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Hybrid Model of Remote and Flexible Working Might Be Plan C

by Media
“It is time to re-imagine what the workplace is for,” writes Sue Unerman, chief transformation officer at MediaCom, on Haymarket Media’s Campaign site. “If you took someone who might have known Charles Dickens and, through the power of time-travel, transported them to an office in 2019, undoubtedly they would be shocked and surprised by mobile phones, computers and the number of women around. They would be less shocked by the overall look of the place: lots of people with their heads down at desks working away, with some managers walking around occasionally to see what they were up to.”
Up until now, most of what we have read takes the form of, “when offices reopen…,” “people going back to normal…,” etc. But as spring turns to summer turns to fall, new conversations are taking place, more focused on the realities of the new normal—where people are not returning to offices until at least next summer and as some do, many others will continue to work from home.
I spoke to Erin Hallstrom last week, an incredible, do-everything person for Putman Media—SEO, podcasts, she created their groundbreaking Influential Women in Manufacturing program—and she told me that half of their staff had been working remotely before this, including her. And she’s always felt more productive.
“For 12 years, I’ve always had a digital job; at 10 o’clock at night I might have an idea [to write down]. If there’s a huge fire at a factory [at any time], someone needs to write about it. Why do I have to go into the office?”
Hallstrom believes, however, that there will still be a need for in-person collaboration. “I used to go in two days a week, with digital folks similar to me. On one of those days, three or four of us would sit down and put our heads together. The people I’ve been closest to, we haven’t seen each other, but, of course, we still have conversations. I miss you guys.”
I remember a couple years ago interviewing Cassandra Farrington, CEO of Marijuana Business Daily. They figured out quickly that some face-to-face communication was needed from their remote team and decided to require people coming in for about 20-25 hours a week. “The rest of the time, as I tell my team, I couldn’t care if you are working from the surface of the moon, so long as the work is getting done to high effectiveness.”
I think you’ll see some of that in the new normal, with even less hours required in the office, but still some hopes to get people in for a day or two a week—while also finding better, more participatory technology for those working remotely. Back in October, Dan Fink, managing director of Money-Media, who was already embracing working from home, said that they had “installed some large screens in conference rooms [to accommodate remote staff]. There’s a marked difference in how that person participates. And how the people feel; it feels like that person was in the meeting room. It really does make a significant difference.”
But as Unerman relates, having people come in to just put their head down and work won’t make sense anymore.
“A hybrid model of remote and flexible working, with offices re-imagined for the better is likely,” she writes. “These experiments are under way, and they do raise another question—what is office culture without everyone in the office?”
Here’s how she finishes. “In a great culture each person enhances each other’s performance. Helping the collective is rewarded. Without everyone in the office most of the time, leadership of a good culture is even more crucial. And in a good culture there are cultural leaders and advocates in every single seat, wherever that seat is located.”
In April, Steve Cody, founder and CEO of PR and marketing firm Peppercomm, spoke with Ragan’s Diane Schwartz, who credited him with building a team culture, steeped in tactical communications that especially helps in these precarious times.
“It will be a foreign experience; how do we ease that transition [back to the office]?” he asked then. “This idea of re-boarding—not onboarding, but bringing them back—we’re working on that now.”
Odds are he’s now working on Plan C.
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Getting Your Event Price Right May Take Some Experimenting and Adding or Shedding a Few Tiers

by Media
There was a famous play in 1924 titled What Price Glory by Maxwell Anderson and Laurence Stallings (made into a 1952 film). Almost 100 years later, the title of a popular play in the publishing world might be What Price Virtual Events.
Up until now, pricing for these pivoted affairs has varied from free to $25 to $75 to half to full price and tiers. ASAE—after starting with a fee to attend—and The Atlantic both made their major annual events free, but with several sponsors. I saw a big 25% off sale for one publisher’s annual event last week. (It started at around $495.)
Here are some of the variations I’ve seen.
Charge low, hope registrations are high. Christine Weiser, content/brand director, Tech & Learning, a Future plc division, said they charged just $25 for a big virtual event they put on, but more than 1,300 people signed on, a number they were very pleased with. “We had no idea,” she said. “Will they pay more? For education they do have professional development budgets.” She said if you do price low be ready for late signups.
Give options but offer a relatively small discount. The American College of Osteopathic Family Physicians (ACOFP) already had 1,800+ people registered for their main event before they had to pivot to virtual. But what they then offered could still be a blueprint for planning a virtual event—a 25% discount for staying registered. More than 50% of the registrants took that deal. Just over 44% asked for and received a full refund. And 100 people deferred their registration to the 2021 conference. If you can provide similar value to your attendees from the in-person event, then don’t be shy about pricing it that way, they advised. Remember, attendees are saving huge dollars on travel costs.
Use pricing tiers. For their FT Live event in October, the Financial Times is offering three tiers: The Knowledge Pass ($299) gives you access to the live talks and the Q&A and polls. The Professional Pass ($599) adds meet-the-journalist sessions, networking and video on demand. And the Group Pass ($3,000) multiplies everything by six people. For its NAB Show in October, the National Association of Broadcasters is offering a $75 Marketplace Pass. There are then content passes that vary in number of days and in pricing–$149 to $499.
Keep pricing similar but you need to deliver similar value. “There had been, at least back in March, a sense that virtual should be cheaper,” Heather Farley, COO of Access Intelligence, said at SIPA 2020 in June. “But people are starting to appreciate the value of what we bring [virtually]. It still has the value of live, and [brings] the experience to connect buyers and sellers. The connections that you’re bringing aren’t all of a sudden cheaper. And the same amount of time that goes into [putting together] live events goes into virtual events. We have to make sure we don’t give deep discounts.”
Keep pricing close to half but provide add-ons. “We feel that people are getting a lot more value [this year],” Jared Waters, training director for BVR, said about their recent Virtual Divorce Conference. “We can do a lot of things to add value to an event. So we figure a price point—[they are charging about half of what they charged last year]—and then throw a lot of value on it. It really is a great deal for our attendees.” That value included pre- and post-conference bonus sessions and a $200 credit on their registration to a future in-person event.
Cut prices in half but get more sponsors. TechCrunch’s Disrupt 2020, taking place this week, cut ticket and exhibition prices this year roughly in half, reports Digiday. Individual ticket prices start at $350, down from $695 last year, while exhibition passes cost $445, down from over $1,000 in 2019. There’s also a Disrupt Digital Pass for $45 that offers access to one stage of programming, but does not include CrunchMatch. (It’s amazing how many names there are for virtual networking now.) TechCrunch expects between 10,000 and 15,000 attendees, close to last year’s attendance figures. However, sponsorship revenue will be up YoY, thanks to more expensive packages (by about 6%).
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Innovation and Boldness Are Being Rewarded During Pandemic

by Media
“There are no ‘enemies’ of innovation, but it is a question of complacency and inertia, of innovation perhaps not being top of mind. I hear often ‘we’ve never done it that way’ or ‘we’ve always done it that way.’”
That quote comes from Kerstin Fröhlich, head of innovation management at German media company Spiegel Verlag in an article on FIPP’s World Media Congress on the What’s New in Publishing site. Fröhlich spoke about how the German media power is “baking innovation into its organizational culture. Despite everyone agreeing that innovation is something they want to prioritize, its value must be consistently reiterated.”
An initial response to publishing life in the pandemic might have been to play down innovation and go with what you know, but what we know has been upended. The more I read, it’s the companies that are being bold and innovative that are doing well.
Here are some successful ways I’ve come across.
Reach out into new areas. Future plc, a member of our Connectiv group, has just announced profits of around $110 million for 2020, up from operating profits of $68.7 million in 2019. How have they done it? “[Future] stands out in its confidence and performance,” independent media analyst Alex DeGroote told Digiday. “Some of its products skew towards gaming—like Techradar—and gaming has gone nuts in lockdown.” Speaking at FIPP, Claire MacLellan, COO at Future, said: “We set out to become global and to have multiple revenue streams. In acquisitions”—they recently acquired Marie Claire among other brands—“we look for ways of bringing in expertise that align with the strategy and really add to the business’s strengths.”
Come up with new event ideas. These event boxes are taking off. Donna Jefferson of Chesapeake Family told me that she is planning to mail out an “event box” to attendees to a virtual event they are holding in October—possibly with sponsorships on both the inside and outside of the box. Bustle Digital Group has started giving away product kits ahead of some of its sponsored events. These kits include items like yoga mats—for its virtual yoga retreat—and lip glosses in order to make for a more immersive experience, but also to get attendees more engaged with the sponsoring brands. The event kits were complementary for the first 150 attendees to RSVP.” Always good to set a limit like that.
Strive for interactivity. This is a different industry but… Geffen “Stayhouse” (formerly Playhouse) in Los Angeles has a new show which follows the hugely successful The Present—which featured those mailed event boxes. “Inside the Box takes us into the exhilarating world of games with New York Times crossword constructor David Kwong. Twenty-four guests will have a front-row seat to an entirely interactive show of puzzles, while David regales them with stories of the most extraordinary puzzle-makers throughout history.” Q&As, roundtables, chat rooms, trivia games, polling… whatever you can do to be interactive, do it.
Adapt your content to audience needs. “There have been real challenges with COVID-19, but the significant point is that our audiences required something different through this time, so we had to pivot quite quickly to create content that mattered to them during some of the most difficult times of their lives,” said MacLellan. The pandemic has augmented the role of the media in people’s lives, and “scale brings opportunity,” she added. Jared Waters, training director for BVR who planned their Virtual Divorce Conference this week, said this is “not a personal growth year. It’s, ‘What do I need to know to survive?’ It’s all COVID-19 related.” Content from people in your community on the frontlines has been hugely rewarding these last few months.
Use virtual’s strengths. I just saw that Mario Garcia, who was a hit at our BIMS conference last year, keynoted WAN IFRA’s Asian Media Leaders eSummit in July. And why not. This year, a trip across the globe to speak has become a trip to your home office to speak. Think big for your speakers. “One of the interesting things about working from home [is] that we could dive in, get on a phone call very quickly and agree that we want to do this and we don’t have time to do 100 meetings,” said Scott Havens, chief growth officer and global head of strategic partnerships at Bloomberg Media U.S. “Hopefully this moment will be a breeding ground for new innovations to connect digital and live in a much more profound way than we do today.”
Did someone say, “hybrid”?
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Sponsors, Ads, Lead Gen, Subs – These Podcasts Are Leading to Revenue

by Media
In a podcast last year for Putman Media’s International Women in Manufacturing series, Christine LaFave Grace spoke with Nandita Gupta, process controls engineer at Georgia-Pacific and a 2019 IWIM honoree. They talk about Gupta’s experience entering the workforce with a mentor, and “how she hopes to provide new engineers with a similar or better experience through a formal mentoring program at Georgia Pacific.”
An article on the Media Voices Podcast site last week gave eight ways publishers are bringing in revenue from podcasts. Number eight was promoting other revenue streams. “Whether it’s mentioning an upcoming event or referring to other products across a portfolio, a bit of self-promotion can help make podcast audiences—who are often a little different to online or print ones—aware of what else you offer. A podcast audience is a particularly strongly engaged user base, and is likely to be extra responsive to messages that fit their interests.”
Through IWIM, Putman Media has brought in significant sponsorship dollars, and happily, the popular program continues. So including one of the honorees as a speaker on a podcast amplified the program’s success.
Here are other ways podcasts are bringing in revenue.
Selling subscriptions. At the beginning of the pandemic, MedLearn Media increased their crisis coverage by boosting their popular podcast, Monitor Mondays—which just celebrated its 10-year anniversary—from 30 to 60 minutes. “Because of the pandemic, there was so much confusion to deal with and just a tangle of regulations,” said Chuck Buck, publisher of MedLearn’s RACmonitor. “So we would have 30 minutes of content with our regular panelists, and then field the questions, which just kept coming on a daily basis. We saw big audience numbers. Wanting to leverage that and create more engagement led us to doctors on frontlines dealing with these issues.” This has helped MedLearn Media sell more subscriptions.
Advertisements. According to the Media Voices article, revenue for The Economist from podcast ads increased by 50% in 2018 across its five podcasts. They use hosting and analytics platform Acast to serve podcast ads. “There has been so much demand for sponsorship that it more than pays for itself,” Economist’s head of digital strategy, Tom Standage, told NiemanLab. “The big change is commercial, which is that we had advertisers who started to come to us last year and say, ‘We are only going to buy two kinds of ads next year: print and podcast. What have you got?’”
Sponsors once a series gets going. Lessiter Media has enjoyed success with podcasts. They recently reposted one of their best ones with this intro: “In this episode of the Precision Farming Dealer podcast, ‘How We Did It: Conversations with Ag Equipment’s Entrepreneurs’ (sponsored by Osmundson Manufacturing), Executive Editor Dave Kanicki sat down with Frank, Pam and Mike Lessiter of Lessiter Media. Osmundson then gets another shout-out in the podcast’s opening.
Sponsors from the start. Some publishers have developed podcasts from scratch alongside a sponsor, Media Voices reported. “Mail Metro Media launched The Wellness Connection podcast in association with Pukka Tea, in order to leverage podcasting’s appeal to younger audiences. ‘Knowing that 71% of our audience leads a healthy lifestyle, we seized the opportunity to create a podcast and content series that would promote the product, while providing the health education that our readers love,’ Mail Metro Media said in a case study.” The series resulted in 50,000 downloads over the six episodes, with nearly 1 in 3 listeners buying Pukka teabags or searching for more information.
Good lead generation. Both Spidell and EB Medicine use their SIPAward-winning podcasts in this manner. “It’s a big lead gen and brand-building effort, and also adds value for our subscribers,” said EB Medicine CEO Stephanie Williford. [We] have “seen an increase in our renewal rates and revenue since we’ve launched it. We think it has played a significant role based on feedback we get.” One move that Spidell does to give subscribers more value is to offer them free access to transcripts. They have also done a Salvation Army Listener Drive where they contribute money for every new name that people send them.
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Survey Recommends Regional Events, Safe Designs and Better Hybrid Plans

by Media
“Respondents are using more than two dozen event technology platforms—a large portion are using Zoom as one of the components. Some reported deliberately keeping it simple by using a familiar webinar platform, while others reported using as many as five platforms.”
That’s from the business event planners group PCMA’s recently issued COVID-19 Recovery Dashboard Survey. It shows how there’s still no one solution for virtual events yet. So while 61% of the event planner respondents have been satisfied with the platforms they’ve used, most also said that there’s lots of room for improvement.
Finding one platform with the ability to perform all of the functions that planners are looking for was one of the most common reasons given by the 39% who said they were not satisfied with event technology. “There needs to be a virtual event platform that integrates—not links out—to other platforms besides Zoom,” one respondent wrote.
Here are some more conclusions from the survey:
Digital events are okay but… While designing digital experiences still matters, more respondents cited as more important the need to know how to design live experiences for the post-COVID era. One supplier said the new cleaning protocols need to be shouted out more.
More thought needs to be done for hybrid events. While everyone says that hybrid is the future, only one-third of the respondents said that they are seeking broadcasting facilities in their site-selection process.
More customizable platforms. “There’s not enough customizability in the off-the-shelf platform we have,” one planner wrote. “We need better functionality to host multi-session, half-day events with many speakers and panelists. It’s time for a more seamless experience and higher quality. We are now all past the newness and need better solutions.”
Connecting event participants is still a work in progress. “The networking option in tools today is very basic,” wrote one respondent. “We haven’t been able to replace the social aspect of our in-person events in a virtual format. We want match-making technology on a budget.” Rafat Ali, CEO of Skift, is more optimistic on this front. “There is so much left to do on online matchmaking, the biggest aspect of conventions and exhibitions, but it will happen,” he wrote this week. “Much like online/mobile dating was unthinkable until the 2000s and then the matchmaking aspect of it moved completely to digital channels, so could the matchmaking part of the events industry, in fact it would necessarily be lot more efficient that way.” We’ll see.
Think regional. “I think smaller and regional events will make a comeback before larger/national/international events,” wrote one respondent. “We fully expect most of our events to carry a hybrid solution going forward.” SIPA’s virtual chapter meetings have actually been made more interesting by the ability of people outside the region to “attend.” Will be interesting to see how we can capture the energy injection moving forward.
Pricing, pricing, pricing. The cost of virtual platforms “is still driving what is possible,” wrote one respondent. “Good ones are too expensive for my clients so, as such, they agree to accept a poorer virtual event. There are plenty of apps that have web platforms, but streaming isn’t integrated yet… There’s a hole in the market for $6K to $10k solutions.” What’s interesting is that pricing to attend virtual events is also all over the place. ASAE—after starting with a fee to attend—and The Atlantic both made their major annual events free. I saw a big 25% off sale for one publisher’s annual event this week. (It started at around $495.)
Will there be pent-up demand to meet in person post-pandemic? Opinions vary. “Planners are less inclined to think that there will be a pent-up demand for all groups to meet face-to-face, while suppliers are more optimistic.” A new GES survey says that 88% of respondents are open to attending trade shows in person, with 65% demanding some form of mitigation to attend and 23% preferring no mitigation tactics. That sounds a bit overly optimistic. GES’s research… underscores how critical it is to understand the attendee base and their risk perceptions to plan event design and mitigation strategies to attendee needs,” said Wendy Gibson, GES Global CMO.