Krishnaveni K
Director - Sales & Marketing
12th Sept 2018!! We hosted a round table conference on how publishers can “Achieving a Return on Investment from Content and Data Enrichment Projects” in London.
Significant efforts and thought were put into planning, conceptualizing & hand-curating the program. The event was by invitation-only, Round Table meeting for Senior Publishing Leaders to coincide with this year’s ALPSP International Conference at Beaumont House in Old Windsor.
Next obvious question: WHERE TO HOST IT? WHAT’S THE OBVIOUS CHOICE?
We smartly positioned this event to save on cost & gained multifold:
- Capitalizing on international clientele, who were anyway going to attend ALPSP 2018 annual meet would help in drawing the right attention for MC’s event
- Tagging along with ALPSP (and our hard Negotiating skills 🙂 ) got us access to the venue at a highly discounted price !! double dhamaka 🙂
Combining MC’s Round Table with another internationally acclaimed conference, was indeed a strategic and an ingenious decision. If not for this coincidence, Sigh!! Forget hosting a conference in London ever – the cost of hosting an event of this scale would skyrocket and MC has never invested nor will invest in “crowd-pleasing shows”. Cost, pragmatism, biggest bang for buck and customer first still remained the focus.
Now, how do we get people to attend the “Round Table”? the focus is, of course, not to please and plead our existing clients but to attract new potential targets. Moving on to the most challenging task…
- Conceptualizing – why should one attend this meeting and listen to us?
- What should be the right size of this meeting?
- The format of the meeting? Topics of relevance to the industry?
- What impact do we want to create? And what take-home message?
- Who should be the speakers? And why?
- What branding do we do around the event?
- Target Market?
Pondered through a zillion questions & after months of brainstorming, freezing on a plan – We decided to get a consultant on board to execute our plan. And the plan was to tackle the next big potential 30-40 customers of ours, lock them in the room, literally and show that what we got to offer, without us “blowing our own trumpet”. WE DECIDED THAT WE WILL NOT SPEAK AND LET THE GOOD WORK WE DID IN THE PAST, SPEAK FOR US!!
We lined up some speakers, who appreciate our good work, saw the potential of working with us and got them to talk about, why they chose to work with MOLECULAR CONNECTIONS. Isn’t the best marketing always “word of mouth”?? and thanks to high-quality work done by MC family – our credibility within the industry has always been “top notch”.
BD team generated a list of 250+ targeted leads including highly relevant companies, decision makers within those companies, invited them to attend the Round Table.
Few months into the campaign – we had about 5 attendees. Nervously, I started panicking and chasing the consultant make a splash and get more people on board and mid-august – we were still at 15 attendees.
Since this was our first international conference, we did not want to make a public announcement, which restricted event promotion and hence registrations. This was the challenge we decided to work with.
Mission chase!! run till you hit the targeted 40 attendees. Note, this was a free event for attendees and still it was challenging for us to get them on board. You can only imagine what it takes to put together a paid event. With just few weeks for the conference, sever personal calls were made to explain prospective attendees from across the globe “why this is one of its kind an event one should not miss”. After multiple follow ups, late night calls, email blasts J, registrations started flowing in and at the end of sept, we were over booked for the round table. We were thrilled to see the positive result and hard work paying off.
Some really exciting publishers and attendees came on board & we were short of space at Buckingham 4 (that’s where the conference happened). Isn’t this a nice problem to have? we sadly had to turn down a few registrations due to space constraints.
Speakers:
Max Gabriel
Max Gabriel joined Taylor & Francis Group, the Academic Publishing Division of Informa, as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in 2015, where he is responsible for technology strategy, delivery and operations for the Group.
Max was previously CTO of Pearson India and Africa, where he was responsible for digital transformation. In this role, he successfully launched the company’s first tablet-based learning product in India.
Before joining Pearson, Max held senior technology leadership roles at Diageo, Pfizer and JP Morgan Chase. During his time at Diageo, Max led the Global Marketing Automation programme to deliver a cross-brand consumer engagement platform. At Pfizer, as Chief Enterprise Architect, he led the strategy and architecture for a sales transformation programme to implement a multi-channel customer-centric sales model in North America.
Max began his career as a programmer in the financial services industry, having completing his B.S. degree in computer science from M.S University, India. Max actively mentors and advises several tech start-ups in the media and education domain.
David Smith
David is currently Head of Product Solutions at the Institution of Engineering and Technology (The IET) where he’s responsible for most of the ‘techie’ things to do with scholarly product development. When not involved in scholarly publishing, he likes to indulge in astronomy, tinkering with things, and restoring a 1960 1600 MGA that currently resides in his garage. He’s not on Facebook, but he does tweet (a lot) (@drs1969).
After he received his D.phil in Molecular Biology from the University of York, David decided to join scholarly publishing. Currently, he is a technology strategist with strong background in developing profitable digital products for research and academic markets. He has more than 15 years of experience in leveraging technology, project management, strategic thinking, relationship building innovations and profitability.
Jonathan Griffin
Jonathan is the Managing Director at IFIS, a scientific publisher which specializes in food and nutrition. Jonathan has been developing digital services for the academic and regulatory markets for the last 15 years. He has worked for Thomson Reuters and the British Standards Institution, where he was Head of Market Development.
Most recently, he worked at the Publishers Licensing Society, where he developed new licensing tools that won two innovation awards in 2017. He has an MBA from Edinburgh Business School.
Jonathan Hevenstone
Jonathan is the Senior Vice President of Business Development at Atypon.
Jonathan is responsible for setting and executing Atypon’s market and sales strategy as well as managing the sales and business development team. He has over fifteen years of diverse experience in the publishing and publishing services industries, including seven years in a sales and business development leadership role managing relationships with the world’s largest publishers and online retailers.
Jonathan holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Dartmouth College and a Master of Arts degree in English Literature from New York University.
Finally, On the 6th of Sept, we were event ready ahead of time!!
I cannot thank Sunil, sushmitha (from BD team) Vidya, Lokanath (from IT and MC Labs) enough in getting the material all well packed and safe to London & administration team for their support in helping find the right vendor to work with. All 40 bags, program material, feedback forms, discussion charts, every tiny material was personalized with the attendee names engraved on it. THE MC WAY 🙂
Attendees started walking in at 8.15am. Even before we & the breakfast was ready:-P
Registrations followed by quick networking meet and greet session started bang at 8.30am.
Andrea Powel, the consultant we chose to work with did the scene setting for the day and announced the format of the event once again and the discussions begun J
This special event focused exclusively on how scholarly publishers are creating commercial value from their data and content assets, either through new product development, operational efficiency or adding value to existing resources – including the challenges of extracting new value from archival content, the appropriate use of artificial intelligence in product development and the importance of data modelling and ontologies.
The meeting was structured to facilitate in-depth interaction with peers from across the sector, by means of detailed case study presentations and “Chatham House” style discussions on topics of particular interest or concern. Attendees were invited to share their concerns and key challenges in order to benefit from the insights and experiences of others around the table.
We concluded with Jignesh’s closing remarks “We had an amazing line-up of speakers, intellectually stimulating discussions and the round table did generate clear takeaways on some pressing industry issues”
Setting up productive conference discussions requires a well-defined strategy. From venue location to presentation materials, each detail can impact the atmosphere and the outcome of a roundtable. We embarked on a journey through the best approaches to setup this event and launched the inaugural edition successfully. We did a similar international event for our IPR business on – 2nd Nov 2017 with 150 participants attending the conference from across geographies. Hoping this trend continues and we diversify hosting many such impactful events for MC’s businesses in the future.
‘Thank you Jignesh for the opportunity, reliance & allowing me a free hand in planning & executing this event, while you stood behind like a pillar of support & guidance’.
It was incredibly satisfying to receive positive & overwhelming feedback from the attendees and to have put up such a high quality program. Icing of the cake was the standing ovation at the end of the conference for creating “a forum such us this” & us ‘MC’ taking lead on bringing global publishers to one intellectual consortium. Nothing of this sort existed prior and we remain the pioneers in curating community beneficial events. A clear showcase of MC thinking ahead of time & being “Thought Leaders in the industry” !!
A glimpse of the feedback from the attendees about the event
More than 90% of the participants reviewed the event, its contents, format, speakers, Topics chosen for the round table nothing less than “excellent to Very good”
For those who wish to catch glimpses of all that I narrated in action – do check out this video:
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