Events are on my mind. This week we have two; The TRB Morning Salon tomorrow morning will focus on practical AI strategies with executives from People Inc, The Wall Street Journal, Politico and more. Thanks to Beehiiv and ProRata for sponsoring. We are hosting a private breakfast on Thursday to discuss audience strategies. Thanks to Omeda for supporting.
Then, next week, we’re partnering with WordPress VIP on May 20 in NYC for the third edition of the Media Product Forum. We have a few spots left for qualified publisher-side executives. Apply to attend.
On the virtual front, we have two coming up:
I’m hosting a TRB Expert Session with Beehiiv CEO Tyler Denk on May 19 to discuss what AI is actually revealing about audience behavior, where it creates blind spots, and how media companies can use it to build deeper relationships without losing the editorial instincts that make them worth reading in the first place. Sign up to join this interactive discussion
Omeda is releasing its annual State of Audience report. I’m hosting a TRB Expert Session on May 21 with Omeda vp of client experience Tony Napoleone to discuss the findings, including why there’s a gap between the strategic imperative of audience-first strategies and publishers' self-assessment of how successful they’ve implemented those strategies. Sign up to join this interactive discussion.
Next up: Cannes Lions, where The Rebooting will have a series of live podcasts and gatherings throughout the week. Get in touch with Dustin Marucci to discuss partnership opportunities: [email protected].
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Double majoring in events
I wrapped up my trip to Marrakech with a trip to a traditional Moroccan restaurant that featured a belly dancer. After she finished her dance, she disappeared into the back, only to reappear a few minutes later to reassume her position at the cash register. These days, you have to be a double major.
That’s why publishers are increasingly events companies, whether by choice or necessity. IRL is emerging as an AI hedge. Look at Apollo plowing $1.5 billion into a bet on B2B events companies Questex and Emerald.
Axios just wrapped up an activation at F1 in Miami. It wasn’t alone. Bloomberg House was in South Beach. Next up for Axios: the Monaco Grand Prix next month. Axios COO Alison Murphy told me it now does 200 events per year. The consensus view is that many media assets are best monetized by getting the right people in the room.
The old criticism that events don’t scale has gone out the window. The scaled alternatives are worse. Nobody is building a digital media business around search and display. Even Daily Mail gossip tends to be behind a paywall these days. If Daily Mail is throwing in the towel on pageviews,
Vice News is now a branded content vehicle for Adobe Acrobat. Vox Media is being dismantled, with its website assets looking at a one-way ticket to the glue factory. BuzzFeed’s next chapter is under the ownership of Byron Allen, who is paying $120 million for the assets. Allen will likely run a lean-and-mean version of BuzzFeed, which will clear the decks for new owners the old fashioned way: with job cuts.
Subscriptions have a ceiling, as Substack appears to be discovering. The Atlanta Journal Constitution got about 20% to CEO Andrew Morse’s 500,000 paid subscribers goal. Morse is now leaving. Killing print wasn’t enough.
It’s easy to feel pangs of nostalgia for the heady era of digital media that’s now collapsed. Gawker nostalgia still runs deep among its alumni. Nick Denton is right that the demolition of Gawker Media was beneficial in one way: The $135 million he got for the website assets from Univision in 2016 would be far lower had he held them. Those same assets were sold off by G/O Media for a fraction of that over the past three years.
Vox emerged as something of the winner, to stretch the term, nearing a $300 million deal with James Murdoch’s Lupa Systems for Vox’s podcast network and New York magazine. That price, while just 30% of its peak 2015 valuation, dwarfs the BuzzFeed outcome, not to mention the Vice disaster, thanks to its podcast network’s margins. The podcast network generated $20 million in profits on $60 million in revenue while New York generated less than half those profits on $100 million in revenue, according to Puck’s reporting
The answer for wringing more value out of New York lies in…. events. Murdoch’s Lupa Systems already owns Tribeca Film Festival and Art Basel. He apparently wants to create an event that is a mashup of TED, Venice Biennale, Burning Man and the World’s Fair. As Dylan Byers noted, it’s very Kendall Roy but makes sense in this media moment.
New York is a prestige media asset, still very culturally resonant, but as Puck founder Jon Kelly pointed out, it appeals more to the restive creative underclass than the Boss Class. The market incentivizes flattering the egos and interests of the rich and powerful, not in tweaking them. The oligarchs are sharp elbowed but sensitive souls. I don’t know if there’s a lane anymore for something like the Code and All D conference, where tech CEOs would be grilled in red chairs. Mark Zuckerberg isn’t going to sweat through his shirt again.
Politico’s developing a new playbook for its Playbook franchise, which incredibly is nearly 20 years old. Politico executive editor for Europe Kate Day broke it down for me in the latest episode of The Rebooting Show. Politico is taking Playbook global with new editions in Madrid and Canberra to complement the flagship DC Playbook and versions in London, Brussels, Berlin and Paris. And, of course, events. Playbook’s twist on the house format is a pub it pops up at gatherings of the powerful, such as the Munich Security Conference. A London Playbook Live is planned for July, a belated foray into convening to build out the franchise.
Digital media operates a lot like a children’s soccer game. A clump of kids follow the ball around the field. Events are that ball now. The thesis that events are a far better vehicle than website advertising is solid. Delivering real audience and sponsor value is another thing. Look at the assets Apollo bought: Questex and Emerald operate in unglamorous sectors like insurance and biomanufacturing, bringing together a buy and a sell side.
Trade shows are an ancient form of media – and one of the grimiest. Many publishers dragged into the events business will turn to live journalism and miss the assignment. The most lucrative events are marketplaces. I loved Pop Up Magazine, but the business didn’t work. Getting public radio listeners in a room isn’t the same as a room of CEOs.
Many media gravitate to the high end. Everyone wants to create the next Allen & Co conference. It’s very crowded at the top end of the market. Jeffrey Katzenberg is in the events business. He’s got Oprah, Justin Bieber and Lionel Richie. Michael Milken is a competitor here too. He’s got Steve Mnuchin, Shaq and Tom Brady.
I’ve spent most of my career in an events model. By far the hardest part I found was operating almost two different businesses. It helped to have events as part of the company’s DNA. I would explain to anyone joining how the company made money and why events were the Main Thing, not a side hustle. I ended up spending as many as 30 days a year in the resort industrial complex, trying to edit stories while people ate breakfast in robes. Events were my full-time part-time job, and I developed a strong aversion to turndown service.
Integrating events operations in an editorial organization is hard, particularly if it isn’t part of the DNA. I saw that with Business Insider, which never committed to events because its original leadership hated events. BI is now very much in the events business. It’s harder to graft events onto a pageview model. Horses for courses.
This is an underrated advantage for Semafor, which is outwardly an events-oriented media business. I rarely even see ads in its newsletters. Events are driving that business. It is looking to build on the success of its World Economy (summit) with a new franchise focused on the nexus of Silicon Valley and other power centers this fall. In this kind of a model, the journalism Semafor produces is in service of the events. That can be a hard pill to swallow for journalists. You need to fast talk about flywheels.
My piece of advice for the intrepid entering journalism is to get comfortable being a performer as part of the job. You will be commoditized otherwise. I forced myself to do events early in my career, even though I found public speaking nerve wracking and absolutely not why I went into the profession. I wanted to be left alone in my cubicle to write stories. But there’s leverage in working the register and doing the belly dancing.
At nearly two decades old, Politico's Playbook was an innovator in the now-familiar daily agenda-setting newsletter. Playbook is now more than a DC staple. It has editions in five countries with two more on the way. And it is looking to adopt a franchise model with multimedia and events extensions. Politico executive editor for Europe Kate Day joined the show to discuss the formula that makes Playbook work: the mix of exclusive reporting, service journalism, and a tone that feels like a letter from your smartest friend in politics. She talks about what stays consistent across cultures, what has to change, and why the Brussels political bubble turns out to be just as full of compelling characters as Capitol Hill.
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