Wednesday 23rd September: Informa reveals £1 billion events revenue cancellation

September 23, 2020

Morning!!! Today's Media Roundup is brought to you by Peter.

The Press Gazette is reporting that B2B information and exhibitions company Informa has cancelled more than £1bn of budgeted events revenue this year. Full-year revenue for 2020 is forecast at £1.7bn compared with £2.9bn in 2019, a direct impact of COVID-19. Informa does not expect to restart physical events until mid to late Spring 2021.

The company reported an adjusted operating profit of £118.6m compared with an operating profit of £435.7m in the same period last year. It has made savings of £300m through a range of measures that have included postponing spending on hiring, wage rises and capital expenditure. It has also consolidated office space and has offered staff six-months unpaid leave. Plans to save a further £300 million in saving may involve redundancies.

The silver lining for Informa is a 'robust' specialist subscriptions, data and content offering, plus virtual events with 500 planned for this year. While virtual events revenues are typically lower than their real-world counterparts, the group is confident that returns will get better as, 'as platforms become more sophisticated, the range of services we offer broadens and we are able to plan and market the virtual events more effectively.'

With solid subscription revenues The New York Times' SVP of ad innovation Allison Murphy has told Digiday her team was able to reshape the publication's advertising strategy. That included cutting open programmatic from its app, mainly because the ads being served there “were crap”.

The sheer scale of this undertaking is incredible: An investigative team at Buzzfeed news, working with another 80 journalists across 100 partner newsrooms in 88 countries analysed almost 3 million words of FinCEN narrative. Gives me hope that journalism can still work together rattle the right cages.

Four in five features from Danish slow journalism outlet Zetland are lsitened to rather than read. The narrated audio stories 'have that campfire feel to them' fueling a lockdown membership campaign that has brought in 2,000 new paying members.

This week's podcast:

This week, we hear from Tobi Oredein, Co-Founder and CEO of Black Ballad, a UK-based lifestyle platform for Black British women. She talked about what drove her to found the site, why they decided to launch memberships ahead of the curve in 2016, and the impact of their recent HuffPost takeover.

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