There are now just 8 days to go until SIPA's Annual Congress in London. For those of you who have yet to register please make sure you do so today. Nearly 150 people have confirmed their attendance so far and I am still competing with Julian to beat his record from last year.
A full brochure and booking form can be found here.
I had to write my Chairman's introduction for the conference this morning. I thought I would also share it here to see what you think. Comments welcome and I look forward to seeing you all next Wednesday (9th July) at the Tower Hotel in London.
__________________________________________________________________________________________
“If
you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even
less”
Gen. Eric Shinseki, US
Army.
Welcome to the SIPA UK Annual Congress 2008. I’m
delighted to see the range and scope of companies on our delegate list and
speaker roster for today & would like to welcome you
all.
When we started working on the
structure for this event at the tail end of last year your committee hit upon
the novel idea of asking SIPA members what were the biggest issues that they
faced in their business and then trying to put a programme together which
answered some of those concerns. Of the nearly 100 detailed responses we
received, some high level themes emerged – the state of the economy; the general
shift from print to online & the impact of Web 2.0 technologies on our
members’ businesses. It was clear that there was a full mix of emotions behind
these responses. For some it was outright fear. “Where do I even begin to deal with all this new
stuff?” For others there was an overt sense of excitement about all
of the new business and revenue models that were opening
up.
From my early days as a direct
marketer I was taught to appeal to the key emotions of fear and greed in my
promotional pieces, so here goes – a packed one day conference for both the
fearful and the greedy out there in the audience. You probably know which side
of the fence you sit on!
We start with embracing the fear. I
know that there are several traditional publishers in the audience who are
seeing their worlds transformed. The revenue mix is shifting from print to
online but the concern is that concepts from the newspaper world like the
“Rushbridger Cross” (where growing online ad revenues one day overtake declining
print ones) will never happen. What do we do? Put on more events? Launch new
forms of subscription products? Move away from news into the development of
workflow tools? In our programme today you will hear lots of case studies from
other publishers in exactly the same boat as you talking about how they deal
with these issues. What’s working and what isn’t.
On the other side of the coin SIPA
is the association which embraces a lot of the newer, less traditional
publishers. These are probably companies which won’t have thought of themselves
as part of the old media community & you won’t see them at mainstream
publishing events. Often they are web based businesses with no print heritage
and work under entirely different business models. Our brave new world of online
publishing is great for these organizations – technology costs are falling
rapidly, barriers to entry are coming down and, in Google, there is a ready made
marketing machine out there to help you reach the ‘long tail’ of customers
across the globe. I’m really looking forward to hearing from some of them
today.
In summing up I think my main
message for you lucky SIPA delegates is that our world is changing at a
faster rate than ever before. Welcome and embrace that change. Experiment with
new business ideas and whether you’re in the fear or greed camp, it is clear that
it is vital to get out there to share war stories; pick up tips and build your
network of contacts. That’s what SIPA the association, and today’s conference is
all about. Enjoy the day.
Rory Brown, Incisive Media & SIPA UK Chairman.
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