Q&A With Michael Bennett Group Director, Audience Development, Incisive Media

At Incisive Media, where events play a large role, pulling attendees deeper into the brand platform is a key focus.

By Bill Mickey
Monday, March 2, 2009

American Lawyer Media switched its corporate brand name to Incisive Media in July 2008, a year after being purchased by Incisive for $630 million. Nevertheless, many of the products kept their ALM branding, and as a particularly active company in the event business—they produce almost 600 per year, including Webinars and live events—the company relies on the strength of those brands to help drive attendee customers deeper into the platform.

This is one of the last remaining “walls” to come down for many media companies. Already merging digital and print customer files, event customers are, in many cases, still siloed outside of the other groups. Michael Bennett, Incisive’s audience development group director, talked with AD about how he’s beginning to centralize this key customer group and how he entices them deeper into the brand platform in the meantime.

How are you tying the print and online brands into the event brands from an audience perspective?
One of the bigger differences, and this is largely the case across the industry, a lot of the time your attendees are there for free, or if they have to pay they’re paying for workshops, and the point of that is to draw customers for the exhibitors and get them to walk the show floor. But the interesting thing is the direct correlation between the shows, the magazines and the Web sites. Every issue is like a trade show. People “walk” across the pages and the ads. But at the shows, people like to meet and network, which is similar to what you see on a social networking site.

Are your show attendees part of a centralized database?
In terms of how we try to look at that, we’re not particularly centralized across events and subscription sales, but we want to go in that direction because it is all audience. You want the whole audience.

So how do you get your people deeper into the brands?
We do that very well. We have a lot of strong brands. As an audience development person, I look at where brands can be extended into an event, whether it’s a trade show or a round table discussion, or even an award show. That’s done by closely linking the event with the host publication.

Can you give me some examples?
We’ll run interviews on the show floor and create podcasts out of them. Or we’ll follow with stories from the show in the magazine. It’s about drawing the show people into the publication and drawing the people from the magazine into the show.

It’s also about the offer. We have a marketing database with 600,000 individuals in it. How do I take those individuals that attended a show and figure out the best offer? One of our shows is technology-oriented, so it would seem appropriate to offer them a digital edition, then eventually bring them into other areas—other events or a book series.

Are you running into any hurdles with your centralized marketing approach, especially with event customers?
There’s a definite sense of turf protection. Everyone’s very concerned, and there seems to be more concern with email than with a mailing, but they want to make sure there’s enough governance in those names so if they’re getting hit, they can still sell the event effectively. But once you have those names in one place, you can better optimize.

Everybody is trying to get the most out of a name. You’re going to have people who go to a trade show and that’s all they want. That’s great, but for the publisher to be able to know who’s who, that’s the key. Then you can bring them across the brand, and it starts and ends with a customer database.