected large trade show organizers to better leverage our content expertise. I am especially excited to see that many sponsors are returning year after year to work with us on custom campaigns – in fact one just finished up a roadshow that started in the US and finished up in Paris and Bangalore!
Related Articles:
- How BuyerZone Creates Content - A Q&A with Jerry Sacco
- Holding a Custom Event vs. Exibiting at a Trade Show
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