The Exposure Hoax in Conference Business

If you don’t care much about how we run the business here, then you don’t need to read this. Have you ever wondered about the “Media Sponsors/Partners” you see associated with the conferences in our industry? Well, I’ve been getting 1-2 e-mails every week, for the last year, from conference/event companies asking us to become media partners…

I’ve had a policy for the last year or so that we don’t do any such deals…all of the offers are really barter deals, and all of them promise exposure through their own conference website and at the venue. They also offer us exposure through their own e-mail lists (If someone comes to me and tells me that they would give us exposure to about 80,000 executives in digital media industry, I would tell them they’re lying. I would doubt the whole industry has 80K business executives).

So if you ask me, it is all bunkum. The whole conference sponsorship/partners business is such a murky grey area, so we try to stay out of it. When we do our own conferences, you’ll see the difference…

Here’s my short answer to these companies offering us exposure: I don’t give a crap about exposure…our written word is our exposure. I don’t want irrelevant exposure…I don’t care about size. This is not a mass play for us. We reach the people who we need to reachâ

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