Digital revenues
Net new digital revenues built on extending the value proposition of your shows onto the digital medium sounds excellent. But it is much harder to achieve than you might imagine. Having built and then shut down a digital marketplace of approximately 1,5 million users, bringing together visitors and exhibitors of 29 events in 8 countries, I learnt a thing or two about the matter.
WorldBuild365 was a digital sourcing platform uniting buyers worldwide with global suppliers to the building, architecture, HVAC, interior design and décor industries. Built on the world's most extensive portfolio of Building&Interiors exhibitions comprising more than 29 events in 8 countries, In less than three years, WorldBuild365 has grown to include hundreds of thousands of products and services, exhibition product directories, blogs from leading industry experts.
This is the Story of WorldBuild365
In 2014, as the Group Digital Director at ITE (Hyve’s predecessor), I was tasked with building a digital product directory based on our then world-leading Building portfolio. Now, this wasn’t something I hadn’t done before. One of the most successful siblings of the business we sold to ITE was the Building Catalog, a digital product directory in the same space.
The promise is simple: Buyers search for products at exhibitions and also online. The job-to-be-done is very similar, so these businesses must support each other.
At ITE, we had first and third-party customer research that told us our visitors were already looking for products online, our exhibitors were spending money to be found online, and, more importantly, they were ready to spend more. We wanted a share of this wallet and knew we could make this work. After all, we knew who was looking for what products, where, and who was already selling them there.
The Launch
After a few busy months of frantic building, we launched WB365 at Mosbuild, our biggest building show. More than a thousand exhibitors and their product information were on display, and all were linked to actual stands with QR codes, ready to be scanned.
The product was well received, and the numbers kept increasing as we added more shows, exhibitors, products, users, and thus more and more interactions. But commercially, it was struggling as a standalone product. (because it wasn’t… standalone)
Introducing the Digital Tax
So we switched our model to a mandatory fee to join WB365 for our building portfolio shows, a digital tax, which will sound very familiar to many of the big organisers reading this. As one could imagine, we didn’t have any considerable pushback from our exhibitors, and suddenly, the project was a commercial success, too.
(exhibitions) Culture eats digital for breakfast
But still, even with the money being made, deep down (and oftentimes not so deep down), we had a growing case of organ rejection. Pureplay exhibitions people, both from the organiser side and, more importantly, the exhibitor side, are not “digital first” type of people. It all sounds fuzzy to them, and there is a point at which that feeling might start hurting the underlying business.
The (bitter) end
We finally decided that, as an exhibition and conference organiser, this was outside our mandate and that we’d be better off focusing our energy on the core business. WB365 was shut down, and as a testament to this being the right decision, not a single customer asked why. (oh, and we kept the fee in a different name)
Key takeaways: If you’re a pure-play events business, you’ll need different types of employees and customers to (also) become a digital media business
Your existing team cannot focus on two things.
This is not an extension of your business; it is something completely different
The customers in your CRM are NOT those buying digital products in their companies.
All that being said when the right teams are matched with the right resources, pure digital revenues can be created as standalone businesses that have significant synergies with your events. You just have to commit at a different level.
I’d love to hear what you think.
Barış