Welcome to The Publisher Newsletter, by Media Voices, your weekly newsletter profiling the people and products powering publishing.

Highlights from Flashes & Flames’ Monetising B2B Information & Events conference

It was standing room only at the inaugural Monetising B2B conference, organised by Flashes & Flames, at London’s historic Stationers’ Hall on 20th May. Peter and Esther went along to fly the flag for Media Voices.

The conference was focused not on the difference between pureplay events and information companies, but on the data-fuelled intersection and growth potential between them. The breadth and depth of the day’s content echoed the mission of Flashes & Flames and of the change underway in B2B companies in the era of AI and revenue diversification.

In this episode, we bring you some of the key highlights and discussions from the stage across the day, focusing on three hot-topic areas:

• AI’s profit potential: How B2B’s application of AI is moving to commercial reality;

• Data with purpose: Why proprietary data can define the future of B2B;

• Events re-imagined: From trade shows to festivalisation – why the future of events belongs to those who curate memorable (and valuable) experiences.

Here are some extracts from the episode, or you can download the full event report at Flashes & Flames.

AI’s profit potential

One of the hot topics at the conference was, unsurprisingly, AI. For an industry long preoccupied with protecting intellectual property, the conversations marked a start pivot – from defending the rights to content to deploying it strategically through AI, as Flashes & Flames’ founder Colin Morrison noted in his report.

AI consultant Paul Hood moderated a session with FT Strategies’ Adriana Whiteley and Alvarez & Marsal’s Amir Malik led a discussion on how AI is already reshaping the commercial logic of B2B media.

“Now people are starting to do more about scraping and launching a product, that’s when you have to start thinking a bit more carefully,” Whitley said. “It’s all very nice to experiment and do lots of sandboxes and play around with different things that are not really designed to be deployed at scale. And when you actually deploy a scale, you realise that half of your users are actually trying to break it.

“But when you start investing in it seriously, and you think about that as a essential part of your roadmap, the investment becomes more important, and you have to think of your data structure. You have to think of where you’re going with this.”

“This is not like the other hype cycles we’ve seen,” Malik emphasised. “We’re at phase of you know, what does AI actually do? Can it be trusted? Is it capable of actually delivering an end to end journey or service? And I think the answer isn’t clear in all those categories, but what it is doing is increasing the productivity, so it can’t code you the end product from scratch, but it can leap you forward in that process and save you time by giving you a foundational layer that’s actually credible.

“Once you start to think about, Okay, what does that mean for my business? Who do I trust? You know, if you’ve got people within the business going to say, I want to try this AI platform. That AI platform, how would you keep your data safe? Which platform do you select? How do you qualify AI adoption? Who’s the investors behind that platform? What client base do they have? What’s their info SEC or cybersecurity features like? These are fundamental questions to answer.”

The panel struck a sober tone on risk. Nearly half of some firms’ employees (46%), Malik revealed, are already using generative AI tools on work devices without employer oversight. “That introduces reputational and compliance risk,” he said. “And it reveals a cultural gap. Leadership is debating AI while staff are already using it.”

If there was one thing about AI that became glaringly apparent during the day, it is that AI is not a standalone trend. It is embedded in pricing strategies, talent decisions, data governance and product design. Treating it as a bolt-on means missing the point and by extension, the profit. AI, properly integrated, is not a threat to B2B media. It’s its most powerful new lever.

Data with purpose

What stood out in every discussion about data at Monetising B2B was that the focus wasn’t on how much data you have, but how deliberately it’s built, how intelligently it’s refined and how purposefully it’s applied.

Speaking on dedicated panel on proprietary data, How (and why) proprietary data can transform B2B values, Leon Saunders Calvert, president, Economist Intelligence, explained why the media industry’s obsession with quantity must give way to value.

“How do you identify the sort of value of the data assets that you have, or how do you differentiate that value?” he asked. “I think there are a number of component parts… The first is to think about how heavily commoditized the data is that you have versus how unique or indeed differentiated it is. And there are all kinds of things you can do with data.

“You don’t have to have unique data to create value out of it, but you do have to think about then how you create further derivations therein. So what can you do with that data? Can you standardise it? Can you homogenise it? Can you allow it to be consumed more easily to the end user? You’ve got to understand why your data is valuable to which customer. So what is the actual use case for your data? Why does it generate value? And that gives you a very good indication as to what the commercial value is associated with it.”

This view was shared by others on the panel. Charlie Kerr, CEO of With Intelligence, emphasised the importance of starting not with the data, but with the end-user’s need. “if we can find we help help a fund manager or private equity manager find an investor, the return on investment they’re going to get from that is huge,” he said, illustrating that if they help a fund manager raise $30 million, that justifies a price increase. “It’s all about ensuring that you have data that nobody else can get, and you’ve got to work out how you get that. And I think that journalism is a good way of enriching that data, but it can’t be the sole source of the data.”

The same principle applies in insurance, said Mariana Valle, CEO of Insurance Insider. Her team began with 15 data-led ideas and whittled them down to three or four based not only on feasibility, but on whether they could solve real market problems. “We had to ask what people were willing to pay for,” she said, reinforcing that proprietary data needs to earn its keep through direct relevance and utility.

As Colin Morrison noted in his closing remarks, the real power of data lies not in uniqueness but in outcomes. “Even if it’s not unique data, if it does the job for somebody, then it’s valuable.” What matters most is not volume or exclusivity, but fit-for-purpose design. Data that’s embedded into workflows serves critical decisions and creates actionable impact. This enables data to be more than content. It becomes an asset.

Events re-imagined

A decade ago, the B2B event world was dominated by traditional trade shows: predictable formats, rigid floor plans and transactional encounters. But at Monetising B2B, it became clear that those days belong to history. Today, the industry is in the throes of ‘festivalisation’: a sweeping reimagination of what B2B events can be, fuelled by technology, changing audience expectations and the need for year-round engagement.

There was some scepticism around the so-called ‘festivalisation of events’, but the concept is still being treated as one of the most urgent transformations in B2B events today. No longer can exhibitions be confined to grey halls in trade centres, and business cards exchanged over coffee stands. A new model is emerging: one that borrows from the world of music festivals, entertainment and community building to deliver immersive, hybrid and monetisable experiences.

One example of this came from Hugh Jones, CEO of RX (Reed Exhibitions), in his fireside chat with Morrison, titled ‘The 21st Century lessons of information and events’. At RX, he explained, the shift has been strategic.

“if you’re walking around to the big halls with a whole bunch of business cards, thinking you’re going to have some serendipity, you’re going to go meet the person that’s going to help you in your career, like the 1980s are calling like, you’re in the wrong business,” he emphasised. “So what you have to do is you have to actually change for the times. You really have to make your events something that where you can your customers are both your visitors and your. Exhibitors and both groups are achieving levels of value that they did in ways they never did before.”

RX now applies dynamic pricing, curates high-impact networking experiences (think Snoop Dogg headlining a jewellery show), and uses proprietary tech to deliver real-time exhibitor ROI dashboards: all built atop a $100 million data business. Jones’s outsider perspective from RELX’s Acuity division helped RX see events not as logistics, but as value exchanges. Done right, not only do exhibitors pay to be at the event, but visitors will pay for it too

In his closing remarks, Morrison called this a seismic shift. “For Hugh Jones of RX to say that in a few years, up to 50% of his revenue will come from visitors is a hell of a big thing,” he noted. “If [organisers] really could get 30 to 50% of their revenue from visitors, then more of them will be doing these festivals…quite literally on the beach.”

This rebalancing paves the way for events that not just showcases but destinations experience is worth paying for. In one panel discussion, ‘How (and why) events are changing and what comes next?’, Lisa Hannant, CEO of Clarion Events, noted a similar evolution.

“There’s no surprise that the next generation…are going to any kind of live event,” she explained. “They do want different things from their experience at a show. They do want to be able to have an element of planning pre pre show. So they want to be in control of what that looks like, and they want to be able to combine any combination of finding the products or the organisations or the individuals that they’re after.

“I would encourage everybody…if you put yourself in the eye of the consumer as an individual, then that is where I think you can really make a difference. Because ultimately, everybody is an individual. They are consumer, even if representing an organisation that that personalised experience and benefit that you as an individual get out of it on behalf of your organisation is really important.”

As Morrison concluded in the report, festivalisation is more than a trend, it’s a business imperative. And it’s rewriting the rules of engagement in B2B media.

These highlights were drawn from Colin Morrison’s report of the day, available to download in full at Flashes & Flames.

More good reads: