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Three key themes driving B2B publishers

At Flashes & Flames’ recent Monetising B2B Information and Events conference in London, leading B2B publishers shared their priorities, opportunities and concerns across the day. Three common themes emerged: building ‘moats’ to protect businesses against AI disruption, publishers building intelligence ecosystems, and becoming indispensable infrastructure to customers.

Held at London’s historic Stationers’ Hall, the event featured more than 30 industry-leading speakers and 210 delegates from three continents. The speakers showed that the B2B industry is going through another transformation, moving away from passive information delivery towards becoming essential to the workflow of their customers.

1: The AI ‘moat’

Unsurprisingly, AI was a dominant theme. But there was a curious analogy which kept being repeated: building a ‘moat’ to protect businesses against AI disruption. Historically, moats were used as a last line of defence and primarily a way of keeping people out – perhaps not the vision we want to have here! But nonetheless, the idea of having some sort of strategy to deal with AI companies brazenly stealing publisher content is a necessary one.

On a panel about the strategic outlook for B2B information and events, Julie Harris, CEO at Expana, argued that AI will amplify businesses with strong moats, rather than replace them. “What [AI] has done is allowed us to have a conversation around, what are the attributes of a data business with a great moat?” she said. “Number one is proprietary data… that is really, really difficult to replicate. The second is trusted and transparent methodology, so the customer can check the number…

“Then the really big one is those decades of relationships and trust and human intelligence that doesn’t transfer to a model. I think the value of human intelligence has gone up rather than down as a result of some of the things that we’ve seen in the market.”

On the same panel, Alex Roth, Director of Strategy at Informa, described their events as a very deep moat because they capture proprietary digital data on human interactions that can’t easily be replicated. “We want to capture how people are spending their time, the interactions that they have, their engagement around people and products, and their reaction to those things,” he explained.

“For us, that forms a very deep moat, and the fact that this is being generated from unique events makes that moat that much deeper.”

Face-to-face interaction will certainly be something AI can’t replace for a long time, if ever. In a fireside chat with Colin Morrison, B2B investor Douglas Emslie observed that while many information companies are currently acting defensively, event-led businesses appear more resilient:

“If you haven’t got a defensible model, and the thing about events is the face-to-face component is the moat that AI can’t get over, whereas if you’re producing information or data or media in some form, you have got to come up with a moat,” he emphasised. That’s the challenge that people have in convincing themselves that it is a real moat.”

Manca Vitorino, Director of Data Ecosystem at LexisNexis Risk Solutions, talks about trust as a key component of their own moat approach. “Trust plays a huge part of the business that we’re in,” he explained. “There’s a nuance in what we mean by trust. Some of that trust comes from a reputational perspective; that decades-long legacy. But the other trust comes from a transparency in what we do… We’re going into a  world where trust metrics become a commodity.”

Our final of many notes on moats is with Leon Saunders Calvert, President of Economist Enterprise. He cautioned that many businesses wrongly assume they have a moat. “Every business has to do their own really tough existential review,” he cautioned. “Everyone thinks that they’ve got uniqueness and propitiousness… it’s very easy to assume you have a moat when actually you may not in this context.”

2: Intelligence ecosystems

The second theme running through Monetising B2B was the blurring of lines between publishing companies, event organisers and data. Everyone working in B2B will have seen examples of publishers describe themselves as ‘data companies’, moving away from being content-first. But what we saw from a number of organisations at the event was descriptions of becoming ‘intelligence ecosystems’. These B2B firms are now defined by the role they play in their industry, rather than the media format they produce.

“At William Reed, we talk about ourselves as born from editorial, built through events, but connected by intelligence,” CEO Tracy De Groose said on a panel about events and information strategies. “Our intelligence is our collective intelligence that we’ve built over 162 years, and it’s just evolving and building every second of the day. So how do we protect that?”

On the same panel, Questex CEO Paul Miller outlined the journey they had been on to serve their customers year-round. “What we do is connect buyers and sellers, it’s really that simple,” he emphasised. “It’s been a bit of a journey to get our internal folks to accept that they don’t work for an events company, or they don’t work for a media company, but they work for a connecting company.

“Once you can get them there, it broadens the thinking about how we should connect.”

For the FT, the close integration of their events business into their editorial and subscription efforts is producing tangible rewards. “If a subscriber attends an FT Live event, they are 8x more likely to renew their subscription at the end of the day,” Orson Francescone, Managing Director of FT Live told Colin Morrison. “Now we have 1.6 million subscribers, and 36% of FT Live attendees are subscribers. If you multiply that into a lifetime value model, we’re talking millions and millions of uplift in pounds that don’t flow to FT Live, but flow into the subscription business, and you’ve got this beautiful virtuous circle where events are feeding subscriptions.”

Simon Foster founded B2B events, data and media platform Arc Network five years ago with the specific intent of avoiding the brittleness of pure events businesses. By designing each brand around communities, rather than formats, he’s found a blueprint which works.

“I try not to distinguish between media and events,” he explained. “I want [brands] to have three key characteristics: a strong content model beyond the live event; strong, well-known brands in terms of what they were doing; and then I also want to make sure that we have a membership model.”

On a panel about what data can mean to information and events, Sift CEO Louise White gave some examples of how data works to link editorial and events in practice. “We’re a hybrid model, so we’re a media business that is now a really fast-scaling events business,” she outlined. “I try to see ourselves less as a publishing business or an events business, but an outcome business. My job is to help outcomes happen between buyers and sellers.”

However you’d describe your business, humanity should be a critical factor. “We have buyers and sellers – we’re commercial organisations – but it starts with that audience,” said Faversham House CEO Amanda Barnes. “We can pull all this data and understand what everyone does in minute detail, but when it comes down to it, it’s about the human connection… and creating an ecosystem where that can exist.”

3: Becoming indispensable infrastructure

Another theme which emerged across a number of different panels and interviews was that the most valuable B2B businesses are becoming indispensable infrastructure for the professional communities they serve.

Amin Mrini, Chief Digital Officer at Informa Festivals touched on this on a panel about what AI will mean to information ownership, profit and growth. “The key component around how expectations are changing is being where the work happens,” he outlined, highlighting the rise in use of chatbots as being ‘good enough’. “Being in workflows is serving your information from where the work is taking place, whether that’s Excel, whether it’s email, whether it’s homegrown AI or third party. That is where the bar is today.”

Expana are using AI to enrich cost models which allow retailers to build product recipes, and see real-time benchmarked prices for every ingredient, packaging and freight cost. This is helping them become the decision layer for their customers, as CEO Julie Harris explained on a panel about the strategic outlook for B2B information and events.

“We want our customers to make the right decisions with our data,” she said. “We have commodity pricing data, and we have built something called InsightIQ, which surfaces the insight everywhere you go… Then layer two forecasts on top of that primary data, so if you own the pricing data, actually you can input lots of other areas of data to bring out incredibly rich forecasts.

“Then we have agentic workflows, so rather than a customer going to our platform and asking, ‘What’s the price of chicken wings’, and looking at the forecast, they can ask an agent, ‘What should my hedging strategy be around chicken wings with these demand signals in my key markets?'”

Natasha Christie-Miller concisely summed up this theme overall from this panel she was moderating on the strategic outlook for B2B information and events. “Businesses that were potentially 20 years ago heritage businesses, were reasonably clear and transactional,” she outlined. “Now, we are really moving through that value of the first layer being information; I’ll give you some information and you can do what you want with it. The second layer being predictive; this is what I think is going to happen in the future. The third layer is prescriptive; now do something with it, and I’m going to help you do something with it.

“With each of those steps, there’s an increasing value.”

Listen to the full episode in this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast, available wherever you find podcasts.

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