Is Your Event Profit Proof?

What's the "inconvenient truth" about selling online?

You'll go broke, says blogger Steven Dennis.

"Only a handful of venture capital-funded “pure-plays” have (or will ever) make money," Dennis says.

The rest (including Amazon) operate at below-average margins for the retail industry, amassing huge financial losses year upon year.

Of themselves, free shipping and liberal return policies guarantee these companies will remain "profit proof," Dennis says.

Worse yet: the cost to acquire a customer. When it comes to customer acquisition, web retailers suffer "diseconomies of scale," Dennis says.

"Many online brands attract their first tranche of customers relatively inexpensively, through word of mouth or other low cost strategies," he says.

But then, marketing costs start to escalate.

"As brands seeking growth need to reach a broader audience, they typically start to pay more and more to Facebook, Google and others to grab the customer’s attention and force their way into the customer’s consideration set," he says.

"Early on customers were acquired for next to nothing; now acquisition costs can easily exceed more than $100 per customer."

The higher the acquisition costs, the lower the gross margin on the resulting incremental sales, a dynamic that eventually lands the business in hardship.

Whenever I plan an attendee acquisition campaign for an event producer, I budget the marketing efforts using, give or take a few bucks, the same amount of money Dennis mentions—$100 per attendee.

Want 500 attendees? Plan to spend at least $50,000.

Some event producers balk—How can it cost so much?

But after more than three decades in the event-promotion business, working on events large and small and in a variety of industries and professions, I've found it a real-world rule-of-thumb.

And most producers who spend that kind of money on marketing can, in fact, run a successful event and go home with a tidy profit.

The "diseconomies of scale" only enter the picture when registration fees are low ; or when producers discount and give away registrations; or—the worst case—when admission to the event is free.

Of course, attendees are a necessary evil: without any, exhibitors have been known to complain. But they need not have "negative value" when registration fees are low (or nonexistent).

Attendees can be little ambling profit centers.

How?

Sell attendees livestreaming.

Events are cornucopias of content. When you capture that content on video, you can sell it to attendees for post-event consumption. None of them can be in two places at once, so none can possibly imbibe all the content you offer. What's more, every attendee loves to share good content with colleagues "back at the ranch." Why deny them that pleasure?

And why make your event "profit proof," when it can be enormously the opposite?  "Back-of-the-room" sales of livestreaming come cheaply, because attendees are already in your "store." The gross margin on the incremental sales you make will come at an extremely low rate—almost for free, if you already videotape content for projection purposes, as most producers do.

Want more food for thought? Check out my posts "Conference Planners: There's No Sin in Syndication" and "Just be Willing to Believe."

NOTE: CEIR reports that average attendee-acquisition costs currently range from $14 to $20 per person. But I don't believe the figures are reliable. My own past research, done in the 2000s, showed acquisition costs to range from $68 to $80 per person. CEIR's report, nonetheless, can help any producer get a grip on event-industry spending trends, and is worth studying.

Event Producers: Bodies at Rest

A body in motion stays in motion; a body at rest stays at rest.

— Isaac Newton

Most B2B events are tired, creaky and ridiculous. And it's no accident.

Most event producers are lazy.

Decades of easy money have made them that way.

That's not to say they're the only lazy businesspeople you'll encounter.

Laziness surrounds us—and runs rampant in industries where easy money once was made. Banking. Stock trading. Real estate. IT. Retail. Advertising.

Ad exec Mitch Joel—who calls laziness not sloth, but self-approval—laments what he sees in his own industry. "There is no doubt that certain strategies and tactics work, but it's the lazy mentality that has got me down these days," he says.

Folks in advertising, Joel says, are allergic to "long, hard and disruptive work." They're unwilling to wake up in the morning and say, "Today is a great day! We're going to destroy what doesn't work, test more things, tweak others, build newer metrics, and keep at it."

You might say they need some woke.

A lot of businesspeople need some woke. Instead, they're imbibing hype.

Hype is particularly dazzling to event producers, says event planner Warwick Davies, who's down on the hype-of-the-month: event tech.

Event tech promises panaceas, but really offers little more than quick-fix "gimmicks," Davies observes.

Gimmicks won't resurrect a dead event.

"Sure, there are some tools and processes which will make your event more efficient and easier," Davies says, "but none will fix an event which is poorly conceived, researched, and not wanted by your prospective audience."

No silver bullet can substitute for long, hard. disruptive work.

"If your philosophy about how to create a valuable event is wrong, there’s no amount of technology that is going to save you," he says.

Civil Disobedience

Thou shalt not follow a multitude to do evil.

— Exodus 23:2

Every day I run into someone so turned off by Trump she's dropped out.

Her diversion of choice varies—job, kids, pets, prayer, TV, travel, sports, shopping, art, literature, Facebook, food, alcohol, pills, joints—but not the feeling: "I can't take any more."

No news here.

The vast majority of Frenchmen also did nothing to resist the German Occupiers in 1940. They played instead the apolitical attentisme—the “waiting game."

Not to sound self-righteous, but I was raised by teachers who made us read.

Not only the Bible, but the Constitution. And not only those things, but Paine's "Common Sense" and Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" (the 1849 essay that inspired Gandhi and King).

Thoreau, you'll recall, "raged against the machine," which in his day had invaded Mexico to protect the property rights of Southern slaveholders.

He spent a night in the county jail for resisting (by refusing to pay taxes).

"All machines have their friction," he wrote after his parole. "But when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer."

Thoreau's message was clear: don't lend yourself to the wrongs you condemn.

Resist. Rebel. Revolutionize.

"If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth—certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine."

What's your plan for civil disobedience?

You need not copy Thoreau; French Resistors provide many models:

• Heiress Comtesse Lily Pastré hid Jewish musicians in her chateau.
  
  
• Gallery owner Jeanne Bucher held shows of the Jewish artists most despised by Hitler.
  
  
• Mother Cécile Rol-Tanguy delivered secret messages hidden in her baby's carriage.
  
  
• Teenager Jacqueline Marié smuggled political leaflets in her ankle socks.
  
  
• Musician Vivou Chevrillon played her violin every day outside the fence of a Nazi concentration camp.

Did You Know Rachel Carson was Once a Copywriter?

Armed with a bachelors in English and a masters in biology, Rachel Carson landed a temp job in 1935 at the US Bureau of Fisheries, where she earned $19.25 a week writing scripts for a 52-week radio series, Romance under the Waters.

Her boss, Elmer Higgins, and his all-male staff called her scripts "seven-minute fish tales."

But a year later, Higgins promoted Carson to junior biologist, one of only two women in full-time professional jobs at the Bureau in 1936; within 10 years, she became editor-in-chief of all agency publications.

Carson, however, wasn't content only to shill for the government.

Through books and magazine articles published on the side, Carson also gained a large public following. Her 1952 book, The Sea Around Us, stayed on The New York Times' best-seller list for 81 weeks, cementing her reputation for making scientific research vivid.

Her 1962 book, Silent Spring, became a classic.

Hoodwinked

On the comeback trail, disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker hawks high-priced “survival buckets," each one filled with freeze-dried nibblies guaranteed to come in handy at the Rapture.

You have to wonder where Bakker―who fleeces his flock of shut-ins for millions annually―got his gift for hoodwinking.

To hoodwink means, of course, to pull the wool over someone's eyes. But the word comes from falconry, not shepherdry.

To calm a falcon―with eyesight 10 times sharper than a human's―until it reaches the hunting spot, a falconer covers the bird's head with a leather hood.

In a word, the hunter hoodwinks the falcon.

The term is redundant: both of its roots mean to blindfold.

In the 16th century, hood meant to scarf; wink meant to close both eyes.

A 1610 translation of St. Augustine’s City of God included the sentence, "Let not the faithless therefore hoodwink themselves in the knowledge of nature."

Hoodwink came into popular use thanks not to St. Augustine's translator, but to an amateur falconer named William Shakespeare, who used the word over 50 times in his plays.

HAT TIP: Thanks to Ann Ramsey for inspiring this post. Falconry has given us many common words and expressions, including under my thumb and wrapped around my little finger―expressions Jim Bakker no doubt uses daily.